The following is a transcript of Rich Jaroslovsky’s opening remarks at the Online News Association’s annual conference and awards banquet at Berkeley, Calif., Oct. 26-27:
On Sept. 11, I stood on the west bank of the Hudson River and watched as the building across the street from my office collapsed into dust and rubble, taking with it thousands of innocent lives.
Much has changed in our world since that moment. For these last six weeks, those changes and their implications have dominated our every waking hour.
One of those things that has changed is online journalism. The 1990s, the decade that gave birth to this new news medium, are truly over. We are no longer an experiment. We are no longer a “project.” In the aftermath of Sept. 11, we’ve seen people come online for news in unprecedented numbers. We are now a major source of news and information for millions of people across the nation and around the world. More than that, we’ve begun to see where we fit in in the journalistic landscape: More timely than print, more in-depth than broadcast, more interactive than either.
People expect more from us now. They aren’t just intrigued by us — they NEED us. For us as journalists, that raises the stakes enormously. People need us to have high standards. They need us to bring them information with accuracy and integrity — with credibility. They need to be able to believe what we tell them. We can’t let them down. And we won’t.
I surely am not telling this audience anything it doesn’t already know when I say that even before Sept. 11, these were rugged times for online news operations. All of us have seen or felt the impact of layoffs, cutbacks, job changes.
And yet, while we still struggle to figure out how to make the medium work economically, the evidence shows that it continues to grow, continues to become an ever-increasing part of more and more people’s daily lives. That should tell us something: That what we’re going through right now are growing pains. The fact that growing pains are associated with growing doesn’t make the pains any less painful. But it means we should be optimistic about the future. This medium is too powerful and its possibilities too vast for us to feel otherwise. Eventually, we will figure out the economics, and they will work. It is inevitable, because the Net is so critical to so many people’s lives.
The medium, and how we use it, will continue to develop and evolve. That’s what makes it so damn much fun. But it’s up to us to make sure that evolution takes place in a context in which there is no compromise on the journalistic values that ONA represents. Those are the values worth standing up for, because they are the values that make us indispensable to our audience.
We sought to change the future, and we did. Now the future is here, and it provides us with challenges we never could have anticipated. Let us rise to those challenges. To use this still-new but amazing medium to inform and to illuminate is a mission worthy of all our struggles — and, yes, worthy of all our frustrations and setbacks, too. It is a mission that is capable of honor.
Rich Jaroslovsky
President, Online News Association
