Digital Technologies Prompt New News Non-Profits (Carnival of Journalism)

When people — mostly journalists who had been laid off from corporate newsrooms — started talking about entrepreneurial journalism, I worried that we were starting to embrace what I had long resisted: that is, the idea that individual reporters needed to think about how to sell their stories as a product as much as how to save democracy.

I’ve come around.

In part, my change of heart has to do with a specific kind of entrepreneurial journalism – the nonprofit news organization. Most of them have adopted a mission to save journalism, to be a watchdog, to fill a void for democracy. (Just FYI: we at UW-Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication are in the middle of a giant study of them, so some of what I am writing about comes from that data we are collecting.)

This blog post is in response to the February 2012 Carnival of Journalism question: “What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead? And how do you see it playing out in terms of application by journalists, and impact?” I consider the recent influx of nonprofits news agencies to represent an important trend in journalism – and one that is a direct result of digital technologies, especially social media.

The evidence suggests that the organizations, which are incredibly diverse in both their funding sources and methods, are proliferating, collaborating, and becoming a significant part of the emerging media ecology right now. In 2009 they banded together into their own trade organization called the Investigative News Network, which formed with just 20 groups. Just two years later more than 60 ventures have joined INN — most of them brand new. Although I haven’t been able to find any hard statistics (anyone out there have better luck?), most anecdotal reports show a giant spike in news nonprofit births since 2008.

They assume as their platform the Web, evoke the new “mass self-communicating” citizen (a Castells term),  and depend on the new network society (this one is Benkler) for their existence. Many of them utilize crowdsourcing as a reporting technique, employ data-visualization experts and populate email list serves, twitter hashtags, Facebook groups, blogs and all sorts of digitally enabled forums and venues.

To be sure, controversy, cynicism and doubts dog these groups. Many are funded by foundations or the generosity of wealthy patrons – how sustainable is such a model? Some decline to disclose where their money comes from – how can we trust the veracity of their information and the altruism of their agenda? Many have very little readership – how can a group with so little content and so little marketability hope to survive midst the glut of the information age? (In other words, the very digital technologies that enable these groups to produce and disseminate news might also be the undoing of these groups?).

These are good questions. I attended a panel on the different models for nonprofit organizations at the Wisconsin News Association conference on Thursday in Madison, WI, where we discussed all of this. Stephen Greenhut of the conservative Franklin Center had this to say (in between his defending of the Franklin Center, which refuses to say who funds them and declares itself to produce “news” from a libertarian perspective):

“We are hiring right now, but the question is long-term: I don’t think anyone knows what the new model is. The money has got to come from somewhere.”

(And then a giant question mark exists from the Internal Revenue Service, which is threatening to restrict the 501c3 nonprofit status for these organizations. This would, of course, devastate many of their operations.)

But my point is that none of these groups could even begin to offer an alternative to mainstream media without new technologies and particularly the networking effect of social media such as Twitter and Facebook. (Rr at least, it would be much much harder; I should note here that of course we have had grand, often government-subsidized nonprofits such as NPR and the Center for Public Integrity thriving for decades, but I am talking about a different, digital-dependent animal.) This ability to bypass the printing press gives someone like Andy Hall, who quit his reporting gig at The Wisconsin State Journal, the opportunity to start up a group like Wisconsin Watch. WisconsinWatch (which is housed in my building at UW-Madison) now employs four people full-time as well as three paid interns and had produced 65 major investigative reports since 2009 with a budget of nearly half a million dollars. Said WisconsinWatch’s Money and Politics Project Director Bill Lueders at Thursday’s panel talk:

I think what the Center is doing is exciting because there is both an old and a new component. This is the cutting edge of journalism right now. But I am also attracted to it because it is very committed to a very old kind of reporting… according to the standards that have been established through decades of practicing these crafts.

