After spending eight years working at his home-town newspaper, where he was covering crime, courts and criminal justice, Ted Gest left the St. Louis Dispatch in 1977 to work for U.S. News & World Report.
Interestingly, he left for the Washington D.C. based national news magazine hoping that he would be on the crime beat, the position he originally applied for but ended up covering the Jimmy Carter administration for three years before gravitating toward ``legal affairs’’ covering the Justice Department, the U.S. Supreme Court and other related areas. After 1996, he served as national news editor and as a writer on law schools and other education issues, including the U.S. News law school rankings, a regular feature he began in the late 1980's, which sparked a storm of controversy. Gest stayed at U.S. News & World Report for nearly 24 years.
In 2001,, he wrote: ``Crime & Politics: Big Government's Erratic Campaign for Law and Order'' , a book dealing with anticrime policy in the United States since the late 1960s.
During his long tenure at U.S. News & World Report, Gest co-founded a national group called Criminal Justice Journalists. After securing funding in 2001 to run the organization, Gest left the news magazine, but continued to keep a foot in the business with journalism training programs.
Before blogs took hold and became such a common fixture on the Web, Gest began writing a news digest in 2003 on crime and justice, which is still going strong and can be found at The Crime Report. The Website, by the way, is invaluable for any working journalist with the way it regularly updates resources for journalists, such as a ``gun violence expert resource guide’’, guides and tips for covering criminal justice issues and even a job board for positions available to journalists looking for employment outside of the newspaper industry.
The Crime Report or TCR is a collaborative effort by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice, the nation’s leading practice-oriented think tank on crime and justice reporting; and Criminal Justice Journalists, the nation’s only membership organization of crime-beat journalists, providing comprehensive news dealing with criminal justice in the U.S. and abroad.
Gest has been president of the Criminal Justice Journalists organization since 1998.
Despite being away from print publications in the traditional sense, Gest says he not only summarizes other contributors work, but also produces his own original writing and is especially proud to report his organization is the only entity covering crime policy news.
In addition, the Criminal Justice Journalists organization has about 500 members on a private listserv called ``Cops & Courts Reporters’’ , where they exchange tips, queries, and other helpful information related to crime reporting.
As if Gest’s plate was full enough, another opportunity came knocking not long ago. Last summer, the District of Columbia Attorney General's office asked this seasoned crime reporter to work part-time as their public information officer. Having never worked on that side of the fence before in his 40 years as a journalist, Gest couldn’t refuse the offer. The agency deals mostly with civil cases, but occasionally handles criminal cases as well. In order to avoid potential conflicts, Gest steers clear of engaging in any original journalism that involves the D.C. government. The PIO position involves what you might expect: monitoring newspaper and criminal justice blogs, along with anything from listservs to YouTube.
Has his perspective changed now that he is working on the other side of the fence? Gest says he does indeed notice a fair share of errors and misunderstanding with news organizations he deals with, but he came to the job expecting that.
Despite the vast reservoir of veteran generalists with so much specialization and institutional memory having left daily newspapers over the last decade, Gest still thinks there is plenty of quality journalism being produced and resists believing, like so many others have, that the content of U.S. newspaper reporting has taken a sharp turn for the worse.
He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
July 29, 2012
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