My Take

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The longer I teach at George Mason University, the more I have come to realize that good journalism today -- heck, yesterday and tomorrow, too -- is about three basic things:

• Your ethical compass
• Knowing your audience
• Clarity in communication

While I'm both a journalist and a teacher (I started writing for my college newspaper at Wisconsin in 1966 and teaching college students at Michigan State in 1987), I'm also a fairly literate, savvy media consumer -- in other words, the ideal audience.
 
So, what have I learned as a journalist and teacher that I can apply to my audience?

1. The best journalists believe in something and want to make a difference, in some small or even large way. In their communities. In the world. I really believe that journalists want to do good. And it isn't just the children of the '60s that still feel that way.
2. The best way to know your audience is to get out from behind your desk and stand in front of it: Be the audience. The practice of journalism is about what the audience wants, not what you want.
3. Finally, and this is more an academic complaint of mine than a professional one, I'm concerned that way too many of my students can't write well. They struggle with grammar, punctuation, word choice and sentence structure. And these are students who want to be journalists. Why is that? I believe it's because they don't read. And now we're at the root of print journalism's basic problem. Our problem. In the future, if not right now, important demographic portions of a newspaper's desired audience won't read. And writing, last time I checked, is a big part of what a newspaper does.

The answer, if not the solution, to this problem for print journalism, is relatively simple, I think. Of course, I'm a proactive person, and I tend to think that a lot of solutions involve common sense, not rocket science. If they required rocket science, I couldn't figure them out.
 
The answer is part how you think, part what you do. And it comes down to the root of what print journalists do, what they create every day: the newspaper.
 
Are print journalists going to be about the news in the Information Age? Or are they going to continue to be about the paper?
 
We live in an age when the ubiquity of information and the rapid, varied and portable means of distributing it have created and enabled the audience to not simply demand but pursue news and information when they want, where they want it and how they want it.
 
And, folks, that ain't just on paper.

In fact, it's not primarily on paper.

Unfortunately, most print journalists still largely see themselves as working for a paper.

But they don't just work for a paper anymore.

They work for their audience.
 
Are print journalists going to be about the news in the Information Age? Or are they going to continue to be about the paper?If journalists don't already think this way, they will not survive in their jobs and in this business. This written form of communication we call the newspaper won't survive if we continue to do things the way we've always done them. "We've always done it that way" doesn't work anymore. It probably never did.
 
Newspapers are changing. Heck, the smart ones have already changed. The next generation -- the next wave of journalists, the people who want your jobs -- doesn't have to change. They already get it. They just need to learn what journalists already do so well, and what qualifies them to do their jobs as they've known them: communicate with clarity.

That never changes, nor should it.
 
I teach the next generation of journalists -- the people the business will hire, the people who will replace today's journalists later if not sooner. They know what the audience wants, because they are the audience -- just as we were the audience when print (newspapers), along with television and radio, dominated our lives.

That's why we do what we do the way we do it: Reading, and later viewing, defined us. I think many of us are out of touch with what our audience does and the way they do it.
 
What dominates our current and future audiences' lives?

• MP3 players, especially iPods
• Video game players
• And popular culture, as opposed to -- sorry -- hard news

What does that mean for a practicing journalist in 2006?

First of all, I am not saying that we should dumb-down the news. I'm still too much of a traditionalist, news junkie and, I hope, responsible citizen to ever want to do that.

But the opening up of a new food emporium is as big a deal in people's lives as what's happening in Iraq.

I didn't say as important; I did say as big a deal.
 
Many newspapers are creating wonderful (from our generation's perspective) new sections that skew to a younger generation.

But it is a generation that doesn't read in the same way that our generation did.

These new sections may not be your father's Oldsmobile, but it isn't what our younger audiences drive, either.

The only Oldsmobile today is a vintage Oldsmobile.
 
So what are we doing when we create these new print sections?

We're trying to force the audience to read by giving them what we think they want and how we want them to get their news.

It's their father's Oldsmobile, in a different color and style.

But it's still an Oldsmobile. (I have students who don't know what an Oldsmobile is, by the way.)
 
Instead of all that unread, perhaps misspent, expensive newsprint, why not create a platform for podcasts and -- sooner than you might think -- vidcasts?

This written form of communication we call the newspaper won't survive if we continue to do things the way we've always done them. "We've always done it that way" doesn't work anymore. It probably never did. Instead of writing about the new garage band in town, how about a quick interview and music cut, all downloadable off the Web site?

Instead of an off-day football story, how about a downloadable podcast from practice by the best-informed journalist in town that precedes the local newscast?

Along with printing a recipe, how about walking -- and reassuring -- me through the cooking process with a podcast or, soon, downloadable vidcast, available off that online platform?
 
Heck, NBC gets it with the "Nightly News." Brian Williams takes the time to blog. And print journalists complain that they don't have the time?

