Meet the New Press

I catch up with Lavrusik one Tuesday morning for back-to-back classes. First up is a seminar led this fall by the Star Tribune’s lightning-rod metro columnist, Nick Coleman. Coleman’s class—Editorial and Opinion Writing—is an experiment in a form that seems to be dying even a little faster than newspapers themselves. “I’m not even sure it’s relevant anymore,” Coleman will tell me later. Coleman laments the fact that all opinions have come to have “equal value” and that the distinction between factual newsgathering and opinion writing are breaking down. “Nobody has to defend their opinion,” Coleman says. “Or argue it. So this is where we are headed. Be careful what you wish for. A level playing field may not be all that great.”

Coleman, a Murphy Hall alumnus, was editor in chief of the Minnesota Daily for the 1971–72 school year. He hands out a column he admires for the class to discuss. It’s a famous Jimmy Breslin piece from 1963. Sent to cover John F. Kennedy’s funeral, Breslin found the guy who dug the President’s grave. The column looks at a day of national sorrow and ceremony from the working stiff’s perspective. It’s brilliant, but—Jimmy Breslin? JFK? Is this journalism or archaeology? Lavrusik and his classmates, after all, don’t remember where they were when Reagan was shot because they weren’t born yet.

Next up is English 1104, Introduction to Literary Nonfiction. Journalism students are required to take a broad distribution of liberal arts credits. Lavrusik likes this class—and right away I do too because today’s lesson is a subject close to my heart: the art of revision. Just when I’m thinking I could listen to this forever, the instructor, graduate student Cory Newbiggin, asks the class a question that stops me cold. “Let’s say you’ve written a personal essay,” says Newbiggin. “You’re the main character. How do you know if it is interesting to other people?”

Man, that is a great question. It’s the question for every writer, really. How do you know what will grab the reader by the throat and not let go? How do you find and cut out that fateful turn of phrase that, against all of your instincts, will invite somebody to stop reading?

As the class kicks this around, I reflect on everything I think I understand after three decades of writing for a living. There are different ways to write well, but in the end every writer who gets it right just knows when it’s right.

A young woman raises her hand. “What I do,” she says, “is I just post everything I write on my blog. If something gets a lot of hits, I know it’s good.”

Doh!

“I think our students see a dynamic media future,” says Al Tims, director of the journalism school. He is sensitive to the fact that the phrase “dynamic future” means one thing to a journalism student and something quite different to a twenty-year veteran reporter with a mortgage, a sagging 401(k), and two kids in college. “We’re telling our students they’ll have an opportunity we didn’t have. They’re going to have a chance to reshape the media culture.”

Whatever that will mean—and nobody knows what it will mean—Tims believes journalism is so fundamental to human society that, while it might change, it will never go away. “Newspapers fill a vital role,” says Tims. “Go anywhere on the planet and you’ll find something performing that function. If the Star Tribune disappeared tomorrow, something would fill that void.”

This is undoubtedly true. But it overlooks an unsettling reality: This is not the order in which change has come. The Star Tribune has not and will not vanish in an instant, leaving a hole in the civic grid to be filled. Instead, newspapers like the Star Tribune are already being replaced bit by bit by new media and new advertising formats. The digital age that is upon us is viral, creating its own spaces to inhabit.

There’s really no way to talk about this without sounding like a curmudgeon. But I’ll try anyway. Let’s accept the Tims doctrine, which holds that journalism is an essential element of a civil society. Has there ever been a better example of this fundamental feature of life as we know it than the American daily newspaper? I don’t think so.

Newspapers integrate the “business model” with the civic obligation to put out the news, straight and without bias. They hire, train, and deploy reporters, check and recheck their stories. Newspapers vet the news and then stand behind what they report. Newspapers set the agenda for other media, including the online and broadcast outlets that are now about to replace them. In an important sense, the daily newspaper is journalism. When it goes away, what faith can we have in what is left? If anyone can be a journalist, who really is one? Hey, you have to be a certain age to remember it, but the medium is the message.

Photo by Makistrunc

Emily Cutts

I hear voices.

“I hope everything won’t go online,” says Emily Cutts. “I like to read something I can hold in my hands.” A tiny, jeweled stud on her upper lip catches the first rays of the morning sun streaming into Coffman Union. When I was in school, Coffman was in its industrial-apocalypse phase and looked like the inside of a boiler room. It’s better now.

Cutts, nineteen, is a sophomore. She’s minoring in French, is a music fanatic, claims she is not especially “Internet literate,” and would love to find a job someday writing for an alternative weekly like City Pages, which she adores. Cutts says she and her classmates discuss what’s happening to journalism, though in terms of “a transition rather than a death.” Either way, she’s flexible. “I’m not worried,” she says. “There will always be something else I could do.”

Justin Horwath, a twenty-two-year-old senior, is the Daily’s editorial and opinion editor. When I ask him to name a journalist, he says Hunter S. Thompson. Last fall, Horwath went to a job fair sponsored by the Associated Press. “Everyone I talked to there asked if I had experience working in multimedia,” says Horwath. “That’s what they all want to know. Have you done stories online? On video? Slide shows?”

It’s the awful truth of the times we live in. If a picture is worth a thousand words, why bother with the thousand words?

Photo by Makistrunc

Justin Horwath

“Well, I’ve thought about this a lot,” Horwath says. “I can’t see everything being online. I can’t see any reason to be pessimistic if journalism is what you want to do. You have to see a future in it. I couldn’t go on if I was really pessimistic.” A political science/history major, Horwath adds that he’s also considering law school.

Simon Heuer, who’s twenty-two and a senior, told me that if journalism doesn’t work out for him he plans to go into the ministry. Heuer is from Fairmont. His high school didn’t have a school paper, but he says he’s always been good at writing. God willing, Heuer says, he will become a sports reporter. Heuer is having a go at it through a special Pioneer Press field course, in which he gets to cover high school sports. Writing game stories and features is great, Heuer tells me, though the newsroom in St. Paul is a little depressing because of “all the empty desks.”

Photo by Makistrunc

Simon Heuer

Heuer is one of sixteen students in Jay Weiner’s class, Journalism 4990: Sports Reporting Beyond the Game. This is the third time Weiner has taught the course. He took a Star Tribune buyout after thirty years as a sports reporter, twenty-eight of them in Minneapolis. He tells me he has no reservation about training a new generation of journalists. “If anybody believes the demise of newspapers is discouraging to students, they’re not talking to any twenty-year-olds,” says Weiner. “Journalism students do not read newspapers. They read the Web version of newspapers.” His students hope to work in TV or radio or—the ultimate—to write for an online sports outlet like espn.com, says Weiner, and those jobs will be there. “We’re not looking at a big change that’s coming to journalism. The change is already here.”

Getting through it will be tough. Rick Edmonds is a media business analyst with the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Florida. Edmonds says it is unclear whether newspapers can hang on long enough to make a profitable transition to online formats. “Part of the problem now is that the settling in of this big downturn for newspapers has been engulfed by the larger economic crisis,” says Edmonds. “It’s going to make this transition period all the more difficult.” He thinks it will likely be another five years before online business models gain a foothold toward profitability. Meanwhile, says Edmonds, “we’ll continue to see what we’re seeing right now. Newspapers will get a lot smaller.”

Edmonds isn’t entirely pessimistic. He says there’s still a long way to go before newspapers disappear or convert entirely to online distribution. “Even with all the losses they’ve suffered, the daily newspaper is still the biggest game in town.”