Taking your kids to work

Here's a column by Dirk Johnson from NINA's Fall '08 newsletter.

Take your kid to work;
benefits are many

When my children were younger, I would often bring along a "young apprentice" on a story I was reporting for The New York Times. It was a good way to spend time with a kid. It was also a good way to humanize myself with the people I was covering.

On plenty of these feature stories, the presence of my daughter or son served to break the ice with people I had come to interview. It was especially useful for stories that involved families. It provided common ground, and served to remind people that reporters are people too.

Over the years, my children have played with other kids at housing projects and trailer parks, sat on the laps of Utah polygamist wives and sat at a kitchen table listening to a gay man describe how his own family disowned him as a "sinner."

Being a parent in action, and making a bond with people, it was my experience, typically opened the way for better quotes and more honest, freewheeling discussions. One of my editors at The Times, John Darnton, a Pulitzer Prize winner, once told me he used to take along a child while reporting stories in Eastern Europe during the reign of the old Soviet Union. Even the most hardened Communist party members, he said, tended to soften around kids.

There are stories in which this approach wouldn’t work as well, I suppose, such as interviews with a major politician (although I have taken a child along to many of these, too, including Mayor Richard Daley). Interviews that might turn antagonistic, or involve investigation of wrong-doing, might not be the best place to bring along a kid.

But journalism is more of an art than a science, so it’s impossible to say precisely when it’s a good idea to bring along a kid, and when it’s not. In doing some reporting that got her fired, television reporter Amy Jacobson brought kids along to a pool party hosted by the family of a man being investigated for the disappearance of his wife. Jacobson was wearing a swimsuit, and, after a rival station taped the reporter at work, there was a lot of clucking that she was dressed in an inappropriate way that showed her getting too cozy to sources. I don’t see it that way. Seems to me it makes sense to wear a swimming suit to a pool party. I doubt a male reporter would have been subject to the same scrutiny.

In the end, she was judged guilty of being inappropriate for wearing the bikini to cover the source. But it did seem to help her case, at least with me, that she had brought along her children.


Dirk Johnson is NINA’s executive director. He has spent the past 25 years writing for The New York Times, Newsweek and the Chicago Sun-Times. Currently, he also teaches in the NIU Communication Department. Contact him at sycamoredirk@aol.com.