uExpress.com: Georgie Anne Geyer by Georgie Anne Geyer -- (04/25/2013) NEWSPAPER REPORTING WILL ALWAYS HAVE A PLACE

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NEWSPAPER REPORTING WILL ALWAYS HAVE A PLACE

04/25/2013

WASHINGTON -- At first I glanced at the data sent out by the respected Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., about the civic standing of news reporters today and smiled -- of course we are The Best!

Then, unfortunately, I looked at the pages again and realized I had been wrong, in fact, VERY wrong.

The Poynter Institute was quoting a jobs-predicting company called CareerCast, which had rated the top 200 jobs in America and (God forgive them) had ranked "newspaper reporter" as 200 out of 200!

It took me a while to pick myself up and stop myself from muttering words I rarely use. I thought of the dozens of years that I had worked in the printed press with job titles that became more delightful as I moved along -- society reporter, general assignment reporter, foreign correspondent, syndicated columnist, biographer, autobiographer and non-fiction book writer.

I particularly remember, in those early days of the '60s and '70s on the late Chicago Daily News, we had a wonderful lawyer on the paper, and he would come down every few days and stand by the door, looking at us and shaking his head.

Eventually, he would come over to my desk and say, "How can you all work at what you get paid?"

I would admit that, yes, it had crossed our minds. I started at $58 a week in 1959 and ended at $23,000 as a leading foreign correspondent in 1975 (but with four months off). But there was a little secret here. What my friend really meant was to be found in the words he didn't add: "and be as happy as you are?"

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Yes, that was what evened it out for us newspaper reporters. A person would go into the legal department, or to the publisher's office, and one feared she had wandered into a wake or some terrible plague that had just arrived with our Africa correspondent. But if you went to the city room, everybody was smiling, despite working hard, and often enough laughing hilariously. The only diseases to be found were various forms of excess, such as scotch drinking, sometimes on the job.

In all these years, wherever I was, I never woke up without a rush of joy to get out on the job. The great variety of my news friends felt the same way. We were fulfilling all of our needs to explore society (legally), to write as well as we possibly could, to be able to go up to anybody in the world and say, "Hello, I'd like to know if your wife has really run away," and to carouse at will with our precious compatriots. Hey, in the legal department they don't even smile when they're counting their money.

Ah, but I am missing something. CareerCast, as revealed by Poynter, has listed jobs as desirable or least desirable based on such factors as environment, income, outcome and stress. According to these, "reporter" is just below lumberjack, janitor, garbage collector and bus driver.

The data came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and trade associations.

CareerCast mentions, for instance, working under deadlines and being in the public eye as being negative for journalists. Where did these analysts come from? These are exactly the things that news reporters, with their showboating qualities, love most!

The Poynter article points out rightly that most of today's reporters are not only responsible for their regular stories, but also "for tweeting all day, perhaps writing a blog, perhaps taking video when you go to that school-board meeting." How can you write good copy when you are chopped into a zillion pieces all day?

Indeed, here you have the sickness of today's journalism schools, which have become not centers of historical thought on journalism, but only temples of worship to the latest mechanical techniques that can get news to readers far faster than most of them possibly want it.

The Poynter article ends with the dire warning that, thusly, young people are leaving journalism. Were it only so. There are far too many of them looking for jobs and for exactly the wrong reasons. Fly away, ye with little love in the very depths of your heart for real print journalism! Go to Wall Street and never smile again.

For we are obviously at a turn in the road in journalism. We'll have a few big national newspapers; then we'll have community papers that will thrive around news of cities and towns. Right now, the Internet is supposedly taking readers, but do readers of The Huffington Post know, for instance, that its writers aren't paid? And you think it was bad before.

No matter how this all sifts down -- and it will, five or 10 years from now -- there will always be a need for reporters. The news doesn't come up and bite you; you have to dig it out. And the ones who hold on will be the ones who feel the joy bubble up from inside and out into that wonderful laugh when you know that you've really found out something about your society that the rich lawyers will never, ever understand.