I am a journalist. I am not a newspaper woman.
1 comment August 1st, 2008
The editor of the Spokesman-Review lamented last night that he’s a newspaperman, and he’s among a dying breed. Steve Smith’s blog post appeared on Romenesko (industry blog on Poynter’s Web site) less than 12 hours later.
I’ve been in the news biz professionally for nearly 10 years. I certainly have not had the same experiences as Steve Smith has had in 40 years. So I do my best to understand where he’s coming from. After reading the post, I walk away with this. He calls himself a newspaperman, not a journalist.
There’s a big difference in those two titles.
I don’t work for a newspaper. (Sure, we put out a newspaper. I don’t dispute that.) I work for a media company. And I am a journalist. Not a newspaperwoman.
This is a tough time. “Newspaper companies” have to evolve into “media companies.” While it’s tough, we have an opportunity. I am an optimist (and, yes, that is somewhat abnormal for a journalist). So I choose to believe that journalism is relevant. People do rely on us to get information for them. Not as many of them are consuming the information by reading a printed newspaper.
So the optimist that I am chooses to look at it not as an industry that’s dying but one that is going to have to reinvent itself over and over again as our consumers change their consumption habits. We can’t spend the next 100 years doing things the way we’ve always done them.
