Not afraid of change

I spoke before a group of fabulous women journalists, writers, authors and marketing creatives Saturday and it lifted me up. The Illinois Women’s Press Association is a cross-generational collection of women who keep reinventing themselves and keep pushing forward at a time of great tumultuous disruption in the media.

We talked about staying relevant and telling engaging stories before a fickle and fleeting audience. Some women have written so many books it was dizzying. Some quilt together a career in writing after they get home from their day jobs as attorneys and engineers.

We talked about the state of the media and the state of the world, how to use our energy for change and how our voices matter. I saw a woman I had not seen in more than 10 years; we met at a Journalism & Women Symposium in Napa Valley in 1997. A former student came with her mother, both of them writers and both of them looking to find ways to stay relevant.

Most Saturdays I am watching wrestling matches in hot high school gyms across the Chicago suburban landscape, screaming my son’s name in encourgament. I knew when I booked this speech it was at the end of the season, and I would not need to be in a gym that day. 

But the few hours at the IWPA event were well-spent. The creativity, congeniality and genius in that room were inspiring. Next Saturday I can do the laundry and grocery shop. This Saturday I was happy to be in the company of women who want to move mountains one word at a time.  

  

Putting It Out There

   I get this. I have been publishing since I had my own newspaper when I was 10, The Juvenile Journal.  So I understand the risk you take when you put your words out into the universe. You have to expect to get feedback, both positive and negative. Not every one loves you as much as your mother does. And not every one respects your words. The wish is that they do.

   Journalists should be able to have a reasonable expectation that if they do a diligent job reporting and researching, writing and attempting to be accurate, fair, balanced and forthright, the reader/consumer/user of their content will respect it. But that is not always the case. Bloggers, consumers and readers can attack with a level of vitriol that seems as if it is aimed at the barbarians who pillaged the village, not the writer who misspelled the expert’s last name.

A person at one of my book signings for my new book, “Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page,” recently said she was terrified of making a mistake  so she got out of journalism, even though we both had been trained at the same journalism school. I said anyone in any profession could have that kind of fear– a lawyer afraid he or she will say the wrong thing in court and hurt the client, not help. A dentist afraid he will damage a nerve, a doctor afraid he won’t diagnose a severe  illness in time. Heck, even a teacher can be afraid he or she will give the  wrong impression to a student on a topic and that impression will stick, false or not.

       But you try anyway. You write the story, you try your absolute damndest to genuinely convey what it is like to be in a certain place at a certain moment, with access to this person, that event, those words, that news. And while you are doing the reporting and the typing or the  recording on video or audio, you are attempting to tame if not silence  the monster that is your ego in order to perfectly articulate a truth. Even a small truth, making careful notation of the color of the chair, the number of people on the parade float, the amount spent on the healthcare program.   

       I tell my students you start the process with a respect for the sancitity of your own byline. Not a worship of it, but a respect that what goes under your byline better be right. And it better be your best work. As much as I love to see my name on the spines of books or on scores of search pages on google, I also acknowledge the possible weight of having something assoicated with my byline that is inaccurate, a misrepresentation, a misstated truth.

I have made a few mistakes in my work in almost 30 professional years writing for newspapers, magazines, websites, books and radio. But they were mostly minor. My worst mistake was when I was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald and in a feature I said a woman had a glass eye, when all she had was blindness in one eye. I had read a clip about her accident, observed that her one eye did not move with the other and had a flatness to it, unlike the sparkle in her other eye. So I thought I verified when I asked, “So tell me about the accident with your eye.” And she did, and I wrote it down. But I somehow thought that because she lost her sight, she had her eye replaced. It wasn’t intentional, it wasn’t malicious, but she sure made my editors know I was wrong. I was just plain stupid. And I never forgot how humbling it was and how completely ridiculous  I felt.

I have this new book out, and the reviews are starting to come in. Mostly they are very positive, but a few have lines that sting.

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4463
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/arts/content/gen/ap/entertainment/Reviews/Book_Review_Everyman_News.html

   I guess it’s because I have never spent more time on a single project than on this book. It was also intellectually and creatively my most challenging work– aside from parenting. But I also know that I did it, I wrote it and I put it out there. Sometimes I feel like writing and publishing is like wearing a huge target on your back. I tell students in my writing workshop that it is worth it to take that risk. That your voice matters, that what you have to say is worth the effort. That you put it out there and wait for the push back, if it comes at all.

And that you keep trying and keep writing and keep publishing because your byline is sacred.

