By Julie R. Cryers & Justin M. Weaver
or Assistant Professor John Temple, the building blocks for writing a book, a magazine article, or a deadline news story are about the same.
“You read stuff and ask questions and take good notes and tape record,” said Temple, who teaches in the WVU Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism.
The difference is the organization.
“I think you have to be extremely organized to write a journalistic book because there’s so much material in the end,” he said. “In news reporting, you can kind of organize a story in your head on the drive back from the scene.”
In April, Temple released his first book, Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner’s Office. In Deadhouse, Temple observed a group of death investigators who work in the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office. Published by the University Press of Mississippi, Deadhouse focuses on how these people did their job and the effect it had on their lives.
The WVU Faculty Senate recently granted Temple funding so he can research a second book, this time about a team of death penalty lawyers. In the same spirit as Deadhouse, Temple’s new project will focus on the unusual nature of the job.
And with both of these projects, Temple takes what he learns and passes that knowledge on to his students in his public affairs and advanced reporting classes. From discussing the organizational skills needed for a news story or an in-depth project to lessons on how to interview sources, Temple makes certain that the lessons he learns while writing his books become lessons in his classroom for aspiring journalists.
“I fairly regularly use my experiences reporting my current book in the classroom. Since my current book is about a court case, it’s fairly easy to find links between it and public affairs reporting,” Temple said.
“And my other main class is advanced reporting, in which students do in-depth stories, so I find a lot of parallels there too. When something interesting happens to me, I tell them about it, so the story of my reporting process is a recurring theme throughout the semester.”
If Temple is working with an uncooperative source to try to find out information or see certain documents, he tells his students about the problem and then later comes back to it, after it’s been resolved. That’s when he tells students how everything worked out, and what he and they can take away from the experience.
“If I think I’ve messed up, I’ll tell them about it,” Temple said. “It’s good for them to see that when it comes to journalism, being smart or perfect is far less important than just plodding along and not giving up.”
His students will carry the lessons through a lifetime of journalism careers.
“His experiences as a nonfiction writer helped improve my own narrative and feature writing skills,” said Jessica Karmasek, who graduated from the News-Editorial Program in May and now works as an education reporter at the Charleston Daily Mail.
“He emphasized the importance of feeling and emotion and that we need to focus on the human interest aspects of our stories. News isn’t news without people. It’s something you have to keep in mind when you write anything, whether it be a news story or a book,” she said.
And sometimes, Temple’s experiences and lessons provide students with a good laugh, as well.
“I remember him telling us a funny, but practical, way of transcribing notes from a tape recorder. He would sit at his desk with one shoe off so he could flip the power switch to his power strip to turn his tape recorder on and off. I never used the trick but I always thought it was an amusing way to keep up with the tape when transcribing,” said Scott Castleman, a sports information graduate assistant who graduated in May from the News-Editorial Program.
For his second book, Temple will shadow a group of North Carolina lawyers as they fight the death penalty sentence of a man who was convicted of murder in 1993.
Temple’s research will focus on attorneys and investigators at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL) in Durham. The nonprofit organization took on the case seven years ago, weeks before the inmate was scheduled to die by lethal injection. The CDPL won a stay of execution and undertook an extensive investigation that turned up some troubling facts.
The grant money allowed Temple to spend a month in North Carolina, where he conducted interviews with people associated with the case. In addition, he plans to return to cover the final appeals process.
Temple plans to turn his research into a book of narrative, immersion journalism that focuses on the lawyers who do the grueling job of defending death row inmates.
“It will be an even-handed look at a difficult and strange profession, a narrative that will provide insight into the issues surrounding capital punishment without joining the debate,” he wrote in his grant proposal.
Temple heads the News-Editorial sequence at the School of Journalism. He coedited Cancer Stories: Lessons in Love, Loss and Hope, a student-produced book about a group of cancer patients.
He used his experiences from writing Deadhouse as he coached students who were reporting and writing for the cancer project, which received national and regional media attention.
“When students felt hopeless or encountered problems, I was able to tell them that those problems are par for the course in this kind of reporting—no long-term project goes smoothly all the time,” Temple said. “The more rough patches you encounter and overcome, the more you just see them as inevitable but overcomeable.”
Temple also brings more than six years of experience working in newsrooms throughout the nation to his students. He was the health/education reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a general assignment reporter for the News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a government and politics reporter for the Tampa Tribune in Tampa, Florida.
Andrew Worob, who graduated in May from the News-Editorial Program and landed an internship writing for the Florida Marlins’ Web site, said Temple’s experiences have made him an excellent teacher.
“He wants you to succeed and is there to motivate and urge you to keep going out and go the extra distance to ask more questions and do follow-up interviews to make your story that much better,” Worob said.
Karmasek agrees.
“Students need to know where they stand, what their strengths and weaknesses are. That’s the only way we can improve and be successful,” she said. “And Professor Temple does that. He helps you to be successful.”
Temple once dabbled in archeology, traveling to the south of France to dig around the Pyrenees Mountains. Instead of digging up bones, though, Temple decided a career in digging up facts was for him.
“I don’t know if I ever really seriously considered (archeology) as a career, but I was pretty interested in it and I do see some parallels—mainly in that they both seemed to me to be fields where you’re out in ‘the field,’ instead of an office, you’re doing something that takes you to interesting places, that kind of thing,” Temple said.
Temple said he decided instead to be a journalist because he wanted to see and experience things that other people didn’t get to see or experience on a regular basis. He also admits that he “thought it sounded adventurous.”
“I think the skills involved in interviewing and in teaching small writing and reporting classes can sometimes be similar. You need to be able to think on your feet and really listen and then respond in a way that makes sense in the context, like you’re having a conversation.” 