One audience member asked about whether the spike in nonprofit news orgs represented just another niche trend, pointing out the recent death of the Chicago News Cooperative that lost a MacAuthur Foundation grant and then had to suspend operations (among other issues, including the IRS situation). Lueders suggested the key is to attract a diversity of funders and develop multiple revenue streams.

Our research backs this up. Foundation support is not the only kind of money for these groups, who are being very creative in developing alternative sources – from contractual project work to media-market collaborations to website advertising. I predict we will see even more networking and collaborating among these new players in this industry, and better and more stable business models as they mature.

I suggest that they consider calling on the technologies responsible for their very existence in seeking those alternative funding sources in addition to other, more traditional sources. I can think of any number of digitally based funding opportunities, including: adopting a a spot.us model where audiences can elect to give money for developing investigations; an Ebyline setup where people and other media organizations can bid on finished packages; community-based models where citizens pay for access for evergreen products like some of the database work being done for these organizations’ sites.

Another key activity we are going to see more and more of is the willingness of traditional media publications to publish and disseminate the work of the nonprofits in a much more prolific manner. On the one hand, this is great for nonprofit org’s visibility; on the other hand, I worry what impact that action will have on commercial news companies’ justification to keep what investigative reporters they still have on staff.

I know many legitimate questions swirl around the agenda and the sustainability of these new business models for news. But I can’t help thinking about the words of news futurist Clay Shirky, who wrote in a 2009 blog post about the uncertainty during the time of the printing press compared to the current revolution and the next business model for the news:

We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it…We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

I think when we look back at this time period, we will see that the nonprofit news organization served as the foundation for a significant component of watchdog reporting in the United States — thanks to these early entrepreneurs who risked their professional reputations and their livelihoods to learn and adopt the innovative digital tools to do old-school journalism in new platforms and models.

Good idea for story form in latest Gates’ letter: Allow users to share chunks of content

Finally! Chunking may be back!

Chunking, at least in the way I am using the term, is when you hyperlink your subheads so that you can jump around between sections of a story. I am sure for some content producers it never left, but I have missed it on the sites I regularly visit for years now. I always thought it was a great way to allow users to access the topics of a story they were most interested in by clicking from within a sort of table of contents under the headline. I’m not sure why it went away, and would love to know. Perhaps people weren’t using the features? Perhaps content management systems weren’t allowing the function? Maybe it just got pushed aside as more interactive features etc. came into vogue?

At any rate Bill Gates has brought it back with his 2012 annual letter from the Gates Foundation. In the piece about extreme poverty and issues of food, vaccines, AIDS, education

A screenshot of Gate's letter

and other causes he pledges support for from the Foundation, he “chunks” or sections each topic with subheads. Within each section, users may tweet or share on Facebook specific parts or link to topics within sections (as opposed to working only with the entire document).

I see this as being a great idea for news organizations’ formatting of longer reads. My audience research revealed that people would love to be able to access specific parts of longer stories and navigate within it. Chunking the story could entice more people to jump into the content because it looks a little less intimidating than a long block of text.

Loving it, Mr. Gates!

Capitalism can support good journalism, but it’s time for some back-up plans

This month’s Carnival of Journalism, which is an informal group of bloggers who write about a common journalism topic every month, asks the question: Can good journalists be good capitalists? The question derives from the omnipresent tension of a commercial press operating with a mandate to be socially responsible. As a business-reporter-turned-journalist-academic teaching students who need paying jobs in the profession, I answer a cautious YES (and here, I’m also thinking: “I sure hope so!!”; otherwise I’ve spent a lot of years fervently and naively dedicated to a profession because of its democratic importance).

In this post I suggest that we also need to build significant infrastructure alongside the commercial press to provide contingencies for the dissemination of significant, relevant, balanced, accurate information circulating in our democracy — you know… in the event corporate media owners might somehow lose sight of their commitment to hosting good journalism. The good news is I think we have already begun to formalize some alternative business models.

