The Thrill is Alive   

Despite the highly publicized frustrations, newspaper work remains an exciting and satisfying profession for many reporters and editors.

I STILL REMEMBER HOW FRIGHTENED and dumb I felt. I was a cub reporter covering my first meeting of the Philadelphia School Board. Everything seemed so confusing. The board approved without discussion a long list of items that I didn't understand, including one that said: "Approves $30,000 in token losses.

How could $30,000 be considered "token losses"? I asked after the meeting. The school official, annoyed by my ignorance, shook his head. "Not token losses of $30,000," he said. "A loss of bus tokens worth $30,000."

The Philadelphia School District didn't have yellow school buses. It sold tokens to students for the public bus system. I was still confused. "How did you lose $30,000 worth of bus tokens?" I asked.

"Go ask the auditor," he replied.

The auditor said the school district had no uniform system of distributing the tokens, and thousands were stolen every year. The next day my story was stripped across the top of the front page of the Evening Bulletin. What a thrill!

After the story appeared, the school board decided to revamp its procedures for distributing bus tokens. At that moment I thought what I wrote really mattered.

Today, nearly 25 years later, the Philadelphia School District may still be losing bus tokens. The Bulletin, my first newspaper, is dead. But my joy of journalism remains strong. Now I try to pass that passion on to my students in journalism school at the University of Kansas. But the newspaper industry and the people who write about it aren't always much help.

Consider these articles published in the past 18 months:

"Battle Weary: Fighting the Bottom Line Takes Its Toll," Quill.
"Kissing the Newsroom Goodbye," American Journalism Review.
"The Media as Monsters," a series of six articles in The American Editor.
"A Generation of Vipers: Journalists and the New Cynicism," Columbia Journalism Review.
"The Thrill is Gone," American Journalism Review.

The list could go on.

And in a major study of journalists, David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit report that job satisfaction at newspapers is declining. In their book, "The American Journalist in the 1990s: U.S. News People at the End of an Era," they write that only 27 percent of journalists were satisfied with their jobs in 1992 compared to 40 percent in 1982 and 49 percent in 1971.

Although I usually bemoan the fact that my students don't read enough, sometimes I long for a print V-chip to shield them from negative news about the industry.

But the studies and articles accurately reflect industry problems: declining circulation, the public's distrust of the media, perpetually low starting salaries for journalists, and corporate emphasis on business profits versus editorial demands to improve the product. Now comes a new threat--the Internet.

A recent "State of the Newspaper Industry" study found that 45 percent of U.S. newspaper publishers, editors and advertising directors said the Internet would be newspapers' biggest competitor in the next 10 years. Although online publishing offers the promise of new opportunities, many print journalists fear it is the Armageddon that will make newspapers as pass* as Gutenberg's printing press.

It's enough to inspire a journalist or a journalism student to seek another career. But what a rewarding career they would miss!

The thrill of it endures for the journalists who thread through my life--newspaper colleagues, journalism professors and former students. They echo a common theme: Journalists can make a difference in people's lives.

T HE DAY BEGINS SHORTLY before 6 a.m. for John Bodette, managing editor of the St. Cloud Times in Minnesota, where he has worked for 22 years. The 46-year-old Bodette sprints around the newsroom to consult with editors and reporters, then lands at a computer terminal to edit and lay out the news pages.

"I still do a copy editor shift every day," he says. "It surprises people that the managing editor gets his hands dirty. I love the idea of helping in the newsroom."

Except for three years in the early '80s when he worked on the prototype of USA Today and helped redesign a few other Gannett newspapers, Bodette has never wanted to leave this afternoon newspaper with a circulation of 28,422 daily and 38,342 on Sundays.

"I know I'm unusual being in one place," he says. "I guess I made the commitment to be here. A small paper like this is an awful lot of fun. It's like driving a sportscar most of the time. You can make changes. It's not like turning around a battleship."

When Bodette began working at the St. Cloud Times as a wire editor, he had a liberal arts degree from St. John's University in Minnesota and a year of graduate school, but no journalism training.

"I came out of a background where you teach yourself. Every night after work I would go to the St. Cloud State University library and read everything I could about newspapers and newspaper design."

