According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal ("The Curse of the Class of 2009," May 9, 2009), we are all about to enter the toughest labor market in at least 25 years. The effects of graduating in a recession, it goes on to say, are longer lasting than you'd think; apparently, the damages which include lower wages and a slower climb up the occupational ladder can last a decade or more. Grim news indeed.
It gets worse for those of us going into journalism. In the last year, advertising revenues have plummeted; the Tribune and New York Times companies have closed papers, cut pay and laid off workers; and the Internet has continued to pick up scores of readers every day. Most college students I know, myself included, get their news from Google Reader-like online aggregators at no expense. Having grown up with the Internet one click away, our generation assumes an entitlement to free news.
Recently, some friends and I got into a lively debate (okay, a shouting match) on the question of where journalism is headed. On one side: those who think that the tweeting and blogging masses the so-called citizen-journalists will seamlessly take the place of reputable newspapers. Crucial to that argument is the belief that all information should be free, that free-of-charge news sources somehow constitute a more democratic way to inform and be informed.
On the other: those of us who believe that professional journalism will survive.
I brooded on that debate for a few days, and came to the conclusion that amateur and professional news dissemination should and will continue to coexist.
Protestations about the untapped potential of Web advertising and its ability to financially carry online news sources in the future are somewhat beside the point. Not only is recession-sensitive advertising a shaky leg to stand on monetarily, but as Walter Isaacson noted in Time magazine a few months ago a model in which news providers rely solely on advertising, nixing their incomes from subscribers and newsstand sales, will inevitably pervert the news industry ("How to Save Your Newspaper," Feb. 16, 2009). The future prototype of a news agency cannot be one in which the provider has a greater obligation to its advertisers than to its readers; if readers are not paying for content, the content produced will start to falter, and, needless to say, the resulting limping news industry will not serve democracy well at all.
The most important stories are the hardest to break; they require lots of time, care, persistence and patience. The major story we covered during my tenure as editor-in-chief of The D was the recent alumni battle over representation on the Board of Trustees and the direction of the College. Competing for stories with a relatively new crop of Dartmouth-dedicated blogs which generally catered to a specific audience with a vested interest in the debate, and thus tended to operate with pronounced viewpoints at first seemed daunting. But that competition ultimately made our coverage stronger we had to be more accountable and vigilant than ever before. We had to parse out false information from the truth, chase down leads and write our stories only after we had the facts, not the other way around. We were trying to report information in the most unbiased, objective way possible (some of the most gratifying feedback we received during those charged months: regular excoriation from individuals on both sides of the debate I figured we had to be doing something right if no one was completely happy with our coverage).
Blogs may have upped the ante on being aggressive, but The D with its manpower, funding and credible reputation was the paper of record. Readers looked to us to sort out the facts amid all the white noise, to keep the debate honest.
That's why I have trouble picturing a world in which unpaid providers, bare-bones aggregators and tweets will be able to break the kind of investigative stories The Times and the Washington Post are known for. It is reputable newspapers whether online or in print which do most of the legwork for the big stories, the kind of legwork that cannot be sustained if those papers are not making money. It's a dilemma the best minds in the business are stumped by: how to make people pay for what they are now getting for free.
Journalism is undergoing a major revolution some say the biggest since the invention of the printing press but then, nearly every field my classmates and I are trying to break into is in some degree of flux these days. Who knows what any of our jobs will look like in five years. Gloom and doom aside, though, I'm confident that the education we received here will prove to have enduring value, whatever the economic climate.
