Back when I was in high school, I briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist.
I was never very serious about it, it was only one of the possibilities I was considering. In junior high and my first year or so of high school, I was fairly certain that I'd pursue a career as an Army officer, but already by that time that desire was wearing off. I liked writing and still do, so it seemed like a possibility. I also liked photography, and still do, and it seemed like a career where you could combine both, although in that era press photographers were usually just that, photographers.
I took my high school's journalism class as a result and was on the school newspaper. Doing that, I shot hundreds of photographs of our high school athletes, as well as some really interesting events. I did learn how to write in the journalist's style, which involves summarizing the story in the first paragraph figuring that some people will read no more than that, summarizing it again in the last paragraph, and filling in the story in between. Good news stories still read that way, although I've noticed in recent years that is observed less and less.
During that year or so I had the occasion to tour the local paper, and the class had a senior, a young woman, who actually already worked there as a reporter.
That paper was no small affair. The paper was a regional one, as well as the city paper, and it's building just off of downtown, still there was very large. That large structure, with a massive open news floor and a big printing room, was at least the fourth locality it had occupied, outgrowing the prior three. It would outgrow that one was well and build an absolutely massive structure just outside of town.
Last year, it sold it.
Now, the paper is headquartered in what was once a bar/restaurant downtown. Much, much smaller. It doesn't have presses anymore, it prints the paper in another state. Far from having a large staff of reporters with dedicated beats, it's down to one or two writers who are always "cubs", just starting out. It doesn't print newspapers at all on two days a week, right now, but relies on an electronic edition that mimics the appearance of a newspaper on your computer.
You can't pick up and thumb through a pdf.
This past week, it announced that it was going to quit printing a Sunday edition and quit physical home delivery for the three issues per week it will still print. Those will be mailed from the printing location in another state.
It's dying.
It's not surprising really, but it is sad.
At one time, it was a real force to be reckoned with, and people frankly feared it. Everyone subscribed to it. I know one family that sued it for liable due to what they regarded as inaccurate reporting on them.
Newspapers reformed themselves after the introduction of radio. That's something that tends not to be very well known about them. Before radio, many newspapers tended to be some species of scandal rag and they were usually heavily partisan in their reporting. You can think of them, basically, the way people think of Fox News today. As radio cut into their readership, papers consolidated and adopted a new ethic that they reported objectively.
They frankly never really achieved full objectivity, as that may not be possible. But they did strive for it. The introduction of television reinforced this. Newspapers became the place where you could, hopefully, get complete objective news and, hopefully, in depth news on various topics. Even smaller newspapers had dedicated reporters per topic, larger ones very much so. The local paper had local reporters that reported per topic assignment. A big paper, like the Rocky Mountain News, had very specified reporters. The Rocky Mountain News, for instance, had a religion reporter whose beat was just that topic. A surprising number of local papers sent reporters to South Vietnam during the Vietnam War just to report on the war.
That's all long past. For quite some time, reporters have become generalists by default, and as a rule, they can't be expected to have an in-depth understanding of any one topic. For that reason, they are frequently inaccurate, even on a national level. Just today, for example, I read a national story which repeatedly referred to Communion Hosts as "wafers". That's not the right term. Reporters on crime blindly accept the "mass shooting" and "high powered rifle" lines without having any idea what they mean. Print reporters repeat in some instances, depending upon individual reporters, hearsay as fact, in part because they likely don't have the time to really investigate everything personally.
Because we now get green reporters, the obvious fact that the local paper is dying is all the sadder. At one time green reporters could at least hope to move up the ranks in their local papers, maybe becoming editors or columnists if they stayed there, or they could move on, as they often did, to larger papers. They still move on, but papers everywhere are dying. Ironically, the only papers that still do fairly well are the genuine small town papers in small towns. That's good, but that can't be a career boosting job for those who enter it.
And with the death of the paper the objectivity that they brought in, back in their golden era, which I'd place from the 1930s through 1990 or so, is dying with them. People are going to electronic news, which so far hasn't shown that same dedication, although recently some online start-ups actually do. Television news has become hopelessly shallow, fully dedicated to the "if it bleeds it leads" type of thinking, or fully partisan, telling people what they want to hear. Really good reporting, and not all of it was really good, was pretty informative, which raised the level of the national intellect. People might have hated reporters, and they often did, but they read what was being reported about Richard Nixon and Watergate or what was revealed in the Pentagon Papers and had a better understanding of it in spite of themselves. That helped result in Republicans themselves operating to bring Richard Nixon down and society at large bringing an end to the Vietnam War.
Now, in contrast, we have electronic propaganda organs on the net that feed people exactly what they want to hear, and that often is the same thing that comes out of the back end of a cow.
Not overnight, of course. This has been going on for decades, and indeed in some ways it started with the first radio broadcasts. But radio was easier to adjust to. The internet, not so much.
The death of a career, an institution, and unfortunately, also our wider understanding.
Sic transit.
