Can online journalism capture students' imaginations the way the romance and excitement of the news business grabbed young men and women a century ago?
While reporters have always needed a healthy skepticism about most things -- and risk turning cynical about some -- but there was one thing an old-time reporter might be idealistic about: The newspaper itself.
Here's how star war correspondent Richard Harding Davis described the attitude a century ago:
Now, you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does, because he does not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his time, his health, his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours, and sometimes his life, to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises only that men may have light by which to read it.
That quote is from the opening of a short piece of fiction, The Reporter Who Made Himself King, that is certainly not Davis's best... but it includes an amusing critique of the traditional "work your way up" apprenticeship. Davis's narrator recommends sending college grads into journalism -- not because they are better educated, but because they are more idealistic, more naive (especially about how much their work is worth to the paper's owner)... I do like his description of practicing journalism as an education in itself:
After three years--it is sometimes longer, sometimes not so long--he finds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his enthusiasm in exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge, the opportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and most remarkable men and events that have risen in those three years, and a great fund of resource and patience.
He will find that he has crowded the experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business man, doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short years; that he has learned to think and to act quickly, to be patient and unmoved when everyone else has lost his head, actually or figuratively speaking; to write as fast as another man can talk, and to be able to talk with authority on matters of which other men do not venture even to think until they have read what he has written with a copy-boy at his elbow on the night previous.
(Note: Davis's career came before we started telling newswriting students to keep their sentences to 20 or 30 words -- or to use bullet lists in place of semicolons.)
Incidentally, Davis only uses the word "journalist" when capitalizing "The Old Time Journalist" -- the one who favored having reporters work their way up from copy boy or printer's devil to meeting stenographer... "and so finally grow into a real reporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even excepting Police Captains."
Davis own newspaper adventures began around the time of the Hearst vs. Pulitzer circulation battles -- the ones that gave "yellow journalism" its name. (So-named to this day because those old media titans even fought over the "Yellow Kid," a comic strip character.) I can see how competing for circulation in a city with a dozen newspapers, roaring presses and kids hollering "extra!" in the street would give a young reporter a "school spirit" kind of dedication to "his paper."
Even with competition, something like that would be hard to match online... but maybe that's not such a bad thing. Better to focus that "why the sun rises" dedication on the reporting, the fact-gathering and the storytelling, not on an organization dedicated to the accountant's bottom line.
That reminds me of another hundred-year-old quote -- one that's disturbingly up-to-date:
"A journalist is a reporter out of a job."
(The line is attributed to Mark Twain by a lot of "great quotes" Web pages, but I haven't seen a more specific citation.)
revised with new headline @ 10:45 p.m.
12:09:35 PM 
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