Why Journalism Still Rules   

Despite the angst and the obstacles, the newspaper business offers opportunities to do great work, and have a good time doing it.

I thought I was meeting a friend for a drink. Instead, I was headed for an ambush. The friend, a high-ranking editor at a Midwestern newspaper, greeted me with a flurry of rhetorical left hooks and right crosses.

When I got up off of the metaphorical deck, I asked her what the hell she was complaining about.

" 'The Thrill is Gone.' That Carl Stepp piece in your October issue," she replied. "How could you do that to me?"

This was worse than shooting the messenger. This was serious. This was shooting the messenger's editor.

What was the problem? I asked her. Was the piece, a sobering report on the angst in America's newsrooms written by one of the most careful, measured writers I have ever encountered, off the mark?

"No, not at all," was the reply. "It was right on target. But it certainly doesn't help morale in the newsroom."

It was the first of a series of such conversations I was to have in the months after Stepp's story ran in October 1995. Perhaps the most significant one occurred when I saw Carole Rich at the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication convention last summer.

Carole, who teaches journalism at the University of Kansas, worked for me when she covered education at the late Philadelphia Bulletin in the 1970s. I don't think I've ever met anyone who brought more energy and passion to reporting. Carole loved the craft and she deeply believed that journalism could make things better. She still does.

She also, quite simply, loved doing her job.

I remember an NBA playoff game a few years ago when the camera focused on Charles Barkley as he ran down the court. It was a tense moment in a climactic game. And there was Sir Charles with a huge grin on his face. He was having a great time. That look said, "They're paying me to do this?"

That was what Carole Rich was like as a reporter.

Now Carole, a confessed Stepp fan, wasn't arguing that his piece was wrong. But, she said, it certainly wasn't helping her instill enthusiasm and excitement in her students. And, she said, there was more to the story.

Or perhaps another story.

A story that would say that – despite corporate pressures and downsizing and the glamor of cyberspace, despite the fact that much of the public seems alienated from journalism – newspaper work could be wonderful. That it could make the world a better place. That it could right wrongs.

And that it still could be as exhilarating and as satisfying a way to make a living as there is.

And what better person to write it than Carole? She had lived that story. But she was maxed out. She had recently taken charge of the graduate program. She was being wooed to write another textbook. There was simply no time.

After three days of relentless lobbying and cajoling, she agreed to write the piece.

"The Thrill is Alive" starts on page 20. I commend it to anyone who cares about journalism.

Carole tells her story through the voices of nine newspaper people who love what they do. Some of them have been doing it for years. Some are just starting their careers. All know newspaper work is something special.

At news meetings at the Washington Post, when an editor pitched a story that seemed to contradict another story he or she had pitched a day or two before, Ben Bradlee would invariably mutter in that unmistakable gruff Bradlee voice, "Correction. It's a correction."

So is Rich a correction of Stepp?

Not at all. Think of it as an answer record. As picking up the conversation. As the half-full counterpoint to the half-empty article that began the discussion.

Stepp – and many other chroniclers of the problems of contemporary print journalism – loves newspapers no less than Rich. In fact, their work is fueled by the very same passion. They write both in sorrow and anger over the shortsighted decisions that have adverse effects on the quality of contemporary journalism.

Only by shedding light on the problems and their consequences can we hope to solve them and perhaps, as Poynter's Jim Naughton puts it, "reignite enthusiasm in the boardroom for what's being done in the newsroom."

But quality journalism will hardly vanish until that happens, or even if it doesn't. Anyone who gets the opportunity to judge a national journalism contest knows how much first-rate work is being done, often in surprising venues. It's never been easy to find the time and resources to do major series and projects. There's never been a golden age in which all that mattered was the story, financial considerations be damned.

Those who romanticize the "good old days" of journalism do little to advance the debate.

ün journalism, as in life, there are no guarantees. But there are great opportunities. And that's why Stepp, a distinguished reporter and editor at the Charlotte Observer and USA Today before turning to teaching future journalists at the University of Maryland, sends his students out into the field with enthusiasm.

There are major obstacles that can turn away some of the best and the brightest. We don't do ourselves or anyone else any good by pretending they don't exist.

But it's also crucial to remember all of the journalists out there doing important work and loving it.