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ending soon.

Hey, honey.

Hi, Nick, How are you?

I'm really good. Am I allowed to say, Nick? I feel like I still have to call you Professor McBride, even though I know you don't like it.

Back in college, I really had no interest in being a journalist or, frankly, meaningful understanding of what that meant, until this guy.

Okay.

Okay. It's good to hear you smiling.

Nicholas McBride is an associate professor at UMass Amherst, where I went to school and where he still teaches in the journalism department.

Unlike the other professors who focused on the who, what, when, where, why, and how of basic newswriting,

he played us a VHS copy of Akira Kurosawa's legendary crime thriller about unreliable narrators, Rashomon.

And Professor McBride introduced his syllabus with an essay, he wrote, that began like this.

Newswriting and reporting is both science and art.

Newswriting and reporting is both science and art. News writing reporting is both science and art.

We observe, collect what we believe to be facts,

and verify those facts using established methods.

But too often now, we have become stenographers.

I've been thinking a lot about that essay, trying to square it with the moment that we in the media face now.

...