The best journalists get away from their
keyboards and go outside. The best reporting involves shoeleather -- and protection from the elements. That's part of the reason "wear sunscreen" is in that headline. It was among the tidbits of advice in a famous commencement speech by Mary Schmich of the Chicago
Tribune, one of several speeches I'm linking to below for rainy-day perusal by this year's graduates or anyone looking for a little inspiration.
Never heard of Mary Schmich's speech? Maybe you know it as "The MIT
commencement addresss that Kurt Vonnegut didn't give." It's a classic case of misinformation on the Internet -- and not misinformation about sunscreen. Someone pasted the text of Schmich's column (it never was a speech) into an e-mail, added Vonnegut as the author and MIT as the place, and sent it circling the globe, chain-letter style. Once the authorship was straightened out, Schmich's words even made it onto the pop charts as a record.
This year's batch of actual journalism school commencement addresses all touch on the Internet as a way to get out the true facts of serious stories. For online journalists (and any journalist today is an online journalist), one of the most encouraging commencement speeches I've seen is one by news website magician Adrian Holovaty, who hasn't been out of school that long himself. A quote:
"Graduates, the fire should be burning under each and every one of
you. You should be yearning -- aching -- to bring this industry into a
new age. Your generation -- our generation -- is going to be the one to
do it. You're going to be the people breaking the rules. You're going to be the people inventing new ones..."
Holovaty started with the innovative Lawrence.com and LJWorld.com, and created chicagocrime.org, a database-backed site that lets you explore every crime
reported in the city of Chicago. Now he works for the Washington Post, where he helped build an award-winning online feature that lets visitors browse every vote in the U.S. House and Senate, going
back to 1991, and keep track of their representatives' most recent votes. (If it sounds familiar, that's because I mentioned it last week.)
For a different perspective on the state of change in journalism, here's another of this year's graduation speakers, the Post's "Below the Beltway" columnist Gene Weingarten. (He spoke at Maryland, Holovaty at Missouri.) Parts of his talk seemed to echo Holovaty, but with a twist:
Our field is changing rapidly. Technology is overtaking us at an
unheard-of pace. The journalists of tomorrow may not look anything like
the journalists of today. I mean, literally. For all we know, they
might have gills and three buttocks. That's how fast things are
changing...
(I won't give away all his punchlines. You'll have to read the whole speech.)
For a more serious look at how shoeleather journalism merged with online delivery after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, see Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss's talk to Columbia Journalism School grads, after he received the 2006 Columbia Journalism Award. On another serious note, the Columbia grads also heard from Farnaz Fassihi, Middle-East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, about the rewards and dangers of journalism in a war zone.
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