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Beth Frerking: Politico AME for partnerships By Andrew Martell When she was young, Beth Frerking dreamed of being an actress. “I have a bit of the drama queen in me,” she freely admits. Though she abandoned the hope of Hollywood success long ago, Frerking’s passion for the dramatic has served her well throughout what has been a distinguished journalism career. From her time covering the city council of a small Texas town to her current position as assistant managing editor for partnerships at Politico, Frerking has remained committed to telling good stories and reporting them with honesty, integrity and a keen sense of empathy. It seems Frerking has always been surrounded by the news. Growing up in the fairly small Texas town of Alice, she remembers always being interested in what was going on in the world. “My mother was a teacher and my father was a businessman, so there was always an interest in what was going on outside of our home,” she remembers. As a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, Frerking started working for The Daily Texan student newspaper and “that was it – I was hooked.” For this self-described “moderate at heart,” journalism provided a way to be involved in all the important happenings of campus life without having to pick sides. “I’m either cursed or blessed with the ability to see all sides of things. I could never go the way of becoming an activist,” Frerking says. “I was always very open to hearing why people felt the way they felt. I could always understand their side, and so I was always more comfortable observing and writing ... than being active on one side or the other.” After graduation and with no job prospects in sight, Frerking returned home to do clerical work for her father’s company, which outsourced administrative jobs for other small businesses. “It was a terrible job economy back then and I had been thinking I could get a job with The New York Times, but things were really tight,” she remembers. “I got very depressed.” Finally, one day she decided to contact [journalist and UT alumnus] Bill Moyers. “I just wrote him and told him, ‘I’m trying to get to the Northeast.’” He sent me a hand-written letter back and it stuck in my mind. It said, ‘just get whatever newspaper job you can get – even if it’s in the middle of nowhere – just get a job and do really well and you will be noticed and people will pick you up.’” Frerking found a job covering local politics in Palestine, a deeply conservative town in east Texas. “It was like going back in time,” when compared to the urban life of Austin, “but it was one of the best experiences I’ve had because I really got to do everything.” Also, “I had to see the sources that I wrote about on a daily basis. … There was no hiding behind an institution.” Within a year, Frerking received an offer from The Dallas Times Herald. Her first taste of national political reporting came with the 1984 presidential campaign, when she covered the Republican national convention in Dallas. From there, she moved to The Denver Post’s Washington bureau where she covered the Colorado congressional delegation for five years, ultimately becoming Washington bureau chief. In 1991, Frerking became a national correspondent for Newhouse News Service, covering issues related to children, families and education. She left Newhouse in 2000 to serve as executive director for the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families, a professional program and resource center for journalists administered by the University of Maryland. “My kids were at the age where it was nice to have a more regular schedule,” she says of her two sons, then 6 and 9 years old. “It was a good time to do something different. I had a great time there and I liked working with journalists who were trying to negotiate their newsrooms with these issues.” Frerking joined Politico, a multiplatform political news organization based in Washington, a week before its launch in January 2007. She finds her work there invigorating in part because “it’s such a happening place.” And while it remains to be seen how less-traditional news organizations like Politico will function in the future, Frerking has faith that journalism as she has practiced it for most of her career will and must survive. “This is in the Constitution – freedom of speech and of the press,” she says, “and we need it to make things right.”