Good Journalists, Good Capitalists

With fewer resources and fewer journalists, the commitment to socially responsible journalism can fade as the pressure to produce content increases. During one of my newsroom stints, the executive editor called a meeting to discuss pending layoffs, the shrinking news hole, and our media owner’s fiscal difficulties (“yeah, right,” we all mouthed to each other, rolling our eyes, knowing our corporation’s top executives had all just received giant bonuses). “Bulk! Bulk! Bulk!” he barked at us, referring to the “need” for the appearance of more content in the newspaper and on the site, more quickly. People could read briefs and rewritten press releases and have the feeling that they were getting a lot for their money.  What could we do?

We quickly learned the art of the fast 200 words while working on our special projects. We learned to conduct interviews so that we could derive a “quick hit” out of the conversation (usually just a one-sourced piece), and then turning the discussion to what we really wanted to know — the good journalism part. Our fabulous editors managed to juggle schedules so that we rotated on “bulk” while keeping some of us on dedicated projects that were so important for our community. Oh and of course we had our own definition of “bulk” as well. After all, a 50-inch story feels pretty bulky, doesn’t it? Plus 200 words advancing an important public hearing can be just as democratically important as a brief about some new product.

Capitalism does not necessitate poor quality in the pursuit of product quantity. The notion significantly underestimates people’s (consumers’?) ability to appreciate important news (product?). Even those briefs have to be something the “market” (society!) needs and wants — well written, informative, interesting. My audience research suggests the problem with the commercial press right now is not the capitalistic structure, but rather the production quality. People are demanding new kinds of content that allow them to connect (with powerful sources, with each other, with issues) and inform themselves on their terms. People recognize that “bulk” does not equate to good journalism (or a good product, if we want to stick with capitalism-speak).

As I tell my students now, the key to being a good journalist working at a for-profit company is time management, creative interpretations of corporate mandates such as “bulk! bulk! bulk!,” alternative kinds of story formats, agnostic understandings of platform, disciplined efforts around storytelling, and finally, laser focus on the end goal of significant and important democracy-improving work in one’s day-to-day labor.

Alternative Models Needed, Though!

Yet the environment of the professional journalist today is certainly challenging. We need to discover other models for doing good information work that complement the industry but do not rely on profits.

I am in the middle of creating a new syllabus for a press-theory seminar I will be teaching this spring, and one of my segments is on new news business models. In doing some research for it, I’m struck by how much innovation is out there compared to 2006 when I and most of my journalist friends either fled the industry or were laid off because of a decidedly failing business model.

I found real suggestions touching on:

• Government/Taxpayer subsidies
• Community as the new biz model
• Nonprofit investigative centers(with all kinds of funding structures, from foundational support to new revenues streams)

And this is just to name a few. This Mediashift blog post from 2008 is a bit dated right now, but the ideas are still very relevant and possible. In looking at all of this in aggregate at this moment, I find myself feeling a sense of optimism about the future of this profession, capitalists and all.

A news cooperative as a potential business model? Great idea to explore!

If you get a chance, you should check out Tom Stites‘ three-part series on the problem of financial sustainability for community news sites at Nieman Journalism Lab.

The series laments the continual business model failure for journalism, including non-profits AND profits and calls the result of that slump a burgeoning “news desert” for towns and cities across America. (FYI: He credits an essay in In These Times with birthing the term.) Stites lays out an idea for the cooperative model of journalism, either worker-owned or reader-owned, as a potential financial structure for news organizations. The idea is fresh one for a profession in dire need for something fresh. It deserves some attention.

