The changing face of journalism

I have been out of work for a week now. I'm not going to be naive and say it's been a great thing, because any time you're not earning money when you have obligations is not necessarily a good thing.

So the desire to find something that earns money is palpable, and one must work hard to make sure that they get a decent-paying job to subsidize whatever lifestyle they choose. As my mom told me once after I earned my first paycheck at 17, the money I earn isn't all just for me. It's for obligations. The older we get, the more we have.

There is a silver lining here. For the first time since 2000, and most likely, for the first time since 1993, I do not have a job in journalism, nor do I plan on returning to said career, unless things change. My first byline came on March 3, 1993, on the front page of The Daily Collegian at California State University, Fresno. My first professional byline came on June 28, 1995, on the front page of the Selma Enterprise weekly newspaper. My last byline came Thursday, October 8, 2009. That's 16 years of bylines.

Some years, I had less than others. I don't know what year produced the most, but I probably on average, once I began working in daily newspapers full-time in 1996, wrote about 300 stories a year.

I've worked for papers big and small. I still love "the craft." To call it a craft these days is debatable, even at the best newspapers in the country. The best papers -- in my estimation, there are a number of them -- The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Los Angeles Times, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle prior to 2000 -- really produced this craft. There were (and still are) some wonderful small papers out there, too -- the Anniston (Ala.) Star, The Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, even the Bucks County (Pa.) Courier -- there are countless other good ones out there.

The point is, so many of them have been hammered by a double- or triple-whammy of epic proportions: a broken business model, an economy in the toilet and the "migration" of people to the online world. I think it has more to do with the first two than the last reason. Newspapers are, by and large, information. How it gets delivered shouldn't matter, even economically.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that so many newspaper owners have leveraged themselves to the hilt with purchases of large media outlets, all on a seemingly endless gold credit card -- that there isn't much time to worry about "craft" at all. Yes, the L.A. Times and Wall Street Journal, and even some other smaller papers will still win Pulitzers every year. But you will no longer see the likes of Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post, or Eugene Roberts, former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, pour tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in "the craft" anymore. No, you'll see unknowns like Platinum Equity Partners (the firm with no newspaper experience that bought the San Diego Union-Tribune recently) do what they can to suck the life -- and every last dollar -- from the dead-tree business.

People who produce "the craft," I feel, will not come from newspapers, but from foundations and philanthropic trusts and organizations with deep pockets and an affinity toward "afflicting the comforted" and "comforting the afflicted." I read plenty of journalism inside baseball to know this is already happening in places like San Diego, in Denver, and at publications that most journalism lifers have never heard of. ProPublica, anyone?

Is this a bad thing? Not really. But if you feel your hometown newspaper -- the same paper that publishes youth baseball scores, gives you coverage of the county fair and court roundups of a week's worth of mayhem and jurisprudence -- owes it to you, the reader, to offer the kind of journalism produced by big, giant Old Media titans like the New York Times can produce, in the pages of a smallish community daily, then, yes, it is a loss. It is a loss to a community.

It's a loss when the paper you write for has to stoop to the level of pandering to advertisers who angle for weekly "profiles" that are only thinly veiled advertisements or plugs for said business. It's important to reflect the community in the pages of a newspaper, especially a community one. It's also something to stand for ethics and fairness and not get rattled when said merchant complains about the placement or the tone of the story about his or her establishment.

Community newspapers are especially vulnerable to this type of scenario. As an editor or reporter, you want to be above such chatter as to how the story was "played" in the paper. You want and need to be a good community partner. One hand washes the other, if you will.

But I wonder, for the hard-core journalists out there, what Harrison Gray Otis, or Arthur Hays Sulzberger, or M.H. de Young, or James Knight would think if they saw newspaper culture today. Would they think what has happened is a good thing? For that matter, forget about those old-timers. What about newer journalists? What would they think of today's grind-it-out-at-all costs way of doing things, both on the editorial, as well as business side of things?

What would people like H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, or, for you 21st-century types out there, Tom Hallman, Anna Quindlen, Lane DeGregory, or Lowell Bergman think about what has happened to newspapers? Should we be focused on producing as many widgets as we can, as fast as we can, so we can sell more? Or is there still room for high-quality, thoughtful, investigative or high-concept feature journalism in a daily newspaper?

It's what has me perplexed and thinking the former, unfortunately, is more appropriate for the newspaper reality that exists today. I don't like it, and I wish it wasn't the case. It's why I don't see a future for me in the career that I so once loved.

Personally, there's a part of me that hopes I eat my words. Literally.