By Bailey Knecht, Bulletin Correspondent
‘I want to get it perfect. You want to perfectly portray this person who has spent time with you, to give the most authentic record of what this person is like, and that’s always the most difficult challenge. It’s a frightening challenge, really.’
— Tracey O’Shaughnessy, Associate features editor
Republican-American, Waterbury, Conn.
Capturing the essence of a person through writing isn’t a simple task.
Sometimes, journalists just have to become part of the story themselves. That’s why, when Tracey O’Shaughnessy began working on a feature on Robert Accetura, a beloved hairstylist in Waterbury, Conn., she decided to take a seat in the styling chair and have Accetura work his magic on her hair.
“I watched him, and I listened to him, and then I realized if I really wanted to understand him, I was going to have to get the treatment, and I was going to have to go under the scissors,” O’Shaughnessy said. “He sort of exudes this sense of capability and expertise, and this incredible sense of caring about the people whose hair he cuts, and it was really through the process of listening to him as he worked on me that I could really see him come out.”
The connection O’Shaughnessy formed with Accetura turned into a personality profile that would go on to win first place for that category of story in a daily newspaper, among the New England Newspaper and Press Association awards presented at NENPA’s winter convention in February.
O’Shaughnessy, associate features editor of the Republican-American of Waterbury, is no stranger to that style of writing. She’s been at the Republican-American for 23 years, and before that, she spent time writing for the Potomac Almanac in Bethesda, Md., the Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin, and Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C.
Rich Gray, features editor of the Republican-American, said the award was well-deserved, because of the amount of dedication O’Shaughnessy displays.
“She always impresses with the spirit that she brings to things and the base of knowledge that she starts from,” he said. “She never worries about admitting that she doesn’t understand something. I listen to her talk to sources all the time, and see how the wheels turn. It’s quite a process, and I’ve seen her grow, believe it or not, and she still seems to get better and better with what she does.”
Gray said O’Shaughnessy has built a strong relationship with the Waterbury community, which has helped to increase readership.
“She’s got a base of followers already established, and readers know what to expect from a Tracey O’Shaughnessy byline, which we sorely need these days,” he said.
Even with O’Shaughnessy’s positive reputation in the community and years of experience, writing feature stories can still be difficult for her, she said.
“I want to get it perfect,” she said. “You want to perfectly portray this person who has spent time with you, to give the most authentic record of what this person is like, and that’s always the most difficult challenge. It’s a frightening challenge, really.”
Despite that pressure, she has developed a few techniques that have been effective when dealing with sources.
‘She’s got a base of followers already established, and readers know what to expect from a Tracey O’Shaughnessy byline, which we sorely need these days.’
— Rich Gray, Features editor ~ Republican-American, Waterbury, Conn.
“I often say that the two most important qualities in this business are humility followed by curiosity,” she said. “The two work hand in hand. I go in there completely aware that I know very little, and the one thing I do know is that, in this world, people do not get the respect they deserve, so I’m very, very careful when I’m speaking with people to give them the respect they lack.”
She discussed the necessity of building an immediate relationship with subjects such as Accetura.
“The most important thing in any interview is rapport,” she said. “You have to develop a rapport with the person that you’re speaking (to), and that rapport happens in a matter of seconds, so you have to be very deft and very swift.”
O’Shaughnessy said that, in the writing process, bringing her interview subjects to life is her main goal as a features writer.
‘Feature stories are the heart of humanity, and the heart of humanity is what I’m aiming for. If you don’t have a newspaper that bleeds and cries along with its readers, then you don’t have a going concern. You’re not doing your job.’
— Tracey O’Shaughnessy
“I always remember that we who are journalists only have black-and-white figures — print on paper — to create color and music,” she said. “So you have to use the words and the way the words fit on the page as a kind of color and as a kind of music.”
O’Shaughnessy said she hopes through her profiles to create a space for her readers to feel strong emotions while they’re reading the Republican-American.
“Feature stories are the heart of humanity, and the heart of humanity is what I’m aiming for,” she said. “If you don’t have a newspaper that bleeds and cries along with its readers, then you don’t have a going concern. You’re not doing your job.”
Montana millionaire charged with journalist assault – and headed for Congress?
Gene Policinski
Inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him on Twitter:
@genefac
Sadly, shamefully, disgustingly, it has come to this: A Montana candidate for Congress was charged recently with assaulting a reporter who was asking him a question about the American Health Care Act.