Beth Frerking discusses her craft in the following interview:
What motivated you to start in journalism? You know, I’ve always been interested in public affairs and public events. We had newspapers and magazines in our house from the time I grew up. I grew up in Texas in a fairly small town, but my mother was a teacher, my father was a businessman, so there was always an interest in what was going on outside of our home. I worked on the yearbook in high school and then I went to the University of Texas [and majored] in journalism because I was so interested in it. I started working on The Daily Texan my second year and that was it, I was totally hooked – I found my interest, I found my talent, I found my friends. It allowed me to be a part of what was going on in covering the university and then being editor of the paper. I just loved it. I’m one of the few people I know who went to college, got the journalism major and never looked back. What was it about journalism that attracted you? I loved being in the middle of the most important issues of the day without having to take sides. One of the things that made me be a journalist is that I’m either cursed or blessed with the ability to see all sides of things. I could never go the way of becoming an activist. I had a lot of friends who were the student government types, but I was also friends with kids in sororities and fraternities who were very conservative. I was always very open to hearing why people felt the way they felt. I could always understand their side and so I was always more comfortable observing and writing about the different parts than about making that my focus in being active on one side or the other. How does being at Politico compare with some of the more traditional institutions where you’ve worked? Obviously, there’s the same commitment to accuracy, fairness and good writing that exists in every good newsroom. Here at Politico, though, we’re not interested in the traditional wire reporting. We take a slightly edgier, more behind-the-scenes approach to political reporting. We’re speaking to a very educated, savvy audience. It’s a little bit like people who go to ESPN. It’s not a group you have to explain the rules of baseball to. Traditional newspapers always were playing to a much more general audience. How do you begin working on a story? You really need to focus what it is you’re writing early in the process. That doesn’t mean that you need to confirm absolutely, or make up your mind before you have the facts. But a lot of news suffers from having not-well focused stories on topics that you could honestly write a book about. Especially in the issues I was working at relating to children and child health, it’s very easy to get into what I call the double-truck problem [a reference to a story long enough to fill two facing pages in a newspaper]. A lot of places had the idea of writing about the children welfare system, and you can write a library on that issue, but what’s the story? You have to really focus -- and that’s something that we do very well at Politico. We don’t try to tell entire story every time we sit down to write a piece. We take very strategic points. How much research do you do before going out to report? You’re going to be doing some. If you’re covering a breaking news beat, then you will be keeping up on things. You should be reading whatever reports are out on those issues. For people who cover Congress, they’re talking to sources all the time. A lot of this is source development – it really is having good sources and being on top of the latest research in whatever field you’re covering. What about when you’re not focused on a particular beat? In many ways, that’s a lot harder. When you’re on a breaking news beat, it’s the news that drives your stories – you’re playing defense a lot of the time, reacting to the news of the day. I was very good at keeping up with things in the news and then taking a piece of it and doing something on it. I wouldn’t cover the main political story at Newhouse but instead would take aspects of a story I read and investigate how that issue was playing out in another part of the country. You look for ways to take a bite of something. How do you know when you’ve finished reporting on a story? That’s one of the hardest things to know and it’s one of the major rookie errors – reporting so much that you’re overwhelmed and don’t know how to pull yourself out from the mountain you’ve created. When I was looking for lots of voices, by the time I got to the fifth or sixth person who was saying a lot of the same things as the first four, then I knew my supposition was right. What about when those voices don’t agree? One of the things we’re guilty of is anecdotal reporting only. Anecdotes don’t make a story unless you’ve got solid research beneath to claim that something is happening nationally or internationally. You never want to have just one voice in a story and you rarely want only two. I’d say you always want multiple sources. The hardest thing -- and the thing that you have to train yourself to do -- is to open yourself up to those varying perspectives. You have to be ready for someone to tell you that everything you were just told by someone else is hogwash. Then you have a responsibility to check both sides and check differing studies. You really have to be critical in your analysis. If you have child death statistics, they are what they are. But when you get into issues like educational achievement, there are a number of ways to slice the data -- and you have to ask yourself if your reporting fully recognizes the complications of it. And that’s something you learn with experience and a good editor. Do you find that it’s harder to write it or report it? I always found it harder to write. I can report like a banshee, but the writing is the challenging part. If you think of it as a funnel and you have all this stuff at the top and you have to get the most incisive, relevant and interesting parts and put that into a narrative that makes sense, that’s difficult. You have to balance giving people the particulars that make it interesting – usually the human elements that personify whatever your larger point is – but also what I call the “dull but important” information that signal[s] that you know what you’re talking about. How do you manage the “dull but important” data? One of the good things that has happened, especially with publications like USA Today, is a move toward graphics, so that you don’t have to bog your story down with lots of gray matter that tells you what you need to know but sort of limits the impact of the human elements of your piece. The best media outlets use a combination of that narrative with graphs and charts and videos to exemplify and illustrate larger trends. The Internet has