And check out what he says about the project he is leading in Haverhill, MA (which incidentally, is right next door to where I grew up and so I know very well the scope of the “news desert” there):

The Banyan Project, which I lead, is building a reader-owned co-op model that’s designed to scale massively, the way depositor-owned credit unions and shopper-owned food co-ops have scaled community by community, coast to coast. Banyan has chosen Haverhill, Massachusetts — a middle-income city of 60,879 whose daily newspaper has devolved into an under-resourced weekly and whose radio station has shut down — as its pilot community. As a news desert, Haverhill has very little focused coverage of issues facing the community or of life-issue reporting that its people can use to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Presuming that the pilot thrives, Banyan envisions scaling with each added community site run by its own democratically run co-op with hundreds of local member/owners; a federation would provide the co-ops with turnkey licenses for sophisticated software and other centralized services.

Excellent project and I wish it well. I think we need to act fast in communities such as Haverhill. I fear that once people get out of the habit of consuming local news, it will be like getting out of the habit of exercise: that time hole becomes easily filled with other things and the notion of informing oneself about the local municipality becomes a quaint luxury. Inertia sets in and trying to retrain citizens means a learning curve (that right now might not yet exist).

(I do have one little nitpick though. As a former business reporter, I always get annoyed at statements like this from the third part of the series:

Few people know that co-ops are such a significant and healthy slice of our otherwise ailing economy — the U.S. government doesn’t keep statistics on them and, because co-ops are structured to build community wealth rather than investor wealth, business journalism largely ignores them.

Writing about cooperatives was a huge part of my daily writing, if only because it WAS about community wealth. From the cooperative dairy business in town (such as Cabot where I worked in Vermont) to the local co-op grocery store, we reported on these ventures if only because 1) they represented significant parts of those city economies, b) it was easy to get owners to comment on the business, c) it was easy to get permission for photos and other art, d) they tended to be fairly innovative compared to the corresponding chains and corporations, and d) they ALWAYS provided great color! Just saying.)

Hello, Finger Wave; Passwords be gone

Every time I go to a website to make a comment or buy something, it asks me for my username and password. After a couple failed tries, my instinct is to give up — though my desire to be obnoxious or to participate in consumerism ultimately vanquish and I persist until I break through. But, man, what a pain.

I was reading this New York Times article with interest: “Logging In With a Touch or a Phrase.”

Passwords are a pain to remember. What if a quick wiggle of five fingers on a screen could log you in instead? Or speaking a simple phrase? Neither idea is far-fetched. Computer scientists in Brooklyn are training their iPads to recognize their owners by the touch of their fingers as they make a caressing gesture. Banks are already using software that recognizes your voice, supplementing the standard PIN.

A couple years ago I conducted a bunch of interviews with regular Madison folk about their use of the Internet, particularly as that use pertained to information actions and community engagement. One of my side findings had to do with passwords. The number one reason these people — and these included often those like journalists and bloggers — did not participate in online forums or other digital spaces? PASSWORDS. They try once, maybe twice, but who can keep track of all of them?

If we could resolve the password issues, I suspect the amount of civic participation in online deliberative spaces would significantly increase.

And then I imagine what our coffeeshops would look like with all of us waving at our computers. We’d all be thinking: “Now, was it a five-finger motion that I recorded? Or something more jaunty?” Even this solution, I predict, would ultimately involve some choice gestures.

Building “special” audiences for long-form video

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to build viewership for news projects for one of the classes I am teaching and the students I am advising. And then I received a comment on a post I wrote for Carnival of Journalism last month.

Here’s the comment:

Sue,

I was reading with interest your response to Carnival of Journalism’s, Future of Video post. You surprised me when you said you’d like to see more long-form documentary enterprise features from newspapers.

As deputy director of photo and video at the Detroit Free Press, I’ve been heavily involved in all of our long-form (and short) video stories. I am a firm believer that video is the future of newspapers, but there seems to be a resistance across newspapers for the in-depth video story. We’ve been fortunate to resist that resistance and do good work – see our most recent doc at http://www.freep.com/livingwithmurder. However, I fear that the return on investment is not yet there and newspaper’s impatience may kill this type of storytelling before it gets a chance to be realized – Washington Post’s layoffs a few years back of some of their documentary folks as evidence.

