Meet the New Press

It’s a warm day in late September. The sky is overcast. Looking out the windows of Room 214 in Murphy Hall, I can see a flutter of still-green leaves on the ash and linden trees lining the Church Street pedestrian mall. Two dozen students, mostly women, have taken their seats at long tables facing the front of the room where Gayle Golden—a smart, energetic former reporter who’s been teaching at the school for ten years—is about to begin the day’s lesson on how to report spot news. That is, hard news as it happens. The class is Journalism 3101: News Writing and Reporting.

This is the basic intro class in which generations of journalism students have written their first stories. Including me. I took this same class, in this same room, thirty-three years ago. Things have changed. Back then it was Journalism 1101. It was taught by George Hage, a legend who enforced a single, rigid rule: Thou shalt not commit a factual error. I notice that the building has been renovated. The ceiling is lower, the lighting is better, and the typewriters are gone. The trees outside used to be elms. I also recall that it was always cold in September back then, but I might be wrong about that. Our heroes were alive. Mailer. Wolfe. Capote. Woodward and Bernstein. Today’s are electromagnetic. Politico.com. TheHuffingtonPost.com. Espn.com. Twitter.com.

As Golden begins, smiling and leaning toward the class, it is apparent that even the meaning of the phrase “news as it happens” is different now. “As recently as five years ago,” says Golden, “I would have taught this lesson on the assumption that if you got a story that broke after last night’s paper was printed you would then basically have all day to work on it for tomorrow’s paper.” What used to be the daily pulse of journalism has been swept away by the Internet, says Golden. Today’s reporters must work, in effect, as only wire reporters used to—filing stories on the fly and continually updating and adding on to them as events warrant.

Golden takes the class through several versions of a recent story from The New York Times. When she gets to the final update, it turns out that it was the first—and only—version to run in the actual newspaper. Everything before it had gone online as new facts were uncovered. News as it happens as it happens.

Of course, if you read the Times online, any distinction between the digitized version and the “real” newspaper is meaningless, and you could reasonably ask what purpose the printed version serves, as it is essentially bereft of news. The printed newspaper has become an odd species of historical document that is filled with recent events you likely already know about or don’t care about. The steady disappearance of newsprint is no mystery. What is surprising is that newspapers still exist at all when both parties involved—the people who write them and the people who read them—have moved on to other “platforms.” Golden and other faculty members at the journalism school have found that about the only way to get students to read newsprint is to have them blog about what’s in the papers.

Golden tells me later that, while journalism is changing, the essentials of this basic skills course are no different from those I remember. What is important enough to be news? Is a story fair? Is it well sourced? How do you know what you know? And, above all, is it right? Accuracy is the immutable currency of journalism—reporters know no greater grief than the widespread public belief that the news is biased, opinionated, and likely to be false. “Technology is not changing the way we do this,” says Golden. “This is the same timeless stuff that journalism schools have always taught. There is the reality of a changing workplace. But it’s all still really about telling stories. Stories that are true and fair.”

Golden concedes she’s had to come to terms with not knowing where a journalism education will lead nowadays. “When these big changes really set in, I saw the students as lemmings—you know, marching over a cliff,” says Golden. “It seemed like they were jumping off into an industry that can’t support them anymore. I don’t feel that way now. I’m telling my students to be mindful of what’s happening. But journalism is a course of study that is still pretty useful. These are skills they can carry into other lines of work.”

Other lines of work. I phone Lee Becker, a professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Georgia, who studies the people who study journalism. Becker reminds me that only about one in five journalism students actually goes into the news business and that it’s long been that way. Journalism majors have always been more likely to go into fields like corporate communications, public relations, advertising, politics. Becker says journalism school enrollment is up—the most recent tally showed a 2 percent increase in 2007—in part because students are ignoring what is happening to the newsgathering industry, where “major news organizations are under siege” but not the news itself. “I just don’t think students are focused in that way,” says Becker. “Their interests are broader. They don’t see their future tied to one segment of the industry. They understand that journalism is going to be practiced outside of the major organizations.”

Al Tims tells me pretty much the same thing. Even though online media don’t yet generate the revenue required to sustain the broad daily enterprise of reporting that newspapers have always done, he says that that day is coming. “For the last decade or so, we’ve told our students not to identify themselves in terms of specific media,” Tims says. “Ways will be found to develop the revenues that can support online news operations. Our core concept is that you’re here because you’re a storyteller. And if you tell important stories, people will pay attention to them.”

Nobody goes into journalism to get rich. Never have, never will. Among the fraction of journalism grads who actually become reporters, only a handful will ever write a bestseller or find themselves on the lecture circuit. Gayle Golden tells me that her students are motivated by the same things that have always motivated journalists: a desire to tell the truth, to get close to momentous events and prominent people, to tell the public what it needs to know.

“Sometimes I can’t believe I get paid to do this,” says Vadim Lavrusik. “We get paid to write. A lot of people would do this for free. I guess we’re doing this because we think it’s important. And because somebody has to.”

All right, then. Journalism is dead. Long live journalism!

William Souder is a Twin Cities journalist with credits that include The Washington Post and Harper’s.