Op-Ed – Late Professor Taught and Practiced Real Journalism

By Chris Otts

A few weeks ago I picked up USA Today and shook my head as I read that its star foreign correspondent had faked many of his top stories. To say that I was disappointed doesn’t begin to describe my feelings. I hope to be a professional journalist one day, but with two of the nation’s leading newspapers guilty of fabrication, plagiarism and other mortal sins of the craft, I wondered if I’d picked the right career.

While I remind myself that the mission of a journalist is to serve people with vital, accurate and truthful information in a style that will make them care about important issues facing their communities and the country, surveys show that the public holds journalism in low esteem.

If only everyone who picked up a newspaper could have read the work of Bailey Thomson, we would have more engaged citizens today. If only every young journalist could have been taught by someone like Thomson, journalism would enjoy the respect it needs to do its job in a democracy.

With the state of our profession hanging in the balance, Thomson’s death in November 2003 has left a void in education, in journalism and in our state.

To young journalists and many of his colleagues, Thomson was to journalism what Michael Jordan was to basketball – he worked harder, he raised standards, he expected more, he made everyone around him better.

Before I met Thomson and took his class, I thought I knew about all there was to know about journalism. After all, I’d worked for a year and a half at The Crimson White. I could go out and get a 500-word story any day of the week. It was a formula I had down to a science.

But after reading Thomson’s work and taking his reporting class, I realized I had just scratched the surface. I only knew the alphabet of journalism. He was fluent in the language.

While most reporters are satisfied with quick fact gathering and quantity over quality, Thomson’s approach to journalism was much different – and better.

He was committed to doing every story to the fullest; he was able to go further – finding real people and writing issue-oriented pieces with rich, narrative character. He expected a lot of himself, and his exceptional effort came through clearly in his pieces.

He set the bar for good journalism higher than I was even aware it could go. How he would voice his disdain for reporters who “sit behind a desk and call people all day long” instead of getting out to do real interviews!

Thomson brought those same high expectations to his role as a professor. Some journalism professors work in the news business for a few years and then leave behind the pressure of the newsroom. They opt instead for what certainly looks to an outsider like a cushy job, giving advice instead of producing.

Just as he had no tolerance for lazy journalism, Thomson refused to teach from an ivory tower. When he wasn’t teaching he was in the field working on special projects for the Mobile Register or The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., or working for constitutional reform. He was continually getting his hands dirty being a journalist rather than just talking about it.

“He spent the last summer of his life doing major journalism,” said Ed Mullins, chairman of the UA journalism department. “He was not satisfied with telling old war stories. Instead, he could tell students what he did last summer in Guatemala or on the Pascagoula River. No, his view was not from the ivory tower.”

And Thomson was just as serious about his students’ learning as he was about his teaching and his own work. Some students resented that he was such a stickler for things like showing up for class on time, always demanding their best as he gave his best.

“I heard Bailey could be tough – he could be real tough,” said Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and friend of Thomson’s. Thomson would often use Bragg’s feature stories as writing examples in class.

“Now that always made me nervous,” Bragg joked. “Just because he’s using your stories doesn’t mean he’s saying good things about them.”

Mullins agreed Thomson demanded a lot from his students.

“Excuses just burned him,” Mullins said. “You could sense the anger coming over him when a student gave a lame excuse. It was always amusing for me to see.”

But for those who were serious about learning from Thomson – like Kim Cross, a UA graduate student about to start an internship at The St. Petersburg Times – Thomson left a lasting mark.

“His passion for good writing was contagious. A lot of my instincts, habits and grammatical neuroses probably came from him. He taught me to practice writing every day, like an athlete working out,” Cross said.

I also caught Thomson’s contagious fever for good writing. It’s a disease I hope never leaves me. I hope it afflicts me my entire career.

If more reporters practiced their craft with the precision and passion of Bailey Thomson and more professors held young writers to his high standards, journalism would never have to hang its head in shame again.

Chris Otts, a junior at The University of Alabama and news director of The Crimson White, will be an intern this summer at the Mobile Register, where Thomson worked before joining the UA faculty. In the fall, Otts will join the Scripps Howard Semester in Washington program.