A group of celebrated Long Island journalists pulled back the veil on what happens behind the scenes at media companies and offered advice to aspiring journalists at an event hosted by the Journalism Club on April 24.
The event, “A Conversation with Long Island Journalism Hall of Famers,” was sponsored by the Office of Student Activities & Leadership Development. It included former News 12 Long Island anchor Danielle Campbell; Joye Brown, a columnist and associate editor at Newsday; Irene Virag, the undergraduate director and associate dean for the School of Communications and Journalism at Stony Brook University; and Lawrence Levy; executive dean of Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies who is also a former Newsday reporter and editorial writer and columnist, as well as a PBS host and political commentator. Assistant professor Carl Corry, a 2017 Long Island Journalism Hall of Fame inductee, moderated it.
“I just wanted to tell true stories about real people,” said Virag, now the undergraduate director and associate dean for the School of Communications and Journalism at Stony Brook University. “I just wanted to find interesting people with stories to tell.”
Integrity starts by acknowledging one’s biases, the panel stressed. “We have to acknowledge our bias, we fight against it every day. We fight against it with every story,” Virag said.
Campbell, a longtime former News 12 anchor, added that she focused only on the facts in her multiple live reports a day. “I was very careful to tell what I know now.”
The group also touched on today’s fast-paced, 24-hour news cycle.
“Every single second of every single day for every single story I do I get immediate feedback,” said Brown, who was on a team that won a Pulitzer Prize-winning for local news coverage with Virag, and has been with Newsday in various roles, including as an editor, editorial writer and columnist, since 1983. “I know exactly what I’m doing right … what I’m doing wrong,” Brown said. “I know what people like, what people don’t like.”
Competence will breed confidence. And then you got to be committed[/pullquote]With trust in the media significantly eroding over the past several decades, the panelists agreed that, above all else, a journalist’s reputation is all they can stand on. That comes with building credibility by doing good work.
“You need to have confidence in yourself,” Brown said. “You need to be able to go places where you’re not wanted, right? Talk to people who don’t want to talk to you, right? Demand respect from those people.”
Levi, a journalist who also worked for Newsday and PBS, agreed, adding: “You want to be competent. Competence will breed confidence. And then you got to be committed.”