In 1980 he met world-famous newspaper designer Mario R. Garcia at an American Press Institute seminar, and the two of them returned to St. Cloud to redesign the newspaper. Since then, Bodette has become a design expert in his own right, conducting seminars on the subject throughout the country.

"I travel a lot to speak to groups," he says, "but it's always fun to come back to this newspaper."

On this day Bodette is having more fun than usual. A good news story broke overnight. Police ticketed 150 students for underage drinking at a fraternity house at St. Cloud State University. "Not a huge story," he says, "but it makes coming to work today interesting."

By early evening, it's time for Bodette's daily run of five to 12 miles (weather permitting) while he unwinds and thinks about the next day's paper.

Despite the spate of negative reports, Bodette is optimistic about the future of newspapers. "We are doing a good job of beating ourselves up," he says. "We want to improve so much that we overwhelm ourselves. I absolutely think there is a great future in newspapers. It's too terrific a life to think it's not going to be here five or 10 years from now. I can't think of any way to have more fun."

S OME DAYS LARA WEBER spends hours gathering statistics and other facts for a graphic in the Chicago Tribune. But one graphic idea she delights in came to her in an instant.

A woman had filed a suit against her condominium board because it wanted to reduce her parking space at the complex by 18 inches. "I had this idea we should show people what 18 inches is, so we just ran an 18-inch ruler along the edge of the story," Weber says. "It's nice when you can have a fun idea and see it show up in the paper."

As an assistant graphics editor at the Tribune, the 29-year-old Weber doesn't draw the graphics; she helps conceive the ideas and often gathers information for them. Not long ago Weber, then assigned to the business desk, gathered hundreds of statistics for graphics for a series about the global economy.

"Our job was to make it interesting to the reader," she says. "So we brought these giant figures to an understandable level by comparing prices in different parts of the world. It turned out to be a real challenge to find comparable information, like the price of a haircut, a bag of apples or a gallon of milk."

Weber, now working with the national desk, says her job combines everything she enjoys about journalism. "I love the excitement of a newsroom," she says. "I feed off that energy. I work with all these different areas--artists, page designers, reporters and editors. It's exciting to see all these people coming together and putting out a product every day."

She also thrives on learning something new every day. "It's almost like being in school," she says.

When she graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in journalism in 1989, she couldn't decide whether to be a reporter or a copy editor. The newspaper industry decided for her. Jobs for reporters were scarce, so she took a position as a copy editor at the Rockford Register Star in Illinois.

"I don't think anybody grows up thinking, 'Wow, I want to be a copy editor,' " Weber says. But she enjoyed the work, especially layout.

After 18 months in Rockford, an editing job at an Indiana women's business magazine that folded, and a stint at the Times in Munster, Indiana, she joined the Chicago Tribune as a copy editor in 1993. She became a graphics editor about 18 months ago.

"I think my job is a good example of the potential for journalism," Weber says. "Newspapers are changing and maybe newspapers are not always going to be around in exactly the same form as they are now. But there are ways to look at the news that are exciting, whether it's writing or editing or using the Internet. Finding new ways to throw it up there is a lot of fun."

Recently she was discussing her job with a reporter who is also her best friend. "We were talking about what we would do if we weren't working for a newspaper, and we were dumbfounded," Weber says. "We couldn't think of anything that would excite us as much."

I T'S A GOOD NEWS DAY AT the Spokesman- Review in Spokane, the kind of day that Peggy Kuhr, managing editor for content, calls "wonderful fun."

She discusses a story with the city editor and a reporter about a Spokane resident who is one of the most successful Amway sales representatives in the world. She works on a series about an orphanage in Romania that 13 Spokane residents helped to repair. She attends meetings, addresses the advertising staff about the paper's new beats and takes a one-hour break for a yoga lesson.

Early in the evening a big story breaks. Three members of a militia group, one of whom was once featured in a Spokesman-Review series, have been arrested for bank robberies and bombings, including a bombing of the newspaper's suburban office. "That was great. We had information no one else had," Kuhr says.

