J-school students, alumni contribute questions
for commencement speaker Brokaw
Longtime NBC newsman and bestselling author Tom Brokaw spoke
to about 2,700 graduates at winter commencement Monday (Dec. 12). We
asked you via Facebook and Twitter what should #UofSCAskTom. You
wanted to know what he thought about today’s journalism,
the “greatest generation” and football:
USC broadcast
journalism senior Lauren Hinnant,
who graduated Monday:
Hinnant. What is the biggest difference in the business
between the time you got in it and the time I am getting in it?
Tom Brokaw: "Both quantitatively
and qualitatively, it’s an enormously different business.
First of all, there are so many more choices now. When I first
got involved, there were really only two network news divisions
that counted – CBS
and NBC – and every community had a principle newspaper and
there were some secondary newspapers as well.
“Now, first of all, the screen is very crowded in television
between cable and broadcast news, and then the small screen, which
gives you access to the Internet, lots of online newspapers, lots
of websites, you can easily access foreign publications, for example.
“But it does mean that you have to be a more proactive consumer
of news to determine what holds up and what doesn’t, what
works best for you and what doesn’t.”
Hinnant: Journalists are exposed to so much depravity
in their daily careers, what’s the most unexpected happy
moment in your career?”
Tom Brokaw: “The most unexpected happy
moment I guess is that I got to the network a lot faster than I
expected to. I was 26 years old when NBC hired me to go to Los
Angeles to be a correspondent and local news anchor out there.
I was just three and a half years out of South Dakota.
“It was a goal of mine. I didn’t think it would happen
as swiftly as it did. It’s been a wonderful career and life
and I realize just how very lucky I have been.”
USC
journalism/visual communications senior Mary Austin (Twitter:
@maryaustinphoto), who graduated Monday:
Austin: What do you think about the current state of the news media? Do
you think traditional outlets will find a way to survive?
Tom Brokaw: “There will be, as there are
now online, what you would describe as a traditional news outlet.
The New York Times is online now, the Washington Post, the Wall
Street Journal. They’ve been able to marry the two systems,
the print and electronic versions, and I think that will hold up
for quite a while.
“Again, it’s mostly that there are just so many more
choices. Some of them are posing as journalists but they’re
really political websites with a distinct agenda of some kind all
across the political spectrum. And it’s incumbent upon the
people who take in that information to develop a system for determining
what’s credible, what’s reliable, what holds up over
time.”
USC News and Internal Communications staffer and
alumna Peggy Ryan Binette, SJMC '88:
Binette: What was your most memorable interview?
Tom Brokaw: “What I often tell people
is there are two kinds of interviews. One is with the big newsmakers
in the world and they’re often very practiced so you don’t
get the spontaneity from them that you do from the anonymous courageous
figure – the civil rights workers in the South during the
1960s, young American military people in Baghdad or in Afghanistan.
“I had a memorable interview in Somalia during the worst
of it with a young man from Oklahoma working for Doctors Without
Borders, who was operating in the middle of the night trying to
save a Somali child. Those are the kind of interviews that kind
of linger longest in your mind.
“I suppose the one interview that was most distinctive in
my career is that I was the first journalist ever to interview
a general secretary of the communist party of the Soviet Union
and it was Mikhail Gorbachev just as he was changing the world.
It was the beginning of not just a professional, but a personal,
relationship, so I really do treasure that.”
By Web Communications
