ALEXANDRIA NIEVES
Special to The Leader
Scott Martelle has spent most of his working life in journalism. He can trace it back to his years at SUNY Fredonia.
Fredonia alumnus and columnist for The Buffalo News Sean Kirst said, “[Scott Martelle had] the same ethic, always with conscience and always with sweat.”
Kirst introduced Martelle with the story of how they met in Martelle’s sophomore year at Fredonia when Martelle was the Editor in Chief for The Leader.
Martelle traveled up the food chain starting from Fredonia’s student newspaper all the way up to the Los Angeles Times.
His journey went from Fredonia to Jamestown to Rochester to Detroit and finally to Los Angeles.
“When I was working in Detroit, it was the afternoon paper. It was a brutal journalism market at the time. [It was] serious competition,” said Martelle.
While Martelle was in Detroit, the paper he was working for ended up going on strike.
“We went on strike in July 1995, [they were on the] picket line for a year and a half,” said Martelle. “My wife was a kindergarten teacher in a private daycare . . . and we had two young children. [I was back] bartending again . . . it was a great fall back.”
Martelle had a friend who had a job with the LA Times. Martelle admitted that he applied for the LA Times three times and he didn’t even get a rejection letter.
Before talking about his journey up the food chain, Martelle was telling the audience about how to build readership and how to get the attention of readers.
He brought up his recent opinion piece, “OMG, a top Trump official is under investigation.”
Martelle said, “That’s a great headline. The headline is driving the coverage of business, but I managed to make it a real piece . . . sort of a summation of [the] number of scandals that have confronted the Trump administration at this moment.
“You’ve got all this corruption and all these scandals going on in different departments of the Trump administration.”
Martelle was asked about how he stayed focused on everything surrounding the Trump administration and not just focused on what Trump tweets in a day.
“It takes a lot of work, a lot of research,” said Martelle. “You have to bring an awareness of the elements of what you’re reading about.”
He showed a series the LA Times did that started on April 2, 2017 titled, “Our Dishonest President.” It talks about Trump’s reactions to issues within a seven article series.
“After he was elected, we were writing this stuff [tweets and comments]. As soon as he declared [his candidacy], we were writing critical articles about it,” said Martelle.
The series ended Aug. 20, 2017. It shows that the LA Times researched what was going on after Trump would say something verbally or through Twitter. They didn’t want the audience to just see what he tweets but how people would react to his words.
Senior Fredonia student, David Wentling, asked why people should trust news outlets, especially since news outlets get called fake news from society nowadays.
Martelle said, “The story you read, read it with skepticism. Is it plausible? Have I read the source before? If it doesn’t [feel right], then look for other sources for it if you’re questioning something. The whole point of this is to do that work for you. If you’re interested in doing that work, then double check our sources.”
Martelle wants everyone to read articles with skepticism, because then you can find the truth behind the lies.