The Battle for My Soul
I am trying to embrace the future. This blog, at least one of my classes, and what little free time I have these days are all centered around what seems to be the inevitable: journalism is going digital. Newspapers are losing pages and staff. It's no longer enough to tell a story through words and paper alone. (In fact, it's no longer enough to give a lecture through words and white board alone but that's another topic.)
So, I have my RSS feeds neatly arranged on my Yahoo home page and assure myself that I am staying just as well informed as I did during my newspaper subscription days (maybe even more so!!) because I receive instantly updated bits and bytes from news sources all over the world! Who needs smelly old papers piling up right next to the laundry and dishes, adding to my "to do" list?
But just as I never fully embraced news by soundbite, I am not yet ready to drive the convergence live truck over the grave of newspapers, recycled though they may be. I, a print person who wound up in TV anchor clothes, am now teaching my students to write shorter, less creative sentences. Use bullet points and subheads, I tell them. Don't write delayed leads!! The reader is scanning - not actually reading, you see. Take pictures, take video, get audio. Don't let the details stand in the way of a good multimedia production!!
So just when I've convinced myself that I'm good with all that and - since I'm now nearly literate in Photoshop and Dreamweaver, I must hold my nose and dive into HTML...along comes some psychology professor to burst my convergence bubble. Leave it to a psych major to bring us back to the sad reality of our pitiful lives. In an essay titled The Long Goodbye
Peggy Drexler opines about how much she'll miss newspapers when the presses fall silent:
I worry about the quality of debate. I worry about the truth. I worry about a community's ability to examine itself. I worry about the abuse of power when nobody is watching. I worry about losing the sheer enjoyment of great writing and reporting.
As I sat contemplating those words, a circulation rep from the San Diego Union Tribune called to beg me to come back. "We'll give you a $20 gas card," she told me, if I spent $19.95 on a new subscription. You do the math.
So, I took the deal. And I'm about to renew two other subscriptions, including the grandaddy of them all - the NY Times, even if their publisher doesn't care whether they stop the presses or not.
My friend and former co-anchor, Rob Hayes, who now makes his living at KABC-TV covering celebrity drunk driving trials, tells me that if newspapers die, "We're all in trouble." Not only do TV reporters rely on yesterday's papers as today's personal assignment editor, no one in broadcasting really believes that they are informing the electorate on anything relevant - like where candidates stand on the issues or other such frivolities.
But then again, I did read Dr. Drexler's column online in the San Francisco Examiner - a paper that would not normally appear on my radar. And I found it through my carefully chosen RSS feeds. And I am now choosing to respond by writing this blog, which I will then email to a number of my friends and colleagues - so we can all lament the good old days, the days before technology stole our time and our paper.
And P.S. - If I had already learned HTML, this post would look a whole lot prettier!
