Journalism

There was a little article I spotted the other day in the newspaper about journalism.  Apparently, the job of being a journalist is now the lowest of the low as far as the public is concerned.

Being a reporter has never been a high paid job for the majority of journalists, and that's a fact.  But, where could you find a position where your best friend is your curiosity?  I'm speaking here of working for the smaller newspapers that give their reporters a little more freedom in developing stories. 

On a much more intensive level, reporters who give their readers the nuts and bolts of local and national happenings, like what Congress is doing or what the Supreme Court is doing, are part of our forefathers' plans for the United States.  The Freedom of the Press stands as one of the most important freedoms because the press is the link between the branches of government and the people.  The press members are supposed to be unbiased, and without an agenda of their own tell the facts so that the people can decide for themselves about what is going on.  Competition between newspapers pushed reporters to get the story first, since selling papers was the objective for the newspaper.

If you decide to go to a local government meeting anywhere around here, you might be surprised to find that there are no press representatives there.  Back in the day when I covered local meetings, there were always three or four representatives, hence there was a press table set up for this purpose because we all sat together.  Tom Ryan would come from the Beacon Journal if he had heard of some possible goings-on.  Then there were reps from the Repository, the Independent, and The Signal (our local paper).  So what happened to the press?  Economics is probably the biggest reason.  Newspapers have had to shrink their pool of reporters in order to turn a profit.  Look at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland that is struggling right now to put out a paper every day.

If a regular reporter (not a stringer) comes to the meetings now, they have a laptop or an iPad or something.  They literally write the story on the fly and send it in.  So you would think that technology would improve the presence of the press, wouldn't you?  But it hasn't. 

So what's a stringer, you ask?  A stringer is a reporter for the newspaper who attends meetings and only gets paid if the story is published.  They get paid by the inch of copy in the paper.  It used to be a decent part-time job for a homemaker, working a couple of evenings a week, and earning a little bit of extra cash.  The cost of gas, the smaller paper, and less advertising that determines the size of the paper have just about put stringers out of work.  There are not that many left.  But on the local level,  stringers helped the public find out what their local government was doing or maybe not doing.

Probably one of the reasons why Americans didn't really understand the affordable health care act is because mainstream media didn't do a very good job of reporting about it.  There were red flags all over the place and people who understand such things were trying to wave them.  However, the true cost of the plan and its one-size-fits-all provisions were never published like they should have been.  So now here we are with a much bigger problem than we had before.  And it isn't like there aren't going to be big losers in all of this because there will be. 

The word that comes to mind about journalism is responsibility.  I can't think of another job where with a bachelor's degree a person can have as much of an impact on society.  But something has happened so that too many journalists today don't embrace the responsibility part of the job.  There have been some who have outright fudged their reporting so as to win a prize or get a promotion or make heads turn.  There are those who report verbatim on whatever a talking head says with no attempt to do a little background work.  There are those who have their own agenda and do very little to rein in their own thoughts, rather than tell both sides of a story.  In short, some of the moral decay that we see in society today is reflected in journalism.  How low do we have to go before we hit bottom and then can start afresh?

There are some rules in journalism that should remain hard and true, because the country needs that person who can observe, assess, research, delve, and write.  And add to that a healthy dose of common sense.

Father Norm Douglas and an attorney in Akron founded Heart to Heart many years ago.  Their goal is to help businesses bring faith into the workplace.  Journalists definitely need God to do their job.  Someone once said that you should work as though your boss is God.  Then it doesn't really matter what your job is because by working for God, your work is upheld.

Well, that's it for today.  Pray for Luke who is very ill in the hospital.  He is only three and has cancer and has how developed pneumonia.