Uh-oh, he’s wrapping things up around here and about to indulge in some newspaper nostalgia about the good old days you know, when city rooms were filled with cigarette smoke and wiseacres, and editors used to speak proudly of having never gone to college.
Good old days? Well, sort of.
No matter how much the Jayson Blairs and Judy Millers have managed to muck things up, this continues to be a fun way to make a living. Delivering information that people otherwise wouldn’t have known and perhaps knocking down a few bad apples in the process remains as rewarding for me as it was nearly 30 years ago covering night cops in Newport News, Va.
And what’s sometimes lost in the current rounds of job cuts and related newsroom anxiety is how much better the overall quality of reporting, editing and photography has become over the years thanks in no small measure to several pieces of nifty technology.
You want to know how far things have come? Consider that when I first came to the Business Journal in 1996, our then-photographer, Todd Frankel, was still getting his film developed at a nearby camera store (I can’t remember whether he would go for the matte or glossy). Late Wednesday afternoons would be the moment of truth when Todd rushed in with an envelope of prints that would fill our pages the following week.
These days, photographer Ringo Chiu e-mails digital images to our news desk, where my selections are moved to the production department. Then they get placed on an electronic page, all in a matter of moments. Anyone under 30 would just shrug at the routine and yet it represents a profound transformation, giving our small newsroom a platform that’s competitive, or nearly so, with every paper in the country.
It’s what makes this transition between old and new media so scary and exciting at the same time scary because the foundation of what we call news is being upended by electronic upstarts of all stripes and agendas (legitimate and otherwise), but exciting because there are so many new ways of imparting fact and opinion. At this point, most every conceivable idea is being thrown against the wall, and if it all seems impossibly confusing, take comfort in the knowledge that you’re not alone. For all the yammering, no one has the first clue about where things will finally land.
Which is fine, except that it leaves people like me uncomfortably straddled between the old and new worlds. After all, I still take notes with a pad and pencil and lay out news pages with a pica pole (if you don’t know, just Google it). There are, of course, more efficient ways of getting the job done, but I just can’t break the ritual of drawing lines and scaling photographs. So kill me.
More true confessions: I like going through magazine and newspaper stacks because it’s easy to stumble onto a story that might have been missed in an electronic search. I like rifling through our corporate files because a 1996 annual report promising explosive growth in the next five years can be revealing when the company winds up filing for bankruptcy protection. I like paging through reference books that provide history and context areas that no one seems to pay much attention to anymore.
In just a few years, all those relics will be long gone, spoken with the same phony reverence as those cigarette-smelling newsrooms. Morning edition, evening edition, five-star final all of it replaced with a media world that has no cycles. Stuff just happens and then it goes out and gets refreshed. The more stuff, the better.
Like I said, a little scary. But always fun.
*Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal. He can be heard every Tuesday morning at 6:55 and 9:55 on KPCC-FM (89.3).