totally changed the way that reporting is done. Now, instead of having to describe an original document – a government document, a new bill or a campaign spending report, for example – you don’t have to go through and report it all, you can just provide a link. That makes political reporting and government coverage a lot more palatable to read, though you’re still responsible for highlighting the most important parts. Do you write straight through a first draft or stop to revise as you go? I was never one of those people [who] just sat down and regurgitated a story and then put it all down and totally rewrote. I always did better having a fairly good idea of how I wanted to structure a piece. People have different ways of writing but that’s what worked best for me. The best writers have a vision in their head of how everything will go and how parts connect to one another. That has a lot to do with experience. The more you cover things, the easier it is to understand the importance and relevance of certain things. That’s harder when you’re first starting out. How do you manage to maintain good relationships with your sources? That’s the whole key to good political reporting. You’ve got to get along with these people and you don’t want to make them angry all the time. At the same time, you also have to be critical and skeptical. They always have to know that you are not them. It’s the same thing covering sports or the military. You end up liking these people, but then you’re going to have to write stories that make them upset, especially in campaigns where they can freeze you out. That can be one of the costs. It’s a tough dance and it’s more of an art than a science. You find your way. If you’re always as accurate as you can possibly be, if you’re always fair, if you always give them the chance to respond to whatever negative news you may have about them, and if you don’t go forward without giving them plenty of time and scope to really explain why they’re doing what they’re doing or what happened, then even if they don’t like what you wrote you can have them saying the fact is that’s the way it went down and my voice was heard. That’s the best you can do. You’re not there to defend or prosecute. You’re there to lay down the facts. Do you ever write about yourself? A couple of times, but they were commentary pieces, nothing news related. I did a piece for Salon during the D.C. sniper incident about what it was like to live through that and I recently did a piece for Slate on the choice to not dye my hair. It’s probably the most widely read piece I’ve ever written. Go figure. Serious journalism aside, it’s about my hair – it’s sort of hysterical and sad at the same time but I had fun writing it. Is there a story you’re most proud of? I did a series that was very hard to report on. It was about fathers who killed their kids in revenge against the mothers. The thing that got me on the topic was constantly reading these stories about men who would kill their entire families, then there was always this paragraph tacked on about how friends and neighbors were so surprised and that they had no idea this had been going on and I’m thinking this is so ridiculous, there had to be signs. I found that there were signs – alcohol and drug abuse, physical abuse, controlling behavior – so I did the piece as sort of a warning that when people threaten you, you can’t always take that as an idle threat and what it means in terms of abusing spouses. It was a really hard piece, but I was really proud of it. Have you ever been surprised by where a story leads you? I can’t think of a time when that’s happened. Usually I know what I’m getting myself into. What’s the hardest part about being a journalist? I think the struggle of making sure that you’re being as fair as you can, that you’re painting as complete a picture as you can with limited space and knowing there is always stuff you have to leave out, that’s hard. Dealing with the human impact of some stories is even harder, though. When you do hard-hitting journalism, there are always going to be people who are unhappy, and if you’re the kind of person [who] likes people generally and isn’t suspicious of everyone, it’s hard when people call in to yell at you or, even worse, when you never hear from them again. Political reporters are used to people yelling at them, but the kind of stories I was doing at Newhouse were about regular, everyday people and I found that they really didn’t understand – as much as you tried to warn them – what it meant to have such exposure. You can never warn someone enough. I have no sympathy for politicians; they know what they’re getting into. It’s not quite the same with regular folks. What do you think journalism will look like in 10 years? We’re entering an era of niche journalism. I think that’s why Politico is thriving. I think we’re going to see more fragmentation by area of interest and we’re going to see a lot more multimedia. If you can’t tell your stories on a number of platforms, I don’t think you’re going to make it. You’re going to need videos, slide shows, solid writing, blogging and the whole mix. I hope, we still have the kind of general publications and the kinds of institutions like NPR that cover everything. There does have to be a shared national understanding of subjects and I hope we don’t get to the point where all of our news comes from very partisan sources. This country works so well because most people are in the middle and can see all sides of things. I’m sort of a moderate at heart, so I’d hate to see that. Also, people have so much more access than they ever had. It demands a more participatory approach to journalism and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It sounds like you’re been thinking about and working in journalism almost you’re entire life. Do you have any sense of what you would be doing if you weren’t a journalist? I’d be an actress or a singer. There are those days when I’m watching something and I think to myself, that could have been me, I would’ve been big. I have a bit of the drama queen in me – that or a cabaret singer, something completely different. Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Andrew Martell.
For examples of Beth Frerking’s work please visit the following links: Palin wows GOP, puts Dems on notice Military families hit by ban on social sites For Achievers, a New Destination I’m Gonna Keep That Gray: My Decision to Stay Silver When your kids are in the line of fire Beyond their years -- pageants for children are a flourishing industry, but who are the winners?
Videos Beth Frerking offers her analysis of the 2008 presidential campaign (C-SPAN, May 2008): Beth Frerking discusses the status of women in journalism (UMTV, March 2003):
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