Is your desire to see this type of video based on personal preference or are you seeing a demand for it in any of your research – anecdotal or hard facts?

Thanks for your time.

Kathy Kieliszewski

Here is my response:

Thanks for reading and commenting, Kathy!
Alas, although my research has shown that people SAY they would watch a long-form video, they rarely do. They told our interviewers that even though they “want” to watch them, they have to “justify” that time (even as they also admit they spend hours watching sitcoms, hanging out on Facebook, or playing euchre on Yahoo). I think the key for news organizations is to evolve their thinking about such projects.  The days of a news organizations producing something like this, promoting it on the site, and hoping people will view it are gone. One needs to discover the audience for these kinds of projects. News organizations need to cultivate genres of audience segments and market those long-form projects to opinion leaders whose demographic indicate an interest in similar kinds of content (such as Frontline or NPR) via Facebook, Twitter, targeted ads etc. Another idea would be to produce such a longer project in partnership with another organization that has such an audience. Finally, such projects are often considered evergreen content, and thus, could be great fodder for attaining a continual stream of viewers from search engines (the idea being that the longer your content stays relevant, the more search engines will find it, the more authority that link gains, the more viewers you attract, the greater possibility it will drive traffic to other parts of your site etc etc). And if it’s issue-based (as many of them are), the project could serve as an anchor for a page that becomes the go-to place for people looking for information on, say, crime or poverty or gas prices or whatever with archived stories, links to reports and data, etc etc. )

I do have some findings that might be helpful to you: that people will devour everything they can about topics they are interested in, that they want to be able to research even more (“dig deeper”), right from the content, and that they want to be able to engage with the material — and the reporter — beyond the product itself. I’d love to see more reporters thinking of their projects in a much more dynamic way.

Here are just a couple ideas to create a buzz and generate that special audience: crowd-sourcing the reporting for it, having give-and-takes about the issue during the reporter with key sources and potential audiences right on Twitter, build up a special Twitter project hashtag, promote the project and relay relevant and credible information about the topic via established discussion threads already on Twitter, side-writing on the issue on their blogs, setting up Q/As with prominent sources and experts on the issue, generating questions and engaging with readers in online forums about the content, using Facebook to generate dialogue and not just as a story-link resting place, cross-promoting the material on highly read blogs and other kinds of content (by other people/journalists/experts) about the project.

The project has to be sold to newsroom leaders in these ways — as something that can live and grow for the site — I think, and not as just a finite product that is good journalism and important for society.

Now the problem is finding the time to do all of this. And there’s the rub, right?

Would love to hear your thoughts on all of this! (And you should check out that Free Press project “Living with Murder;” It’s awesome and there’s always time for “awesome.”

 

Journalists as chroniclers or tricksters? Two speakers offer much different versions of reporters

Journalists have a serious, serious PR problem.

I was thinking this as I listened to a speaker from a University of Wisconsin-Madison Go Big Read Event on. Oct. 19 when 180 high school and college English students came together to discuss the nonfiction novel, Enrique’s Journey. I was asked to launch the event with 15 minutes about literary journalism and how the book by Sonia Nazario worked as an example of that genre. (You can read my remarks here.)

Enrique’s Journey is the story of a boy whose mother had left him at the age of five to travel to the United States. Nazario, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, spent months documenting Enrique’s search for this mother, particularly the deadly immigrant path across the Texan border via train tops. She won a Pulitzer Prize for the series as it ran in the newspaper and turned the whole thing into a riveting book.

The cover of the book

In my talk to the high school students, I focused on how journalism can be broken down into myth, chronicle and story (which comes from several scholars but most notably Bird & Dardenne’s seminal work in the Social Construction of News). I talked about why stories are often framed the way they are, and how news accounts are woven using mythic qualities and chronicling motivations. I emphasized how good literary journalism teaches, that we can grow from a good story about the truth, and that we can vow to be better people because of it.

