The Future of Journalism

We were between innings at my son’s baseball game, yesterday. When he was younger, and the kid playing catcher needed half the team to help put back on the equipment, you could basically run home, have a snack, come back and not miss a moment of action.
 
Now that Alec is 11, it has been cut down considerably. But there was still enough time for a glance at my Blackberry and the e-mail that had come in from an unfamiliar address.
 

Michael Conroy, a former journalist, and for the past nine years an English teacher and school newspaper adviser at my alma mater, Niles West High School in Skokie, Ill., was writing to tell me that he had watched my interview by John Callaway on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” last Friday, and that a mutual friend thought I might be interested in what he had written in his latest blog.
 

He called it “A journalistic epiphany” and it took me the next couple innings to recover from it.
 

Conroy wrote (http://mgc1237.squarespace.com) that for the past two or three years, he had been vaguely dissatisfied with his job, but didn’t know why. He liked the school and the kids but he had lost his sense of passion.
 

Then a few months ago, he decided that after next year he would step down from teaching kids journalism and photojournalism, and heading up the school paper, something he wrote would once have been “unthinkable.”
 

While he felt somewhat satisfied with his decision, he still couldn’t quite figure out why, after working as a publications adviser for 19 of his 32 years since college and being a former newspaperman himself, he was moved to do it.
 

And then, he wrote, he watched “Chicago Tonight.”
 

“I am not being hyperbolic,” Conroy wrote, “when I say that a tear slipped down my cheek as I listened to [Isaacson’s] account of being given a complimentary press credential at the United Center, the halls of which she roamed with impunity for most of her career, so that she could bid farewell to fellow journalists, Center employees, Bulls and Blackhawks staffers, etc.  I was moved beyond words by the pain in her eyes, the catch in her throat as she related her the specifics of her dismissal, and the resigned slump of her shoulders that suggested that she doesn’t expect to work for a newpaper ever again.
 

“Watching her heart-wrenching interview with Callaway brought home to me the reason why teaching journalism and producing a student newspaper no longer bring me any joy:  teaching journalism has become a discrete task, somewhat like instructing students in the rudiments of the five-paragraph theme (which I loathe) or preparing students for standardized testing (which makes me cringe).
 

“Isaacson’s situation and that of two of my former editors (one of whom will head to graduate school after leaving the Charlotte Observer one step ahead of the pink slip and the other who is hanging by his fingernails onto his sports writing gig at a Texas daily) make me realize that I can no longer in good conscience or good humor prepare my students for a profession in which, chances are, they never will find employment.
 

“Teaching is challenging (and often frustrating) enough when teachers actually feel that they are making a difference.  It is almost intolerable when it becomes an exercise in futility.  . . . ”
 

It was not the first time I have thought about this. In recent years, as I have continued to talk to journalism students who have called or e-mailed, or in classes I have visited at Columbia College in Chicago or DePaul or Northwestern, I have wondered how to advise them.
 

I often ended my talks by saying that I hoped and prayed there would always be a place in the world for the news gatherer and the storyteller. Deep down, I truly thought there always would be.
 

I mean, in whatever medium it happened to be, a free society demands a free press, that news be gathered and reported, that stories be told, whether to inform or to entertain. And if it wasn’t a newspaper, it would be on the Internet or television.
 

But with the downturn of the newspaper industry, I certainly questioned where the future storytellers would come from.
 

With a little bit of research, I found out.
 

It seems college students are not shying away from journalism. Quite the contrary, according to the Columbia Journalism Review and Forbes Magazine, which have reported in the last eight months that despite the thousands of jobs lost in the newspaper industry, enrollment in J-Schools continues to grow. That rather than discourage kids who didn’t grow up reading newspapers anyway, the new crop of digital media jobs, in an almost romantic way, are encouraging students who see that anyone and everyone can be a journalist.
 

Rather than being scared off, the next generation of news gatherers and storytellers believe they can join and create new mediums through which to report, and more freelance opportunities which are already forming the new-look industry.
 

So why am I still worried? I guess because as I join the great blog beyond, I see greater volume, yes, but also less credibility and accountability. Anyone and everyone really can be a journalist.
 

Maybe that’s why I’m worried.