The changes that journalism is undergoing are staggering and historic.
The numbers alone, with thousands of jobs lost, say so. But the personal stories make them real. For these past few weeks, the Poynter Career Center's Colleen Eddy and I have been talking to people, lots of them, through Poynter's
Standing Up for Journalism program. I have also been talking with friends I have met through more than 30 years of working in newsrooms -- most of those years as a recruiter -- or through
my weekday Poynter column. This is what I am seeing.
Journalists are hopeful people. But we are struggling.
The popular image of journalists does not engender sympathy. On Labor Day weekend, I watched yet another movie in which actors play a swarm of reporters on a grieving widow's porch, all but punching microphones through the front-door glass. That's how we are portrayed, but that is not how we are.
This is how we are:
We are the 62-year-old editor who was culled as part of a thousand-job cut. His first thought: "Who will do the five stories I have to edit today?" He found himself asking whether he could just leave and if they would box up his personal effects and send them to his home. This was not the way he had imagined his career would end.
We are the 2007 college graduate who told me she covered "everything" at the tiny paper where she was the sole reporter until she was laid off on Feb. 29 -- Leap Day.
We are the features writer at the major metro who was told to submit an equipment inventory in case she goes in the next round. The paper does not want to lose any of its stuff.
We are the journalist who put in her buyout letter and then tried to get it back when she learned that her husband's division -- he is also a journalist -- might be eliminated. She couldn't get the letter back.
We are the magazine editor-in-chief who answered her cell phone in a news meeting and then ran out of the room cursing, her job gone. And we are the journalists around that table who witnessed it.
I talked with one copy editor who is waiting to see if the third fall of the ax at her newspaper will be the one that gets her, and we agreed that no one has found the right formula for doing layoffs. No one says, "Thanks, that was a really cool way for me to lose my job."
One human resources vice president was touched that, as she coordinated a hundred departures, someone asked how she was faring. These cuts are hurting people far beyond the ones who are packing boxes and cutting cakes.
Yet we are a resilient lot.
To a person, I think, the people I have talked with through Standing Up for Journalism are as worried about journalism as they are about their jobs.
How will people where that Leap Day layoff occurred know what is going on in their tiny town? Will the police chief tell them? The town council?
The newspaper I left in August, the
Detroit Free Press, is tenaciously telling the story of mayoral corruption. Will this be one of the last times that happens?
Who will report on world news? Or specialties like business, health care, religion and urban affairs if we lack the firepower and expertise to dig beneath the surface?
We face this crisis alone. We should not expect a federal bailout. The number of jobs we're losing is dwarfed by what is happening in other industries. One company,
General Motors, is in a buyout program so big -- 5,000 jobs -- that it will likely exceed all of what journalism is losing. And GM has had bigger cuts this year.
Our challenge in this painful, historic time is to invent journalistic forms and alliances that citizens will support to get the facts they need to govern themselves. One journalist told me it will not be a silver bullet, one-size-fits-all answer, but a media cocktail where modern news consumers choose what they want. I think she is right. There will not be one answer, but many.
And as we develop answers, there are a whole lot of journalists ready to get retooled and re-engaged.
We'd like to get your thoughts and see if we can help. Contact us
here.
