Former News Babe Is No Biddy: Mehren Keeps Her Trade Fresh

BOSTON, M.A.When a journalist’s pedigree entails over two decades at a prestigious newspaper and a byline that has crowned the biggest stories, he or she may seem entitled to a bit of professional snobbery. Not so, says Professor Elizabeth Mehren, with a proud flourish of her latest piece: an interview with a dancing seal.

Addressing her students—aspiring journalists at Boston University’s College of Communication—Mehren relates her impressive biography with humorous self-deprecation and a sunny disposition compatible with her blonde hair, proud California origins and diploma from the University of California at Berkley.

Declining to reveal her age, she jokingly blames her displacement to Boston on “marriage to a Yank.” Mehren was dispatched to New England as a Los Angeles Times correspondent, a post she held for more than twenty years. She became a BU professor two years ago.

Having spent her writing career at a mega metropolitan publication, Mehren brings to the classroom a store of anecdotes and an insistence that this generation of students be familiar with old newsroom jargon, shorthand, and especially their unchanging professional purpose.

In an era when readers prefer blogs to ink on their fingers and newsroom shorthand could be confused with style, Mehren does speak wistfully of old school style, namely “the long form narrative that was permissible in dailies when I worked as a reporter.”

Mehren is quick to defend the art of print journalism from doomsayers, but admits “there have certainly been major shifts in the trade and we may never see it in its traditional form. But however we present the material, it must be done well.”

This call for journalistic care and integrity forms the theme in her classrooms, where she battles daily to not simply to dissuade her tech-savvy students from shortcuts, but to ensure the endurance of her beloved trade.

“The essential theology of journalism is not obsolete,” Mehren concludes. “The skills should be constant, the motives unchanging.”

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~ by thedailydrawl on September 24, 2009.