After the students spent an hour discussing the book in Socratic groups, the final speaker took the microphone to caution students about the power of media and specifically, how journalists often misrepresent or completely ignore the plights of immigrants.

Some quotes from her talk:

“By understanding the role of the media, we can create our own ideas about what is real.”

Media apparently give us a “package reality” that is “often false.”

“We have to make our own realities.”

“The news only tells you part of the story.”

“Be media literate so nobody can fool you.”

She ended with this last. I was interested in this in particular. I agreed that students need to learn how to be media literate. I agreed that reporters can only tell part of any story (it’s hard to include every part of every event in just a few words or minutes of video).

But a whole lot of questions buzzed around in my head: Why did she think journalists were trying to fool her? Is she conflating “media” with “journalism?” How would people go about “making their own realities,” exactly? (And a press theorist cannot help but be reminded of Walter Lippmann’s “picture in our heads” essay that described how the press is responsible for forming people’s view of the world they could not see).

I saw students nodding during her talk, and I hoped they would not go away thinking about journalism along the same lines. I understood the frustration, particularly for minorities who are often portrayed as stereotypes or completely absent in news accountings. But journalists like Nazario, who travelled on those trains to relay Enrique’s journey across the border, risk their lives to tell stories so people can learn and understand others’ experiences. And there are some great ones out there.

And then I heard the students’ takeaways from the book, the discussions, and the event:

“I will be more willing to understand why people are willing to take risks,”

“I will be more grateful for the parents that I have because Enrique did not have that opportunity.”

“I hope we take what we learned here and we do not forget about it so that we can apply it to our lives one day and to the lives of our parents.”

“I think it’s important to remember we don’t know people’s background and not judging a book by its cover.”

“I learned how much risk someone will take to come here.”

“I learned to be thankful for what I have.”

These students were nobody’s fools. And they learned all of this from a journalist.

Fiery crash-video postings raise ethical questions to ponder

Terrible news today on Sports Illustrated and ESPN, and it got me thinking about the ethics of the situation:

So would you as an editor have published the video of the fiery race-car crash in which Dan Wheldon passed away today?
Or just a still photo of the fire, no video link.
Or a photo of the man, alive and winning races?
Or some other solution?

I would have gone with the still photo of the fire with no video link, figuring the following:

• People could surely access it elsewhere if they really wanted to see it;
• There was no real news-y reason for the entire video to be shown;
• And it seemed a bit gratuitous.

On the other hand, the footage is dramatic and DOES show how the heck something so terrible, involving so many cars, could happen.

What do others think?

Amy Webb’s Top Ten Tech Trends for Journalists

The coming digital journalist will mean refined ways of researching stories, knowing who is where at news events, easier source identification through face-recognition software and digital note-taking.

Oh and by the way? That digital journalist is now here.

Amy Webb, a technology guru whom I revere, offered up her annual 10 tech trends for journalists at the Online News Association conference in Boston in September 2011. The trends come from the work she does through her company, Webbmedia Group, which is basically a digital-strategy consultant business that tracks techy trends through research, interviews, networking, focus groups and observations.

The top trends to be aware of in journalism, according to Amy Webb, are the following:

