The Purity of Their Passion   

Teaching high-school students reminds this journalist why this profession is so important.

The classroom chatter faded as she read her "what makes me tick" essay. It was a journalism exercise I'd asked the high-school students to do to get them thinking about why people behave the way they do, how they acquire their personalities and quirks. As journalists, they'd be doing that, so I had them start with themselves.

This particular student wrote about a terrified young woman who found herself pregnant after her first sexual experience. Desperate and lonely, she quietly aborted the child, only to wind up pregnant again months later. I was certain, as were most of the people in the room, that the girl was writing about herself. We squirmed as she shared this intensely personal story. She continued: The young woman considered another abortion. But this time she decided to tell her mother, who surprised her by comforting and supporting her.

Then the young writer jerked the taut leash she used to lead us through her story--she was that second baby, the baby her mother decided not to abort.

Hearing her story, and those of many others, is helping me put months of my own professional distress into perspective. I'd allowed all of the news about hiring and salary freezes, mass corporate downsizing and the newspaper business' generally bleak outlook to pilfer what I love most about this profession: the euphoria of inspiration.

When our paper, like many others, experienced a staff reduction last year, I lost a close friend. Fran Kentling, our administrative editor, volunteered for the company's early retirement package.

Not a day passes that I don't wish she was still in her office. That now-dark room symbolizes how this business seems so much more about money than anything else. It is ironic that almost none of us answered this calling for the great pay, but now, financial concerns have seeped into journalism's most basic decisions: Do we have the budget to cover that conference? When will we hire a reporter to help carry the load around here?

Whenever I hear "doing more with less," I think of Fran and wonder how we could possibly do more without her. Multiply what I've shared by every journalist in every newsroom and you get a sense of this pall we're all living under.

But that class of high-school journalism students helped me sort through some of this.

They are a scary generation, the urban kids with their baggy clothes and tight cornrows and the suburban kids with their smoldering hostility.

But my heart broke for the trials these teenagers shared so earnestly: pregnancies and abuse hidden behind smiles and good grades; the pain of discovering their sexual identities; finding God.

One young woman wrote about her older brother prancing around the house with his new driver's permit, excited about driving to a lawnmowing job that afternoon. Since he had only a permit, his mother had to ride along. Thirty minutes later, she took a call from someone asking if she or someone in the family could come down to a nearby intersection. Her mother and brother had just been killed in a car accident.

I remember feeling ashamed that I'd let cornrows and baggy clothes come between me and all of these deeply thoughtful and beautifully talented people.

The purity of their passion also reminded me of just how powerful our medium continues to be.

We're in this business because we love stories. We tell stories about pain so that people don't suffer in isolation, and we tell stories about delight so that people can share it. We fill in the naturally occurring gaps between people so that we don't have to live like complete strangers.

In this era of downsizing, it is easy to lose sight of that.

The students' letters thanking me brought this into focus for me. But don't get me wrong, I still miss Fran.

It would be nice to receive a larger raise this year. I'm hoping for a circulation boom and a resulting blitz by newspaper advertisers. I wish our profession's future looked brighter.

But I'm inclined to agree with University of Maryland journalism professor Carl Sessions Stepp, who says "newspapers are so far along in supplying the public's informational needs that we will only lose this if we're stupid."

Things may be bad for us now. We may have to find other outlets to satisfy our journalistic jones. But if we don't stay in touch with why we do this, if we fail to nurture a new generation of journalists, it'll only get worse.

So make time to visit a classroom. You just may learn what makes you tick.