There will be journalism going forward, even though what it will look like is undetermined.
EVEN THOUGH I left newspapering in 1992, dipping my toe back into journalism and writing in the years since, I will always consider myself first and foremost a journalist.
That’s why I felt both sickened and saddened by the massacre carried out at the Washington Post by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. It was a mass murder of career and the burial of an institution by a man seeking favor from a tyrant.
The death of the Post, and a death it was, leaves a handful of smaller papers still struggling to survive across the nation, and The New York Times, which the tyrant has tried to break but so far has failed.
The death of newspapers, though, must be viewed over time, going back to the late 1980s. One of the things I learned as a consulting doing strategic planning with firms was the importance of one question, asked at the beginning of any planning exercise.’
“What business are we in?”
The example I would give of a wrong answer was the airline industry. Who should have owned the airlines, I ask. I often get stares; folks start looking at each other. Trick question?
No. The railroads should have created the airlines. But they viewed airlines as something that, pardon me for this one, would never fly. When they answered the question of what business they were in, they said “trains.” The correct answer would have been “moving people and goods.”
In 1992 I was publisher of the Hanover (PA) Evening Sun. The CEO of Thomson Newspapers, which owned the Sun and 60-plus other papers in the US, told publishers they need to create a mission statement for their papers. We already had one. I sent it in.
“We will be the premier source for all information in York County PA.” That was it. Says it all.
My statement was rejected because I did not mention “newspapers.”
At the time the sons of the owner of Thomson were being groomed to take over the chain. I sat with them one night at dinner at a publishers’ meeting. They were talking technology, talking about how print was about to take second place to other forms of transferring information.
I went home, took a hard look at the future and left journalism. With a few years the boys had sold every newspaper in the US and Canada. Today the firm operates Reuters, Thomson Financial, Thomson Travel and publishes textbooks – all online.
ALL THIS IS to say newspapers began a slow death from self-inflicted wounds long before Jeff Bezos arrived on the scene. Venture capital has just accelerated the deaths, but the death march began with the births of generations who were raised on technology, not paper.
While I am sickened and saddened by what happened to the Post and its employees, I am confident that information will continue to be transmitted. A look at history gives me hope.
When the colonies were rousing the populace to throw out the king, Thomas Paine published his pamphlets in secret. They were handed out in taverns, tacked on trees. Newspapers evolved as small, local publications in the early days. Any group with a view seemed to have its own newspaper.
Big papers came later. Early papers were hardly reliable. They were political in nature and often outrageous. Slander and libel were common. When large papers came along they fought for circulation using sensationalism more than facts. Objective reporting was not even in the minds of those early editors and publishers.
As the prospect of war with Cuba loomed, William Randolph Hearst sent illustrator Frederic Remington to the island to provide pictures. Remington failed to find anything newsworthy and reported back to Hearst that “everything is quiet – there is no trouble here. There will be no war. Wish to return.” Hearst replied “please remain. You furnish the pictures; I will furnish the war.”
It was not until World War II that what we would call modern journalism began to emerge. While journalism schools existed before that they did not become common at colleges and universities until later. Now, they are fading, replaced by “communications” schools.
When I look at the evolution of newspapers, I look less at paper and more at process. We will always have information. The question today is whether the public will be able to find information it can trust. The internet is a place of fact-fiction-sensationalism-outright bullshit.
I don’t think it will always be that way. I think we are seeing journalism stepping back to the days of Thomas Paine where individuals write and post. Today we post online as opposed to tacking our single sheet to an oak tree. But isn’t posting posting?
I believe this latest evolution will end up providing more voices and, at some point, will see a return to the editing standards that drove the best of journalism. I may not live to see it, but I think it will happen. There may be some missteps along the way, and the road might be rocky, but that always has been the case.
I think as the nation deals with its most serious threat to its freedom since the Civil War, new generations of journalists will step up, and the majority will step up in ways both responsible and on the side of free, fair and responsible speech.
I don’t say “I was a journalist.” I say “I am a journalist” even though I work for no one, do not have a printing press or a TV studio; but I have my ethics, I have a computer and I use both.
Be one with hope, dear readers!
Rich Heiland is a retired journalist and semi-retired consultant, trainer and public speaker. During his journalism career he was a reporter, editor, publisher, college instructor, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team and a National Newspaper Association Columnist of the Year honoree. He lives in West Chester, PA and can be reached at [email protected].