I have this bad habit of prefacing my blog posts with some sort of apology about not posting often enough. You should know, dear reader, that I haven’t been posting because I’m shoulders-deep in articles/work for The Oregonian (yessss!), and when I’m not in the newsroom or working on an article I’m either commuting to Corvallis, spending precious few hours sleeping, in class, or riding my horse.
On the topic of my internship at the O, I can’t possibly begin to go into what a surreal and incredible experience it’s been working in that newsroom, among Pulitzer winning reporters and some of the nation’s best writers and journalists. I’m just in awe every day. I don’t feel like I fit in, but that’s a good thing — it keeps me on my toes. I’ve never felt so lucky in my life. I applied for an internship with the O three times. On the third, I got one. For this 11 week period I get to grab casual coffee with reporters whose work I’ve quietly idolized and followed for years. I get to pick the brains of living journalism legends. I can’t say more, because the thought of it makes me completely inarticulate.
Tangent.
I was talking with this old man today. What started as a casual discussion praising Oregon for all that it offers (the mountains! The city! The friendly people! The beach! The generous drivers!) turned into a conversation about the newspaper industry. We started talking about the future — which papers might survive, which won’t, which might have a chance and which deserve to fold altogether anyway. He’s a local Oregonian. He subscribes to a few papers, and he reads them all. He is in his 70s. Smart. Easy smile. Modern in the sense that he’s aware of the changes befitting the industry. Like many people his age, he is a loyal reader and subscriber. He loves the newspaper, but he particularly loves good news — he even used a key descriptor that would perk any journalist’s ears — he loves to read “human interest” stories.
He likes it when newspapers are able to give honest, intelligible answers to political questions and can help the reader sort out the messages of different candidates and the provisions of different measures during election season. He likes when they put the leg work in and read the fine print and then translate it in a way that makes sense to most readers. He says that’s what a newspaper should do. It should assist the community and provide the news — not just the scandals.
What he doesn’t like are superfluous stories about crime, especially petty crimes. We must be hurting for news, he implied, when newspapers are running stories about local celebrities and their unpaid parking tickets. To him, that’s not news. He wants good news, and he knows there is plenty of it out there to report on.
I listened. It was a beautiful Oregon fall day and we were standing outside under the late afternoon sun. I knew there wasn’t much I could do but listen. I’m not an editor, I don’t run a newspaper; I’m not even permanently employed at one. Maybe I never will be. But I also know that his concerns aren’t the ones editors and publishers worry about — they’re focused on what people 50 years his junior want to see in a newspaper, if they’ll bother picking one up at all. That’s what they have to be focused on in order to survive. He knows that, too.
By the time our conversation had died down, the sun was setting. I’m still thinking about what he said, and it’s starting to form into an idea in my head, adding to a cluster of notions of what I think a newspaper should be. It’s kind of a living web of thought that changes and grows with every new internship, article and experience I have in this industry.
There’s no guarantee that I’ll get a job at a newspaper after I graduate, especially in the first six months. I heard a statistic on that somewhere once, but it was depressing so I shut it out of my head and now I don’t remember it. Maybe if time goes by and I really can’t find a job, I’ll start my own idea of what a newspaper should be — online, of course, and attached to all the new media/social media bells and whistles that are must-haves at the time.
You can’t fight city hall.
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