| The Positive Future of the News Industry |
|
Susan Edgerley, assistant managing editor for the New York Times, assures students from the NY Times Hispanic Student Journalism Institute that the future of journalism is in good hands – theirs. I look at the brilliant work you all have done here this week and it inspires me. Congratulations. My job at The New York Times is to lead the effort we call Reinventing the Newsroom – that means helping the predominately print newsroom take on more and more Web tasks and feel more and more comfortable doing them.  It’s about change. There is much of it in the newsroom of The New York Times these days. Copy editors are writing Web heds. Producers are learning Times style and how to spot holes in stories. We’re turning our traditional way of doing things upside down. Jon Landman, the deputy managing editor in charge of the Web, says it’s just not enough to learn the technical skills. You have live it. You have to be on the Web all the time. You have to have a sense of competition that goes far beyond Washingtonpost.com and CNN.com and even the Huffington Post and Yahoo News and all the rest. You have to embrace this new form and swim in it, not simply accept it with a bit of distain. Wrongheaded distain, I might add. Embracing the change, our changing workdays and job descriptions – and by the way, our changing financial picture, our changing industry and our changing job market – sometimes leaves us with a slight sense of discombobulation. But then I look at your paper and your Web site and I am reassured that amid the change, some of it exhilarating and some of it wrenching, there is something that stays the same. We are doing the same things, you and I. The institute and The Times, at their core, have the same mission and are doing the same things I wanted to do when I began in this business 30 years ago. You are telling stories, you are finding things out and figuring things out, you are contributing to the public discourse and yes, to our nation’s democracy by questioning, by being curious, by being skeptical and by relating what you know. By bearing witness, as it were. Gene Roberts, the legendary editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who left The Times as national editor and returned as managing editor after his stint in Philadelphia, said one of the best things, and one of the hardest things, a reporter can do is to observe and then tell what he saw. People say journalism is in trouble, and you who are looking for your first jobs probably feel that on occasion. But that’s not right. Journalism isn’t in trouble. The forms are changing, or some of them anyway. God knows the business model is changing. But the fundamental thing we all do, the watching and the thinking and the making sense of what we have seen, that is staying the same. Thank goodness it is staying very much the same. Of course you are all on Facebook. My 18-year-old daughter tells me that anyone older than 20 or 21 or 22 who’s on Facebook is ridiculous, but OK, I’m on Facebook anyway, and Twitter and all the rest so I can try to understand and participate in what is going on on the Web. On Facebook, I keep getting invited to these groups or efforts I am asked to be a fan of: Fans of Newspapers or 5 Reasons Why We Need Newspapers, or Save Newspapers – those kinds of groups. They all make me a little sad – we need special interest groups now to protect our future? We need a non-profit setup? We need a government bailout? I don’t think so. I see your good work, your very fine work, and I am reassured. By the looks of what you have done this week our future is secure – maybe not easy, but secure. Thank you for providing that reassurance. I hope you know how proud we are of you at The Times. All week long we have been talking in New York about how terrific you are, how smart, how hard working. It’s an inspiring way to start the New Year. I want to tell you a little bit about my background tonight, because I know that your future and getting a job is on your mind, and a little bit about how I think our business is changing and a little bit about how, fundamentally, I think our business is staying very much the same. And then I’ll invite your questions. My first paying job in journalism, after the junior high paper and the high school paper and the college paper, was at a 7,000-circulation daily – well, almost a daily, I don’t think there was a Sunday paper. It was in Arkansas City, Kansas, a town that pronounced its name ArKANsas not ArkanSAW, because it was in Kansas, about 9 miles north of the Oklahoma border. I was Kaleidoscope editor. What can I say? It was when the women’s society pages were changing and newspapers wanted new names to go along with their new sections. Some papers called their sections Living or Topics or Today. In Ark City, it was called Kaleidoscope. I wrote about club presidents and philanthropy and whatever features I dreamed up. Within a year, I was covering city hall and the local board of education – I think there were 9 or 10 people in the newsroom, so career advancement wasn’t so complicated or difficult – and I was getting the chance to write the kind of stories that provided wonderful training. Stories about fire hazards in the local community college dorms – it was a small community college and the dorms, many of them, were converted houses or apartment buildings, full of open stairwells and no sprinkler systems and all the rest. Stories about a city council that sometimes wanted to do its business behind closed doors. Stories about firefighters who collected the nickels and dimes from the city parking meters without any safety checks to ensure they weren’t pocketing the change. It was great training. A couple of years after that, I got a job at the biggest paper in Kansas, where I covered cops and courts and the county commission – more good training. From Kansas, I went to the Philadelphia Daily News, and from there I came to The Times. I started out as a copyeditor and ended up doing a bunch of other editing jobs on the Metro desk – I was day editor and night editor and weekend editor and politics editor and city editor. And then shortly before 9-11, I became deputy metro editor. For those of us on the Metro desk