Dear Reader, This past Monday, when I sat down to my computer with a cup of coffee, I kicked off my 40th year as a professional journalist.
Everything I did that day, and how I did it, and who I did it with, and how it was presented and read and shared and digested by you and other readers, was different than it was May 3, 1982, the day I tapped out my first story for pay on a typewriter.
Except for one thing: The “why.”
I’d be happy to have a beverage with you all and tell war stories. About the days we made so much money we’d hire “add-on” employees to have on staff until an opening eventually occurred.
About finally being named the editor of a newspaper, and being told while my hand was still being shaken that my first duty would be to cut 20 pages out of the TV guide.
About being in a room with all my employees when our publisher told us we were cutting half the staff and taking the paper to three days a week – or else we’d close.
About being flown to New York and being told to figure out new job roles, new staffing models, new ways to measure performance – and to make it work for a digital world that rapidly was moving away from the printed newspaper.
But that’s not the story. The story as I enter my fourth decade in the news business is that “why”: Regardless of the technology, or the economics of our industry, journalism matters. Journalists matter. The stories matter.
What motivated me at 21 to ask uncomfortable questions and educate myself on issues and stay up after midnight writing city council stories motivates MLive reporters the same way now, every day. They are wired to be curious and tell stories, but they also all have that gene that wants to see truth come out, justice be served, and people to care about what is going on around them.
Journalists today have much more to navigate than when I worked in newsroom in 1982. The word “online” wasn’t in anyone’s vocabulary, unless maybe you were a carpenter. I had one deadline a day. “Reader engagement” was someone coming into the newspaper office to pay their bill. And no one tracked and assailed me daily in some parallel universe called Twitter.
Most papers operated without true competition for the first half of my career. And I don’t mean just economically. If you wanted the story, it pretty much came from us. The internet grew into something that let everyone be a publisher. Add smartphones, which made it more convenient – heck, even habitual – to find information in a flash, mix in the hall of mirrors called social media, and pretty soon you have information vertigo.
Some of you will email to tell me that’s a good thing; we had it coming; we are fake news anyway.
Well, I’ll tell you my take-away from 39 years and counting: You don’t know how lucky you are to have professional journalists still around. These aren’t bloggers, or operatives with an agenda. They are educated, trained and developed to follow standards for finding, vetting and presenting information.
Do we make mistakes? Of course. I know I have. But I wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t learned early on to get the facts right, the quotes right, and the context right 99.9% of the time. Our work is reviewed by 1 million eyeballs a day.
I’ve worked with some great journalists, and seen a lot of work that mattered. But the MLive journalists I work with today are as smart, dedicated and committed as anyone, in any decade.
They are more adaptive and more productive, more engaged with their work and the effect it has on readers, and they have to deal with a ton more scrutiny and external pressures than any of their predecessors.
Me? I’ve been through a lot, but I don’t think of it in terms of what was lost. I wish the entire industry made the money it used to, and had the number of bodies that once covered news across the country. We’d all be better for it.
And I cherish the trove of stories I have, both the ones under my old byline and especially the ones that happened inside the four walls of a newsroom.
But I don’t have time for nostalgia, or regrets. I have a job to do.
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🎧On this week’s Behind the Headlines podcast, co-host Eric Hultgren turns the questions on me. Tune in here to listen in as we discuss the changes in journalism and media over four decades, and what it means for all of us today.
Editor's note: I value your feedback to my columns, story tips and your suggestions on how to improve our coverage. Let me know how MLive helps you, and how we can do better. Please feel free to reach out by emailing me at editor@mlive.com.
John Hiner Executive Editor Vice President of Content Mlive Media Group
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