Entertained and Inspired

Another busy day in a very busy week. The morning began with an all-class lecture on Covering the Cops with the New York Post’s Bill Gorta, a former cop himself and a J-school alum, and ended with a talk by David Isay of Sound Portraits Productions (but probably more familiar from NPR). In between, I went up to Hunts Point to find a subject for my “portrait of a block” assignment.

Covering the Cops

Gorta was a character out of Central Casting, a colorful speed-talker with a flagrant New York accent and a great comfort with profanity. He gave us a tremendously helpful primer on the NYPD going back 25 years to his rookie days on the force.

Gorta likened the Department variously to the Catholic Church and the former Soviet Union in management structure and ethos. According to Gorta, “why?” is the only thing you’re not allowed to ask in the Police Department. If you do, you go through a “gulag re-education system” in which you are sent to some “shithole precinct” far from your house. Gorta himself was re-educated. Twice.

He told us that it’s been extremely difficult to get information out of the Police Department since the Giuliani administration, when the press was considered an outright enemy. Then he gave us tips on how to do it. For example, he said, look for “the dopey kid at the tape” – aka the least important cop at the crime scene, who probably won’t know much but probably will at least talk to you.

Gorta also told us that cops are a tough audience. They’re news junkies (who knew?) and take the coverage personally. They’re also very literal and pedantic about the law, so it’s important to be specific and accurate when talking about crimes. Don’t say sodomy, for example, if what you really mean is aggravated sexual assault (his example, not mine). Apparently, for the real inside scoop, one needs to check out NYPD Rant, some of which he described as “breathtaking.”

As with so many speakers, there was much, much more – and trust me, it was good stuff. Gorta closed the talk with some words of wisdom for our year at the J-school: “You have to get a life – one will not be issued to you.”

Walking the Beat (Mine, That Is)

When you look at a map of the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, you see a single small patch of green, which turns out to be a park that covers approximately a square block. It is so incongruous – it’s in the midst of the area’s industrial center and nowhere near its residential neighborhoods – that it seemed the perfect subject for my first neighborhood piece.

I have to say that I got off to a somewhat slow start, at least in terms of talking to real, live people. I did, however, get pages of description, including a diagram of the park and the surrounding buildings. By the time I left for the evening lecture, I knew two things: this was the block I was going to cover, and I had a lot of reporting still to do.

Radio Documentaries

David Isay, certified genius (aka MacArthur Fellow), performed what I had thought was an impossible feat tonight: he made me want to work in radio.

It’s not that I ever had anything against radio, mind you, but I was never a big listener, either. Not even to NPR. Heresy, I know. But true. I’m just a really visual person, so I have a hard time processing information solely through my ears. I tend to get distracted and look for something else to read, write, or watch. (This presented a serious challenge in my last job, which sometimes seemed like an endless series of conference calls of disembodied voices.)

Nevertheless, when Isay played extended clips of his work for us, I was riveted. And this was at the end of a long, exhausting day when nodding off would have been far more likely. We heard segments of character-based documentaries on Angola Prison inmates serving life sentences (Tossing Away the Keys); the prison staff in charge of executions in Huntsville, TX (Witness to an Execution); two teenage boys living in the ghetto on the South Side of Chicago (Ghetto Life 101); and just regular, everyday folks (the very cool Story Corps).

I sailed out of the lecture hall intrigued and inspired – a pretty great way to end the day.

Quotes of the day:

“Police said”: the two finest words in the English language. --Bill Gorta

I work in short-attention-span theater. --Bill Gorta

He had an IQ approaching pi from the low side. --Bill Gorta

Get drunk. Cut a class. Kiss a frog. Get a life. --Bill Gorta

Fight to do stories you care about. --David Isay

Recommended reading:

Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America --David Isay

Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories --David Isay