In The Field
Making sense of the world requires leaving home
I remember once asking Dan Rather why the CBS News headquarters — an incomprehensibly laid out warren of dilapidated and often windowless rooms carved out of a cavernous old dairy warehouse on the windswept far west side of Midtown Manhattan (near car dealerships and the uninspirational entrance/exit to the Lincoln Tunnel) — were far less swanky than the NBC News headquarters (Rockefeller Center) and ABC News headquarters (Upper West Side). Dan, ever the optimist, tried to spin it as a positive: “If you’re doing your job right as a reporter,” he told me with his patented sly seriousness, “you shouldn’t be spending much time in the office.”
He wasn’t talking about working from home (this was 2001). Rather, it was the CBS News ethos. Go out into the world.
I learned early on as a journalist that there is no substitute for being out in the field — walking the ground, meeting people, and seeing the world with your own eyes. When I got started in this business, that was the norm. But shrinking budgets, collapsing business models, and the proliferation of studio news shows have made pounding the pavement and shoe-leather reporting increasingly rare for the shrinking number of people employed as journalists, whether in newspapers, radio, or television. Not to mention social media.
The pandemic, I fear, has only made this worse. You don’t even have to bring people into the studio. They can just Zoom from home. We’ve gotten used to talking to people in tiny online boxes.
My first job in television was as a researcher for CBS’s production of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. I started a few years before the games along with three other young guys right out of college. We spent months on the road traveling to competitions and training centers to interview athletes and report on the state of the sports we were each assigned to cover. Since I spoke some Japanese, my purview also included reporting on the host country — its customs, history, and preparation for the Games. We then spent months writing up our findings into printed reference binders (you remember the ones with three rings?). The internet was still relatively young and I can still remember waiting for the results of world cup competitions in sports like biathlon to be faxed to our offices.
By the time the Olympics rolled around, however, all that was already antiquated. You could find out who won, and so much more, with a few clicks of a keyboard. Our three-dimensional manuals would have been a lot more useful in a searchable digital format. That’s how fast things changed.
The internet has made it a lot easier to learn about the world — a powerful technological tool that changed reporting forever, just like the telephone before it. The access we all have to limitless information is mind-boggling. I imagine many of you are old enough to remember navigating card catalogs and microfiche.
But I often think back to Dan’s belief in getting out of the office. He was never happier than out on a reporting trip because he understood a core truth that still holds: There is no substitute for leaving the confines of the familiar behind and having to face people and events with the immediacy that can only come from being in person.
Meanwhile, a lot of what now passes for reporting is mostly commentary. We have no shortage of people talking about the news, but a dwindling number of people doing original reporting. The implications for our society, and our democracy, are profound.
How we got here to this place in journalism and what it means is, however, a topic for a different time. That’s because I was recently back out in the field for a documentary we are making at the Science Communication Lab and I couldn't be more excited. I feel renewed and rejuvenated despite the long hours and jet lag.
The idea behind the film — tentatively called The Observer — is pretty straightforward: Observation is an essential part of the human experience and also central to the accrual and appreciation of scientific knowledge. Trying to make sense of the world yields awe, wonder, serendipity, frustration, and ultimately humility.
We approached our funder, the Moore Foundation, with a hypothesis: If we can make a thought-provoking, nuanced, and epic-when-it-needs-to-be film about the wonders of observation, can we inspire general audiences about why the pursuit of science is a quintessentially human — and thus appealing and accessible — endeavor?
Directing the film is my good friend (and new Substacker) Ian Cheney. And seeing his vision take shape has been thrilling. He and members of the production team have been hopscotching the globe with scientists and other types of observers exploring new worlds and considering what it means to be driven by curiosity. I think the resulting film will be a game-changing look at what science really can be.
You can follow the making of the film through our newsletter.
This was one of the last shoots of the film and we were in South Korea with Stanford bioengineer and indefatigable observer of all things microscopic Manu Prakash. I will save why we came here and what we found for the final film. But here are some behind-the-scenes photos — from mud flats to markets, to the lush mountains abutting North Korea.
It feels great to follow Dan’s exhortations about getting out of the office once again. We face a crisis of trust in science that echoes the divisions solidifying within society more broadly. It often feels like the world is teetering on an axis of antagonism. We desperately need more dialogue, more face-to-face meetings, more journeys through our wonderful Earth. We need to observe the observers and tell their stories.
We all knew we had captured something special on this film shoot. We headed home happy and filled with hope.
If you are interested in learning more about Manu Prakash and his work, plese check out an earlier short film we made about him:
As a television person and as a graduate of CBS as well, I totally agree with you and Dan. My mantra always was…..” you don’t get ideas sitting in an office”. What I hear of the things going on today, much of it turns my stomach. NBC covering some Olympic sports from Stamford, Ct, CBS doing some football games from their nyc control rooms, announcers arriving on site an hour b4 the event never having talked to a player in person, are all shortcuts that shows up in the final product. What a shame!
Love the idea of a film on the simple notion of observing. I mean how else do you really learn. Todo other wise takes the joy and wonder out of so many things. My vet has decided to only be in the office one day a week and do virtual visits four days.it was suggested that the animals were so much more comfortable at home then if necessary could make appointment to come in. (More$$$$) want to tell me how you listen to the heart over zoom (looking for new vet)