• Refined Search: New kinds of search engines can help you target your research findings much more precisely than just Google or Yahoo. Take advantage of the “smart” functions of features like “Google +1″ that help the engine know your preferences. See: Google +1, Google Related, Heliod, Greplin’s app.
• Topics: New software is arriving that allows us to conduct topic-focused dynamic curation. This all goes WAY beyond aggregation. See: Twylah, Klout, Scoop.it, Google Propeller. (Some of these are still in private beta, but they are coming, says Amy!!)
• Inner Circles: Features like Google Circles are allowing you to curate conversation around specific topics and groups of people. So for journalists, consider exploring these new programs to conduct focus groups, organize key influencers and keep up to date on product launches and other industry-specific news.
• Social-Proximity Networks: These show you who else is around you when you are at a conference, in a meeting, or just out and about. Besides Foursquare, there is also:  Nerd Nearby (and a bunch of others but I can’t seem to verify on the web, so I’m going to have to get back to them later when I make sure I’ve written them down correctly).
• Face and Iris Recognition: Face.com and Facebook are helping us identify and tag people in images. Creepy, right?! But imagine as a reporter taking a picture of someone on your phone and finding out who they are in a few seconds. Great for those of us who can’t remember people’s names for the life of us. See: Viewdyl. A bunch of others are coming too.
• Digital Note-Taking: The Livescribe, ABBYY, and Wacom Inkling mean you can take notes (and comment on your notes) digitally by hand.
• Quick and Long Reads: Consider marketing that long piece to byliner or longreads, which show the reader how many minutes it would take to read the entire thing. And for that shorter stuff, check out Amazon Kindle Singles and Apple short-reads content.
• Gestural Interfaces: This technology will enable people to interact with a digital device without touching it. (I had to wikipedia it while she was talking.) Not a lot out right now, but she says to look out for: Kinect, Android@Home, and stuff from Apple, MSFT, and Primesense 3D.
• Pre-cognition reporting: Data visualization tools that can predict where trends are heading (in other words, to see the future!).  Check out the Terminator Vision app and Recorded Future.
• Ethics in Digital Journalism: Amy ended with a caution about digital technologies taking over the world, and more importantly, our souls (my words, not hers). She reminded us that just because you CAN use digital tools to do just about anything, doesn’t mean you SHOULD (again, my words, not hers but this was the basic takeaway).

(*** ALL OF THIS COMES FROM WEBB’S PRESENTATION!!)

Some J-Student Therapy

Journalism students having identity crises seem to be visiting my office lately, seeking counsel. Their uncertainty has moved me to write this blog post. I tend to relay one message to them: Despite all the industry turmoil, despite the very real concerns they might not be able to make a living as a professional writer, despite the hard work being a reporter entails, the job of journalist trumps most other jobs I can think of.

I’m not sure what other day-to-day job provides the opportunity to ride along in police cruisers, drive farm tractors, fly model airplanes the size of a classroom, talk to a creator of the Manhattan Project, talk to a creator of the Internet, hang out in emergency rooms, access backstage, effect legislative change, learn how to invest money, meet famous people, sail, fish, network, hear how a woman covered with external benign tumors aimed to make someone laugh every day, interview presidential candidates, know how a town operates, analyze tax code, discover that I could talk to anyone about anything, understand how to find information on just about anyone and anything and then to write a story about it all — on deadline.

(Um. Of course, it also provided me with the opportunity to get shit on by cows, ruin countless pairs of shoes, miss parts of my brother’s wedding, spend Black Friday in the middle of Wal-Mart, wallow in an empty newsroom on Christmas Day, get my car broken into doing a story in a bad part of town, be lied to often, endanger myself trying to chase the police chase, and — the worst worst days — write sad, sad stories about death. But even these situations taught me something, each and every one: never wear white to a farm, carry extra boots in my car, videotape weddings, bring my checkbook to work on Black Friday, host Christmas the next day, buy anti-theft devices, learn how to spot a liar, drive fast well, and develop empathy and compassion for my fellow human beings.)

Don’t get me wrong: I love my new career as a professor. I find infinite satisfaction in teaching and enjoy immersing myself as a researcher. I fancy that I can make something of a difference investigating the industry by providing pragmatic recommendations. Still, as a journalist, my faith in humanity was alternatively destroyed and rebuilt — often in the span of a single day. It was worth all the sad paychecks and long work days and professional instability and corporate politics.

Dear students, please try it out. Take a chance, if only for a little while. I don’t think you will be disappointed. And in the process, our democracy might grow just a wee bit healthier for your decision.