It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.
When you practice reporting for as long as I have, you keep yourself at a distance from True Believers. Either conservatives or liberals or Democrats or Republicans.
A big part of reporting is just being present. You have to show up ten days in a row to get the one telling detail.
Unfortunately because of the variety of outlets for people to speak their minds on the Internet and that kind of thing, it's made the media in general more opinionated and there's more of a 'gotcha mentality' than real reporting.
But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.
I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy.
The first step in good reporting is good snooping.
Good reporting is good reporting, regardless of the newness or oldness of the medium.
Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles 'stories,' and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don't know all the background can understand them.
I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.