The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported that U.S. House candidate Greg Gianforte, a Republican, was charged with misdemeanor assault for what witnesses and the reporter involved said was an unwarranted attack.
Ben Jacobs of The Guardian, who has reported for weeks on the state’s close race for its only House seat, tweeted that “Greg Gianforte just body slammed me and broke my glasses.”
Gianforte’s campaign issued its own statement, claiming Jacobs had entered an office where a TV taping was being set up, “aggressively shoved a recorder in Greg’s face, and began asking badgering questions.” The statement claimed that both men fell to the floor in a struggle over Jacob’s cellphone, and that “this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene.”
Too bad for that set of “alternative facts” that several witnesses — including a Fox News television crew — were on hand to dispute them.
A Fox News reporter wrote that “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him … I watched in disbelief as Gianforte then began punching the man, as he moved on top of the reporter and began yelling something to the effect of ‘I’m sick and tired of this!’”
Three of Montana’s major newspapers, The Billings Gazette, The Missoulian and The Helena Independent Record, quickly got “sick and tired” of Gianforte: By the morning after the incident, on the day of the state’s special congressional election, all three rescinded their endorsements of the GOP candidate.
We all should be “sick and tired” of attacks on journalists in recent weeks, from this Montana mess to a “manhandling” of a reporter by security guards after an FCC hearing, to the arrest of a public radio reporter in the West Virginia statehouse.
The incidents have much in common: The journalists were asking questions of public officials or candidates for office, outside the staged, controlled environments of news conferences. In each case, the journalists were labeled aggressors by those they were attempting to question.
Many defenders of a free press see all three incidents flowing from the stridently anti-press tone set by President Trump, both in office and on the campaign trail. He has called journalists “enemies of the people,” and on occasion verbally abused specific reporters at rallies and news conferences. The Gianforte account took pains to label Jacobs as a “liberal journalist,” continuing the candidate’s anti-press stance through a campaign that has drawn comparisons to Trump’s. In an effort to give Gianforte a boost in Montana’s close congressional race, Trump recorded a robocall in which he calls Gianforte “my good friend.”
For those who are more inclined to view politics as an opportunity for mud-slinging and chest-beating, rather than a spirited exchange of ideas, the Montana attack no doubt will produce appreciative chuckles and nods of endorsement.
Do not be fooled. It’s democracy that got “body slammed” in the Montana incident. It’s respect for the rule of law that was dealt a blow. It’s the First Amendment that was insulted by Gianforte’s attempt to justify what he did: attacking a reporter for asking a reasonable question, on a matter of great public interest, to a political candidate on the eve of an important election.
This recent spate of attacks is not the first time journalists have been hassled by thugs and bully-boys, or by security forces. Multiple attacks and beatings occurred as reporters and television correspondents covered the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s. Reporters covering the “Occupy” movement in recent years were hustled aside or held by police looking to prevent news coverage of protesters being forcibly removed from parks in New York City and elsewhere.
At national political conventions, journalist arrests have become so common that national press organizations regularly set up phone banks and offices to help individual reporters who have been taken into custody without cause.
Dangers to a free press have deep roots in this country. Just seven years after the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, Congress passed the Sedition Act, allowing for the arrest and jailing of journalists for publishing political criticism. About 20 editors were thrown into jail.
In the Newseum in Washington, D.C., where I work, there is the starkly tragic exhibit of a lone Datsun sedan — notable because the floorboards at the driver’s seat are peeled up, the result of an explosion that fatally injured Phoenix newspaper reporter Don Bolles in 1976. A remotely detonated bomb had been planted by mobsters seeking to stop Bolles from reporting on organized crime in Arizona. The attack had the opposite effect, as reporters nationwide flocked to Phoenix to complete Bolles’ work, proclaiming that “you can kill a journalist but not journalism.”
The fear is now real that — as we saw after fake reports of a child sex ring in a Washington, D.C., restaurant prompted an armed man to appear on the premises — some disturbed person will decide to counter reporters with more than a “body slam.”
Let’s say again, for the sake of the nonpartisan, nonpolitical 45 words of the First Amendment, that this pattern of verbal abuse and physical attacks on journalists is an attack on all Americans, and that that these attacks must stop.