The View From Here: Passion for hard news no fling

Sometimes I get jealous of my sources because they’re allowed to use words like “should.”

The people I interview are free to opine about the stories I cover, but I’m stuck reporting the facts, the things we know with certainty.

I get jealous because I, too, have thoughts on what should be done or how we as a community should progress, but I’m duty-bound to clearly convey the shoulds uttered by others, without letting my opinions obscure the report.

That is, after all, why I love hard news.

There’s merit in magazine-style features and fact-based columns for sure; however, I see something indispensable in the way I’m forced to treat the threshold of certainty as sacrosanct.

There’s something freeing, in fact, about knowing your place in the world, which for me entails asking questions and learning new things every single day. That way, I can turn around and state plainly for the public the new things I now know.

So that’s why I respond coyly when sources ask me to affirm their shoulds: “They don’t pay me for my opinions.”

Instead, they pay me for surefooted reporting attributed to trusted sources.

This is not to deride uncertainty, though, which I define as the gap between what we know and what we want to know. That gap is precisely where I find questions to answer in tomorrow’s paper.

When I was in high school, I viewed education largely as an information-gathering endeavor. I figured four years of college would leave me with enough knowledge to operate in the “real world” with certainty, but I’ve since realized that’s not the case.

Education is all about learning how to ask a question, begin the search for an answer and acknowledge the limitations of your findings.

Fact-gathering builds context for the questions, but academic research is ultimately an endeavor into the unknown, which I would argue is infinite.

Demystifying a once-uncertain domain is like throwing a shovelful of dirt into the shallows of a massive body of water. Little by little, it changes the shape of the shoreline, altering the sacrosanct boundary I dare not let my reporter toes cross.

In that sense, my role is to chart the shifting coastal sands. My task is to tell the public, “This is what we know.”

Reliable, timely and actionable information, over and over again: “This is what we know.”

And I love it.

Porter is a reporter at the Journal & Courier. He can be reached at sporter@jconline.com or on Twitter @StevenPorterJC.