CBS News gets it, with its new Web site featuring video and audio downloads, including podcasts of "60 Minutes."
 
But we keep putting out more print sections in paper format.

More reading and writing: What kind of arithmetic is that?

It seems to me that we're going to force the young darlings to read the stuff whether they want to or not.

Why?

Because it's good for them?

Because it's what we know and do?

We used to call that castor oil when I was a kid.
 
The lesson of video games is simple, really: Interactivity. People want to participate, especially young people; just look at talk radio.

I got involved, in 1980, in something called Enterprise Radio: The Sports Network, Bill Rasmussen's first initiative following another entrepreneurial enterprise of his in 1979: ESPN. Sports talk radio was, by the way, ahead of its time by about a decade.

Look at blogs, which I've barely mentioned because they are so yesterday (so naturally, newspapers are now interested!), when you consider the current social impact of podcasts and the future impact of vidcasts.

I remember all our numerous phone-interactive initiatives at the Lansing State Journal between 1985 and 1995. What were we trying to do? Get more hits, so to speak. More involvement. More immediate involvement.
 
Interactivity and immediacy.
 
The lesson of video games is simple, really: Interactivity. People want to participate, especially young people.Golly. We've just defined the Internet, the online platform, which allows us, as journalists, to practice all method of media through one medium. You can write on it, talk on it, watch on it, interact on it. You can combine all these things in multimedia stories.
 
To do this requires two things: a skill set and an attitude.

Lack of the skill set, and the intuitive ability to practice it, frightens a lot of journalists -- we tend to fear what we don't understand -- and contributes to an attitude that simply won't work in 2006.

It's like riding a horse when they're already paving the roads for cars.

So many of us stick with the horse -- or a print mentality -- and are hung up on how newspapers distribute the news (on paper) rather than focusing on what we distribute and how we should be doing that.

We create expensive new sections when we could be creating inexpensive podcasts.

Newspaper people complain that they can't write, edit and publish a story with journalistic excellence in the multitude of formats a 24-hour news cycle demands. Heck, if Samuel Adams, the first American syndicator back in the 1760s, could have distributed the Journal of Occurrences to the 35 or so towns where the publication circulated on a faster horse, do you think he would have hesitated for a minute?

So what is it that we have against faster horses?
 
Newspaper people complain that they can't write, edit and publish a story with journalistic excellence in the multitude of formats a 24-hour news cycle demands.

As a journalist, I have always taken the approach that I'd rather do it right and best than first. Velocity can kill you and your reputation.

But we now have the horses -- or, better still, the vehicles -- to do it in a number of ways through a variety of distribution formats:

• The Web site, for immediacy and interactivity
• The newspaper, for depth
• Podcasts, for portability
• Blogs, for interactivity and participation

Historically, the publishing cycle has been more determined by the business cycle than by the news cycle. Of course, we had multiple editions and EXTRAS! to mitigate that. They're pretty much history.
News is a 24/7 cycle, as we now understand -- although we have always known it.

I knew it back when I wanted to find out the score of a ballgame and had to wait for the 6:15 or 11:20 sports report (and who stayed up that late?) on radio or TV, or -- if the suspense didn't kill me -- the newspaper the following morning.

I knew, way back then, that news was a 24/7 cycle.

I just couldn't do anything about it. (Can you recall ever calling the newspaper's sports department for a score?)

But now, I can do something about it.

And so can our audience.
 
The reality of the 24/7 news cycle isn't a question anymore.

The questions for us, today, are:

• What are we going to do about it?
• How are we going to change our attitude?
• How long are we going to allow the skill set to intimidate us?

We've all heard this question over and over in 2005: Will newspapers survive?

I believe they will.

I believe newspapers will adjust and adapt, not unlike the revolution we're seeing today in satellite radio, with Sirius and XM.
 
A more pertinent and personal question for print journalists, I'd think, is: Will you survive?

If your jobs continue to exist -- and many will, despite this past, very discouraging year of downsizing -- will you be capable of doing them in 2006 and beyond?

I'm teaching my students how to do them, so the replacement troops will have better attitudes and multimedia skills.

If your jobs continue to exist -- and many will, despite this past, very discouraging year of downsizing -- will you be capable of doing them in 2006 and beyond?They are just on -- not beyond -- the horizon in the future of every newspaper. They are people like Naka Nathaniel of The New York Times and Kevin Anderson of the BBC and Adrian Holovaty of The Washington Post.

Yes, many journalists can write and edit better than many of the newcomers. That's how they hold their jobs. For now.

But as technology and business demands change the practice of journalism, as they always do, we've got to be less paper and more news, less writing (which shouldn't be difficult to fathom since we have smaller newsholes and staffs) and more alternate means of distribution.
 
My news, when I want it, where I want it, how I want it.
 
More podcasts.
More vidcasts.
More immediacy.
More interactivity.
 
That's not the paper.

That's the news.

And that's the story -- or, as we say: -30-