By 11 p.m, after a 13-hour workday, the 44-year-old Kuhr heads to her empty house. "I try not to work on weekends," she says. That's when her husband, Tom Foor, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Montana, drives 200 miles from Missoula to join her in Spokane. They celebrated their 20th anniversary of this long-distance marriage last June.

"I think it is very hard for a couple to pursue two careers and wind up in the same town at the same time," she says. "He's doing work he loves, and I'm doing work I love. We probably spend as much time together as a lot of working couples who live in the same house. It's unusual, but it has worked for us. It's a terribly romantic relationship. You couldn't do it if you didn't love the work and have incredible trust and faith in the relationship."

In this job Kuhr gets to see her husband almost every weekend. That wasn't the case during the three years she worked as an editor at the Hartford Courant while he remained in Missoula. But the job in Connecticut gave her a chance to be an editor on the news side. In her previous job, she was editorial page writer and editor at the Great Falls Tribune in Montana, her first job after graduation from the journalism program at the University of Montana in 1973.

"I think I am a better editor than I was a reporter," she says. "I like the creative process of working with reporters."

She also likes the people who wind up in this profession. "It's a huge variety," she says. "They have a tremendous interest in learning."

But mostly she likes the results of journalism. It's not always the major stories that make a difference.

Kuhr cites a personal essay the paper printed from a woman with cerebral palsy. The woman wrote about her frustration because the public bus with handicapped access didn't stop at her corner, and she couldn't negotiate her wheelchair to the bus stop several blocks away. As a result of the story, the Spokane Transit Authority is considering a change in the route.

"That didn't affect a lot of people in Spokane, but it was a big deal in her life," Kuhr says. "I think journalism is a very personal form of communication, and on a very personal level I think you can make a real difference. I think it's still a job with a calling."

A NGELINA LOPEZ VIVIDLY REMEMBERS the day she decided to become a journalist. The late afternoon sun was streaming through the window as she sat at the kitchen table and worried about her future. She was in fifth grade.

"I was telling my mom I like to write, and I like to talk to people," Lopez recalls. "She said, 'Why don't you be a journalist?' I said OK."

Lopez hasn't looked back. "It's always been my driving goal," she says. At 23, eight months after graduating from the University of Kansas with a journalism degree, she is in her first job as a community reporter for the Des Moines Register. "I get to do everything," she says. "That's exciting. I'm gaining so much knowledge."

She once wrote a story about a Hispanic resource center and felt bad that she couldn't volunteer to work there because it would have been a conflict of interest. Then she decided that she was contributing by writing about the center. "When you care about what you are writing," she says, "you can have such amazing influence."

Despite the angst about declining circulation, Lopez says there is no question that people read her newspaper. She cites a story about highway expansion in the Register's "Around Town" section. The story started on page one, but the jump somehow vanished. The paper's switchboard received at least 70 calls from readers who wanted to know where the rest of the story was. "It proves that people do read the jumps," she says.

But she's finding that being a journalist is vastly different from training to be one. "In journalism school you're building all these strong ideals, and you think you are going to go to work and apply them every day. Then you write about tax abatements. Sometimes it's easy to get burned out on just feeding the beast."

The constant demand for copy concerns her, and her inexperience frightens her. "I love to write but sometimes it's horrible," she says. "I'm afraid to sit down at the keyboard. I want it to be so good. I'm still dealing with insecurity, especially in a newsroom like the Des Moines Register where everyone is so good. It's very intimidating. When I struggle to come up with the perfect lead, I think I'd rather be a waitress. Journalism is something you put so much of yourself into. That's why it feels so good and that's why it can break your heart."

She worries that her job will consume her. She wants to get married and have children someday, but she also wants to be an outstanding reporter. "I have a drive to be so good, and because of that I am afraid I will get tunnel vision and forget about all the other things that are important to me and wake up 20 years later and wonder what happened to them," she says.

And just as she did in fifth grade, she worries about her future. "The thing that makes me afraid is that the industry is changing," Lopez says. "I'm wondering what a reporter's future is."

As she talks to her former journalism professor, we wonder if she'll still be a journalist 20 years from now.

"I hope so," she says. "I love journalism."