August 03, 2003 - 11:07 p.m.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do career-wise and where I want to go in life. It's not an easy subject to think about, because each time it comes up, and I think I have the road mapped out, my mind starts to wander about all the things that could go wrong.
"What if the economy is slow?" my mind asks. "What if no one hires you? What if you apply for a job and hate it, or get eaten by a bear on the way to the interview?"
"Shut up," I tell my mind.
But it doesn't work and on and on I think until I'm sick of thinking about it and have gone from having a clear cut set of career goals to not even knowing if I'm majoring in the right thing.
But today I think I've finally settled on a place I could see myself working for a long time: 60 Minutes. Why are you laughing?
Okay, so you don't just decide you want to work at 60 Minutes. The process goes something like this: you get an internship in television (done), you graduate with your degree, you hope you find work at a small market station (probably Lansing, in my case) and you pray to God that you're lucky enough and good enough to advance to bigger markets. Once you're in the bigger markets you work your butt off until someone at CBS notices you and says, "Hey, that Ed Ronco kid has some skill." So far so good, unless by this time you have been fired because the ratings are down, or you have a zit.
Once the network realizes who you are, and that you actually live and breathe like the rest of humanity, they bring you on board as a correspondent. This means they send you to the remotest part of the world (which, to my knowledge, is somewhere near Bismarck, North Dakota) and you spend five or ten years filing stories about farmers in crisis. As an aside, farmers are always in crisis. I feel for those people. Really, I do. Anyway, once you've made your mark there (or once the soybean crop gets better) you get promoted to the Washington or New York bureau and then, eventually, if you're one of the select few, a news magazine brings you on board. And by newsmagazine, I mean 60 Minutes. Not Dateline, not Primetime, though they're decent, but 60 Minutes -- the best of the best. The cream of the crop. The real deal.
So, why, with those overwhelming odds, does a geeky, still-awkward boy from a middle-class suburb of Detroit want to (or think he can) work for the longest-running news magazine in television history?
Because it's everything I believe in.
They've stuck to the same formula for 35 years, not because they're too lazy to change it, but because it works. Because they don't need to look at focus groups and figure out how to draw in the 18-30 demographic. They don't need to do special "Interactive Editions," where the viewers can vote on the outcome of the story. They don't look at ratings (although the show has been in a pretty sweet spot for most of its run). They look at what people need to know.
60 Minutes takes a solid, at-length look at issues surrounding our lives. Some relate to the headlines, some don't.
But they always do something you don't expect. While other shows are reporting on the latest threat al-Qaida made against airlines, they took a look at seaports, and reported that only 2 percent of the millions of 40-foot-long containers entering the country every day are inspected. That's it! Every airplane passenger gets screened, (including people with darker skin tones, who often get searched "at random." Right...), but only 2 percent of sea-faring cargo gets looked at. Oh, and by the way, the head of the Coast Guard told them that al-Qaida owns ships. That got my attention.
Their second story was about Qatar. While others reported that the country was home-base to U.S. Central Command in the Middle East, 60 Minutes reported on how it's one of the few Arab nations that allows women many of the same rights as men, and how its leader (called an "Emir," it's like a king) is trying to set up something similar to a democracy there.
Their last story had little to do with the headlines at all. It was about how famous artists made the details in their paintings so clear. One man suggests they used mirrors to project their subjects onto a canvas, then traced them. This story was, in my opinion, the best of the broadcast. It wasn't anything people NEEDED to know, and it's certainly nothing a focus group said they wanted to see more of. It was just interesting. It took something that many people (including myself, when I saw the preview of the piece) would consider boring and turned it in to a magnificent piece.
What I hate most about television journalism is that it rarely gets beneath the surface of the issues. The job of a journalist is not to tell you what's going on, but to help you understand what's going on, and 60 Minutes does that.
What I hate most about print journalism is how much better it thinks it is than TV journalism and how you can't always tell as compelling a story without showing someone what you're talking about or seeing the face of the person you're quoting. 60 Minutes takes care of that.
So here's a place I can work where I'll get to do some great writing, strong reporting, produce good television, travel the world and learn about it every day, and at the same time incite positive change in society.
Now, all I need to do is be the 1 in 1,000 who actually makes it in the TV news business. I can't wait.
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