of The New York Times, 9-11 was a local story. A local story of global importance to be sure, but local nonetheless. That first day there was a lede-all, which is what we call the main story, which has a touch of all the other stories in it. There was an analysis. There was a scene story, of course. We thought there would be a victims story, and listed it on the budget but it never materialized because there was no list of the victims that came from the police or the hospital, not that first day or the second. On the third day, a reporter and another editor came up to me and said there was a list of the victims of course, but it wouldn’t be coming from the police. We had to gather all the fliers that families were handing out and posting on fences and light poles and bulletin boards to get the list of the victims. The fliers from families trying to find their missing spouses, their missing fathers and mothers, their missing children. The fliers held the names of the victims, though we called them “the missing” at first, and we had to gather those names, call the phone numbers listed and begin to tell their stories. And that’s what we did, and we called them Portraits of Grief, and we wrote almost 3,000 of them, trying to capture the essence of what made each person an individual, trying to tell their stories in just a few hundred words each. To us, they were all local stories. The stories of the firefighters, and the police officers and the brokers and the non-stop cleanup and the mayor and a city in shock and in grief. And later, there were the stories of fire codes and emergency exits and security measures and the final 102 minutes of the World Trade Center. The reporting was deep and expert and the writing was heart-rending and at a fundamental level, born of the same kind of skill and talent and determination you have been practicing here over the last week. We are the same, and our work is alike and we are trying for the same thing, to bear witness to the important stories of our time, whether we tell them on newsprint or in pixels. Whether people read us or watch us or listen to us on their laptops or iPhones. It matters less to me what the form is and matters more that in each form, we find a way to tell our stories with expertise and authority, to ascribe to high standards and talented, sometimes brilliant story-telling. I am far from the smartest person in the newsroom of The New York Times. Far from the most talented. Oftentimes I think what I bring to The Times is the same kind of stuff I brought to the Ark City Traveler or The Wichita Eagle or the Philadelphia Daily News. A commitment to work hard. A passion to do well. A bottomless curiosity about the city I live and work in. A healthy dose of outage and a healthy dose of empathy – and not too much of either. What we do at The Times, and what you do here, is go to places where others cannot or will not go and bring back the story of what happened there, whether it is to Ground Zero after 9-11, or the Lower 9th Ward after Katrina or to Gaza after this week. Our reporters go – you go – because people need to know what happened there. I became Metro editor a couple of years after 9-11 and since that time, the editor who was my deputy, Joe Sexton, has become Metro editor as well. He had a hell of a story last year, not so far removed from the kind of story a reporter might find himself doing in Ark City or Wichita or Philadelphia. It was the story of Governor Eliot Spitzer and his involvement in a high-priced prostitution ring. Wow. What a great story. A man in high office brought down by the low life. But at its heart were the serious questions of public responsibility that define our mission. An elected official who had shaped his public persona and his governmental agenda on the notion of ethical reform and strict accountability – whoops – had betrayed those values in his personal behavior. The reporting there was the same kind of meticulous shoe-leather reporting that we all do in this business if we are doing a good job and it makes us all proud. The kind of reporting you are doing here. Whether you write for a newspaper or a blog or the nightly news, whether you hold a still camera or a video camera, your job is the essentially the same. To report the news impartially and fairly – without fear or favor, as Adolph Ochs, the patriarch of our newspaper, put it many years ago. As journalists, we engage in the honest review of public issues, in the fair description of debate and in the determined ambition to reflect our world accurately. I’m talking about newgathering, of course, and there is less of that going on as newspapers close and reduce their numbers and pull out of places like Baghdad and even Washington. I think one of the most important lessons we can learn is to ensure we are fully and wholly accountable for what we do and what we do is gather the news. Editors need to be held accountable for their journalism, and for the people who produce the journalism. Reporters and photographers need to be held accountable for the integrity of their work, and the newspaper itself needs to be accountable to its readers and to the public it serves. Our platforms are changing; our jobs are changing, but our fundamental mission is not. At The Times, it means shared standards of impartiality and fairness and a determination to produce something quite grand, something that will not only inform but also provide context, explain truth and bear witness. Even if it means raising troubling questions or revealing unpleasant truths that many of your readers, or your advertisers, will find disagreeable. And it means, I should also add, producing something that is interesting and well-written. Nothing I am saying suggests a prescription for dullness. How do you do all that? I think you know. It starts with listening. With sometimes putting yourself in the place of others. With being open minded. With being honest and accurate and fair and possessing the traits that are defined as character. Because ours is an enterprise built upon trust. Between a reporter and an editor. Between a newspaper or a Web site and its readers. Thank you for your good work here this week and the best of luck going forward into your careers. Cheers.
|