It was only when the stranger made for the door that one of the students — the woman who'd been robbed — finally noticed him and shouted. The stranger raced out the door, down the stairwell, past the bronze plaque, past the bronze busts of Joseph Pulitzer, past the stucco reliefs of the Gods of Journalism and out into the night, chased by a dozen or so less swift journalism students. Standing near the fateful spot in the lounge where she and her classmates had been sitting, Kuae Noel Kelch-Mattox related the story to me. “We were literally ten to fifteen seconds behind him, but then he just disappeared,” she said. “I never would have thought this sort of thing could happen in my own student lounge.”
“Who wrote the story?” I asked. The students were required to hand in homework articles each week. The student newspaper was also sorely in need of material.
“No one,” she said. "There wasn’t a story.”
As I pulled out a pad and began to write, students in the lounge gathered around me, along with a pair of young adjunct professors.
“Oh, here comes the notebook!” said one, sounding very media wise.
“What’s your nut graph?” asked the other, who was keen to know how this article was going to turn out. I scribbled a note to check the meaning of the phrase, one of the several bits of J-school jargon I failed to understand.
“What happened to the wallet?” I asked my source.
“Why are you trying to find out?” she asked.
“I’m just curious.”
“O.K.” She looked relieved. “Then there’s not a story.”
“Yeah,” said one of the other students, a little aggressively. “It’s just normal here. I keep mugger money in one pocket and my money in the other.”
“Oh no,” said the media-wise professor, “what you're going to see in this article is a completely skewed position on the crime problem in the school.”
The women telling the tale began to lecture me. “So, like, just because someone had their purse stolen is proof that there is something wrong with our school?”
“C'mon,” said the other professor, “tell us your nut graph.”
I gave up and dropped the pad. “What’s a nut graph?” I asked.
"He doesn’t know what a nut graph is!” someone shouted. [JF: All right, I didn’t either, but since it’s 2017, I have Google.]
The adjunct professor took pity. He tried again, gently. “In the article you are writing about the school,” he said. “What’s your null hypothesis?”
My null hypothesis?
My null hypothesis! My angle. My bias. My take. My … point … of … view!
“My null hypothesis,” I said, "is that the Columbia Journalism School is all bullshit.”
They paused. “That’s a good null hypothesis,” said one, finally.
J-School Confidential By Michael Lewis April 18, 1993