A fair number of the law students I teach (in my post-daily-journalism second act) would be journalists instead of aspiring lawyers if they were confident journalism could provide a reliable middle-class living. Quite often, they seek me out to talk about their aspirations and to hear some war stories from my 30 years covering the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times.
A few months ago, a student asked how many stories I wrote during a typical week in those days. If the court was in session, I replied, probably three, four, five or sometimes more. The student’s amazed response reflected a culture in which the author of a law review article might spend six months or even a year immersed in a dense 50,000-word piece. Wasn’t it confusing, she wanted to know, to have to switch gears and move all the time from one topic to another. That was just part of the craft, I replied, something any daily reporter soon got used to.
But pondering the question later, I realized my answer had missed the point. I wasn’t switching from one topic to another, not in the sense the student meant. I was covering a beat. Each individual story was just a piece of the bigger, ongoing story of the life of the Supreme Court during the unusually long time I was privileged to have the assignment.
The challenge of covering a beat, whether it’s national politics or Silicon Valley or the automobile industry, is to work constantly in three dimensions — past, present, and future. What led to today’s development, and what lies around the next corner? Not every story will address those questions, of course. But inside the head of every beat reporter is a time-and-space continuum into which the new development falls, ready for retrieval as needed.
That’s the challenge, and also the reward — especially, it seems to me, in today’s hyper-atomized, hyper-wired world where attention spans are short and news seems to drop randomly from the sky. To cover a beat is to have the ability, and with any luck the license, to extract a little order from the chaos.
I never expected to cover the Supreme Court, let alone for 30 of the 40 years I spent at The Times (1968-2008). There’s irony in how it turned out. During my junior year in college, I applied for a summer internship at The Washington Post. Those were great internships that offered lots of writing opportunities and, in those days, often led to real jobs after graduation. I was interviewed by a panel of three Post editors. Suppose, one of them said, that you had the chance to cover Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court or a small town in suburban Virginia. Which would you choose?
My ambition was to be a political reporter. As a star-struck 13-year-old during the 1960 presidential election, I followed every move John F. Kennedy made, and of course devoured Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960 when it came out the next year. A distinctive part of that book was its vivid description of the traveling press corps — people who were actually being paid to fly around the country with my hero, the newly elected president. To be one of them was my goal — almost certainly out of reach but never, during my years as a high school and then college journalist, completely out of mind.
So how to answer the Post editor’s question. I considered my options. Just coming out and saying I wanted to cover the White House seemed somehow arrogant, above my station. Congress, on the other hand, seemed too obvious a choice. The Supreme Court seemed appealingly intellectual and unobvious. I didn’t spend a minute thinking about the small town in suburban Virginia. I chose the Supreme Court.
Wrong! the editor barked. If I really wanted to learn how to be a reporter, I would have chosen Virginia. I’m sure I had a sour look on my face as I absorbed this lesson in adult trickery. I didn’t get the job.
I never did get to cover a national political campaign. When I was asked if I wanted to do it, for the 1988 election cycle, I had a two-year-old daughter at home and couldn’t picture spending the next two years of her life on the road. Another time, I said, although I think I knew it wouldn’t happen.
But I did get to cover government and politics. My first beat, after finishing a one-year internship with the columnist James Reston, was the New York suburban county of Westchester. The Times metro desk staffed the whole New York region in those days — New Jersey, Long Island (both Nassau and Suffolk counties, separately) and Connecticut in addition to Westchester. They gave me a car and a map. I’m not sure anyone even wished me luck.
Westchester was actually a good story. The state was trying to get some of the wealthier towns to accept affordable housing, which might have brought a bit of racial integration to the all-white suburbs. The controversy went on for years. I’m not sure how or when it ended, if it ever did.
I moved on, first to night rewrite, where I learned to appreciate the narrative art of a good obit, and then to the state legislative bureau in Albany. There, thanks to a great story — the fiscal collapse of New York City — and to the company of older and wiser colleagues and the support of a great editor named Sheldon Binn, I learned to cover a beat.
The next and, I suppose, defining chapter of my career unfolded randomly, as life does. After four years in Albany, the last two as bureau chief, I asked for a transfer to the Washington bureau. I assumed I might cover Congress or — despite how arrogant it had sounded to me years earlier — the White House. But The Times had a need, and hence a plan. The Supreme Court correspondent had announced her intention to leave the paper and become a federal prosecutor. The editors offered to send me on a one-year fellowship to Yale Law School in preparation for covering the court. Of course I said yes, and began climbing the learning curve, one that in my current incarnation as a teacher of law students and a writer of a biweekly opinion column for the Times website, I am still climbing to this day.
In 1998, 20 years in, I received the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting. I later learned that Times editors had originally submitted my work for explanatory journalism, and that the entry had been moved toward the end of the process. I’m all for explanations, and of course I would have been delighted with that award — or with any other the Pulitzer board might have bestowed. But given a choice, I would have picked beat reporting, hands down. I still would.