Today, I speak with Sarah Lyall, who is a reporter in London for the New York Times. I try and get in her head about social media’s impact on traditional media, as well as how to be a successful journalist, and the importance of breaking from from your geography to work abroad.
What is your opinion on how social media has influenced traditional journalism/media? Do you find yourself viewing, subscribing and using ideas on blogs to generate story ideas?
If by social media you mean blogs and the like:
“I think the rise of all these new media has forced traditional journalists to be quicker, more reactive, more on top of stories than perhaps they’d been before.”
It’s also provided a new way to take the temperature of the public – if an event or a controversy is blogged about a lot, it means it has resonated with people to a degree that might have been difficult to gauge before. I do read blogs, and get germs of ideas from them, and go to message boards when I’m writing about something that lots of members of the public have weighed in on already.
You’ve lived in New York and London. How has living in each area helped your career and what are the job-related differences that are apparent in both locations?
Because I work for a New York newspaper, it’s been a huge liberation to get to leave town and be set loose in Britain. The farther you are away from the home office, the more latitude you have to follow what you find interesting or provocative.
By the same token, though, it’s much easier to be a reporter in the U.S. than in London. Leaving aside the current vilification of the news media at times in Republican campaign rallies, journalists in the U.S. are, if not liked, at least respected as having a necessary role to play in the functioning of a civilized democracy. There is no First Amendment in the U.K. (and no written constitution), and no tradition of the public’s right to know. Plus, British people are by nature reserved, and it’s much harder to get them to talk to you!
Can you talk about how you became known for your amusing and incisive dispatches from London? What words come to mind when people think of you and how have you shaped people’s perception of your brand?
Well, that’s a very nice description of my work. I try to write from a slight angle, mostly because, years ago, I decided I never again wanted to write an article that I myself would be bored reading. So I aim for some kind of engagement and humor, some kind of (if I’m doing it right) wryness. I don’t know what words come to mind when people think of my writing, but I’m very aware that people have a lot of pulls on their time and attention, and that newspapers have to present stories in a way that will draw the reader in. I’m also just naturally drawn to quirky, odd, funny stories.
What recommendations do you have to people wanting to start their career in journalism and how did you get your New York Times position?
I first started work at the Times as a clerk – a peon, really – in its Washington bureau, and was lucky enough to get to write for the paper in my spare time, enough so that I was given a tryout as a Metro reporter and then eventually hired. But so much has changed since then (this was nearly 20 years ago) that I’d have a hard time giving great advice to a young person starting now.
But I would say: Don’t go to journalism school! Start work as soon as you can, even if it’s for a small outfit – the idea is that it will lead you to bigger things. Getting experience is better than sitting around in a classroom.
But, at the same time, make sure you understand the basic rules and standards of journalism:
rules about….
- attribution
- what is on and off the record
- accuracy
- aethical behavior
All that is very important, and I think it’s something that people in new sorts of platforms often don’t emphasize enough
When writing for and presenting to a British based audience, what are the differences for how you have to carry yourself, change your style, etc?
I’m pretty attune now to what they know here in Britain, and what we know there in America, so I can modulate my tone and my language. But in general, I write for an American audience, so it helps to come at it from the point of view of my readers: educated Americans who know something about Britain but not as much as I do, and need to have things explained and put into context. British reporters are allowed to be a lot more opinionated in print than American
reporters; they can be funnier, meaner and more reckless. I stick to American standards, since that’s my tradition and since I think by and large they’re good ones.
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Sarah Lyall grew up in New York City and is a London correspondent for the New York Times. She lives there with her husband, the writer Robert McCrum, and their two daughters. The Anglo Files is her first book.
