Foundations Bureau of Investigation

Although we all spend significant portions of our days talking with other people—people we like, people we don’t like, people we want to like us—there are hairs inside my little freshman journalism student brain that stand on end when it is time to “interview” somebody. It feels like an entirely different species of conversation; it feels more tense and exponentially more awkward than straight-up talking, and a little bit like I am a door-to-door salesman who is inconveniencing somebody with my pitch. All of these problems are only magnified when there is no scheduling or forewarning or maybe comfortable chairs to sit in, and I am instead approaching a random stranger for a brisk conversation about campus in the middle of an already-quick 50-minute class. Ironically, it is in this pressed need to get this interview over with as quick and efficiently as possible—to get a sentence, to get something from this person—that the primary reason for conducting the interview in the first place is thrown out the window: to listen. There is such an inherent desire to cut off elaborations or stifle tangents in the conversation and simply move on that it is difficult to keep your original intentions in mind—that you are there to listen and just to sort of sit there and see what happens, what’s on this person’s mind, instead of plotting their quote within the scheme of your article like a pawn on a chessboard, where there are only two yes/no or good/bad sides, with no room in the middle for individuals or stories or the real world to actually be as it is.

It is also rather evident, when working as a one-day bureau, why writing is done by one person (excepting your oddball Woodward/Bernstein duo). There wasn’t really any contention within our group (and, collectively, we had more synonyms than we knew what to do with), but, if you are working to write one item as a group of five people, then maybe two of them at maximum can actually put their own fingerprints on the project and call it their own. I find that I feel I simply compromise everything when I write with somebody else, because I personally tend to rely on such unorthodox things as parenthesis, the dash (which has its own distinct usage that is wholly separate from a comma, parenthesis, or semicolon), and the run-on sentence. And also the very short sentence. But it’s good to work with other people.

The Census Bureau is similar to our mini-bureau because the bulk of its information is gathered out on the proverbial field and then sent back to a sort of headquarters, where it is all assembled, organized, made sense of, and eventually published. However, unlike our class, the Census Bureau is in not in the business of reporting events, as they are only interested in things like demographics and how many people live in your house. Also they only work once every ten years.