Today's young journalists are writing a new business model

By JOSEPH R. SCHWARTZ
Published July 14, 2007

Reporters are supposed to ask the tough questions, but as an aspiring journalist, lately I've been the one forced to provide answers.

Why do you want to work for a newspaper? Don't you know that this industry is a dinosaur and that reporters are a dying breed? Haven't you heard that your generation doesn't read print on paper?

The vitality of this industry and doing what I love are too important to not reply.

There's no better or more rewarding way to serve the public than to connect with readers daily, and nothing tops seeing a stranger reading your bylined story. No two days are the same. You can become an expert in almost any niche, gain access to groups you otherwise wouldn't know existed and meet people you never would have had the courage to approach without a press badge.

And, most important, you can make an impact in your community. You write the article that's framed on a grandfather's wall and passed down through generations. You protect your neighbors from getting run over by their government.

And so against advice from reporters, relatives, friends and career counselors, I've thrown myself into this business.

I spent last year as editor in chief of the Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina student newspaper with 38,000 avid readers. I interned last summer at the (Greensboro) News & Record, the third largest paper in my home state and an early innovator in blogging. Now I'm an intern here at the St. Petersburg Times, one of the last venues where real journalism matters more than the bottom line and the company is betting on the future.

But I've been warned. Profits everywhere are plummeting. Newsrooms, circulation and even the physical paper are shrinking. Pension packages are as outdated as typewriters.

Pessimistic publishers nationwide make me feel like my education and work experience are preparing me to take the baton in a race that too many already feel is lost. I'm going to run anyway, even if I have to use a new route.

Despite dwindling circulation, the desire of citizens to be informed and participate in a democracy is not declining.

A recent New York Times/CBS/MTV News poll found that 54 percent of 17- to 29-year-olds intend to vote in 2008. About 23 percent of that age group turned out to vote in 2004 compared to only 20 percent in 2000, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. People want more news, not less.

Maybe they aren't going to scour a printed product every morning over a cup of coffee and an omelette, but they'll listen to podcasts or read e-mail alerts on their iPhones while they scarf down a breakfast bar.

But until you can pick a laptop out of a vending box or make Web sites easier on the eyes, the portability, permanence and presentation that newsprint offers can and will have value.

Media companies that don't realize this and insist that newspapers are dying will be the first ones to keel over. Others will adapt.

Regardless of what lies ahead for the printed product, the tool belt of a newspaper - credibility, the ability to disseminate information concisely, the gathering of information people need to know but wouldn't otherwise - still is essential to daily life.

True reporting, especially on local news, still is a valuable commodity. The last time I looked Google didn't have its own reporters covering city halls and courthouses across the land.

For all the get-out-while-you-still-can speeches I've heard, I've also been encouraged. The best insight came from a Washington Post Internet whiz who told me at a conference that newspapers will be like record companies, which haven't pressed vinyl in years but bear the same names and still make music.

Newspapers will remain vehicles to provide news, be it on paper, online or through venues we've yet to contemplate, he said.

The field is changing so rapidly that young people are becoming increasingly marketable. To us the Internet isn't a newfangled, daunting abyss. My Tar Heel colleagues are getting jobs at Time, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times because we bring both a youthful perspective and multiplatform expertise that's foreign to many who have occupied traditional newsroom seats for decades.

It's up to us to write a new business model, and while I don't have all the answers, the questions aren't going to stop me from entering a business that is vital to our democracy.

[Last modified July 14, 2007, 01:32:43]