Foster Kamer does not enjoy covering protests.
Kamer, a senior editor at the New York Observer, recounted a recent conversation he had with Jack Shafer, the Reuters media columnist, about this very issue. “He was talking about how he abhorred protest coverage,” Kamer told me in a recent phone conversation. “And I found that to be the case with a lot of alt weekly editors. That was my experience with [Village Voice editor] Tony Ortega. Any time we covered a protest it would drive him up the [gosh darned] wall. The thinking was: ‘So people are angry about something — what next?’ And so the instinct I’ve been trained to have, always — and I think it’s a lot of reporters’ instinct — is that protests are generally a non-news item.”
Luckily, when the idea was floated to cover the people who had begun gathering in Zuccotti Park, Adrianne Jeffries, who normally writes for the Observer’s BetaBeat, jumped at the chance to go. “She just thought it was intensely interesting,” he said. “She was down there from day one.”
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here