Once a journalist, always a...
For 11 years I made a reasonable living doing what anyone with modest typing skills and directions to the local public library can do today: Publishing local news to anyone interested in reading it.
How-to: Sit down at a keyboard and tap out what you saw and heard that morning at the local courthouse, or the night before in the City Council meeting room. Add a few comments from whichever officials have time and inclination to talk to you. Call the local minister or social worker and ask what's being done to help the poor people this winter. Call the funeral homes and ask who died. Call the police and ask what all those sirens were about. Type up their answers.
That would take all day, so it would be nice if someone would pay for it.
The Nation's Oldest Newspaper in Continuous Publication wrote me a paycheck for doing that, and for editing similar reports from smaller towns, stories contributed by "correspondents" who were barely paid at all, but loved keeping their own or their community's name in the paper. Today, they might be blogging.
The newspaper paid the phone bill and provided my typewriter, a teletype machine to convey our stories to a main office around the corner from the state capitol, a room full of editors to backstop my lapses as a writer and reporter, and an enormous collection of press machinery in a big old building with its own railroad siding, where Mini-Cooper-size rolls of paper were unloaded by the freightload.
You don't need the railroad anymore, or the iron horse printing press shaking the building. You just need a loco motive -- to tell the story without getting paid for it... or to settle for whatever pennies float back from Google reader-ads in the right column of a blog.
Today, any person with minimal computer skills can sit down at a public library keyboard, sign up for a free e-mail account at Yahoo or Google, then open up a free publishing space at Blogger or WordPress or thousands of other providers around the world. (On the day I typed this, searching Google for the words "free blog" produced 160 million hits.)
One of the blogging software companies has a new angle -- with newspapers losing circulation, advertising losing its business model, the economy in crisis, and reporters losing their jobs, Six Apart has announced a special "free blogging space" program for unemployed reporters: The Typepad Journalist Bailout Program, launched with a cheery greeting of "Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist!" The pitch continued as follows:
We're offering a platform to publish your work and profit from it. A
platform that gives you complete control, with no dependence on the
whims of a publisher, and no interference from an outside editor.
Your blog can act as a clip file for your best pieces, whether
you're looking for freelance work or a new full-time gig. You can link
to your best past stories and even add back in those two or three grafs
that your editor cut. Best of all, the first result for a Google search
on your name will be an active, engaging blog, instead of a neglected
LinkedIn page or a placeholder "coming soon" site or your old articles
from a publisher that doesn't even pay you anymore. Is it just a cute gimmick for one of the older blogging engines to promote itself and its not-Google advertising program? Pardon me a moment of old-journalist skepticism. Actually, Six Apart's Anil Dash sounds sincere enough to tempt me to launch yet another blog.
But I won't, even if my collected news clips are too old to qualify. I'm not posting much on this blog these days, having slipped back to my old Boblog.blogspot.com blog, supplemented by http://delicious.com/bstepno, because both are easier to use from our campus computer labs, my office, or a laptop at the coffee shop. And there are four or five other Web sites I write, edit, coordinate or procrastinate about regularly.
Besides, if I get tempted by yet another blog, I won't have time to grade my 80 students' accumulated homework this week, which is part of what I get paid to do. I'm convinced that they have to learn to report and write better than ever before, especially if they expect someone, someday to pay them a salary for doing it, or if they hope to make a convincing plea for funds through some technological method of passing the hat...
I'd be happy if the ones who become professionals at other 21st century careers also get into the "journalism" habit enough to want to write up some goings-on in town as a public sevice, or just to entertain and inform their neighbors. You know -- the way newspapers used to do.
To make a living as a reporter in the future will take more than writing skill, a perky personality on-camera, or the ability to post to Blogger or WordPress. It will take much better than average skill at storytelling -- in writing or multimedia. And it might require more specialized knowledge than most reporters of the past have needed. Add to that the ability to avoid the jargon and group-think of the traditional "specialist," in order to keep communicating with a wider audience. That's if we can just figure out a way to collect a paycheck from the hoped-for wider audience.
PS If someone paid me, I'd make this a lot shorter.
12:21:29 PM 
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