  

Ink on paper vs. ideas anywhere

I live in the Chicago area where two newspaper dramas are playing out with different scenarios. At the Chicago Sun-Times, a nearly 20 percent staff cut was proposed in an effort to save $51 million. At the Chicago Tribune, new owner Sam Zell (who paid $8.2 billion for the deal) is trying to convince staffers he is “a direct agent of change” who will not interfere with content. Is that possible?

The buzz in local media is that this will be a one-newspaper town soon (not fun, I was part of the Dallas Times Herald before it bit the dust), but I think such premature projections miss the point. This is an opportunity fo the Sun-Times to reinvent itself, taking the best of the brand and making the content the commodity in a new delivery mode.

Naysayers say printed newspapers will soon all be extinct. Ink on paper is ancient. True. But saying there will no physical product is like saying because there is air travel available, no one will take the train. Or the bus. Or drive. Sure they will. According to journalism.org, 51 million people buy the newspaper everyday, and more than 124 million read it every day. (Must be people picking up all those leftover copies in Starbucks.)

As journalists and as consumers, the future is about cooperating with each other and looking to see what the audience wants when and why, not just blindly producing a product and hoping to God someone buys it and reads it. Can the Sun-Times evolve into the best informational news site locally? Can it drop walls between consumer and journalist and allow more citizen journalism locally and more long-form, invetsigative and enterprise work done by talented staff? 

We have to think of newspaper identities as brands of content. We no longer think of National Public Radio as just a radio outlet. There are photo slideshows, video and text on the website. The New York Times is no longer just a text newspaper arriving with a thud on your doortsep Sundays. They offer consumers video, audio, blogs, photos, slideshows, the whole multimedia mix.

The myopic view of a newspaper company as only able to fit into one business model of a printed commodity with accompanying ads is not just old school, but all wrong. People don’t buy a newspaper to find out the score to the game anymore. They already know it by the time the paper is printed. Consumers look to the brand of a newspaper for its content and its style. So why not think about how that brand identity could  migrate to another delivery mode or many delivery modes  and be successful? Can we imagine newspapers as something other than ink on paper, and brainstorm for new ideas?         

What is news and what is just words?

  I teach the freshmen in  my 201-1 Reporting & Writing classes at Northwestern University about the traditional definitions of newsworthiness and the judgment calls that help reporters and editors decide what they should cover when, where, how and why . Lately I am thinking I should throw these rules out the window. Because as the media landscape gets more and more crowded and the audience have more options of places to retrieve information from, it feels as if so many of us from mainstream media to citizen journalists and bloggers are flying by the seat of our pants.

It seems as if the filters are gone. The outtakes are viral. The personal observations you would have left in your notebook a few years ago are now the front page story. Everything goes. Grab a camera, a recorder, shoot a video, make a slideshow, blog your impressions. No discernment. Do anything and everything you can. Just do it. POst it now. No need to polish it for later. When anyone can have an audience on a social network site, why work all day to gather and vet the info for 10 inches of printed text in a newspaper?

As the lines between audience and media have become porous and each sector has grandly influenced the style, content and sourcing of the other, there is the possibility that all we end up with is chaos. The worst case scenario heeds what I call “Chicken Little Journalism,” when rumor and third-hand anecdotes become urban myth legitimized by their ubiquity and repitition. News can become like a printed or digital version of the childhood game of telephone. The best case is that stories become deepened by inclusion of sources and what we end up with is  a democratization of news that truly informs all, and is less top-down than all-around.   

I am amazed by how much time some bloggers spend sending out information and commentary and I wonder when they do the rest of their lives. And then I remember what it is like to work on a newspaper and spend days and weeks on a story and have it either shift completely in focus or be killed. Sometimes it really did feel like an editor killed a story. The possibility of creating a narrative from nothing had died. So having an outlet for all that legwork would be great.   

All I know is that I am in the fortunate position of having seen thousands of talented and  inspired writers and reporters at the beginnings of their careers, instructing them in claases on how best to tell a story, how best to harness that creativity with accurate information and how to move past just typing words to creating a product that makes an impact.

As the elements of newsworthiness change and how we tell stories becomes more layered with the introduction of more tools across more platforms, we have to keep asking what is news and what is just words. Or images. Or audio. We have to keep asking why we focus on reportting and writing on this trend and not that, and why interview this person and not her. Because in the end it is not just about filling up time and space and airwaves with content of any kind. It is about filling up time and space and airwaves with content that is worth our time.           

Welcome to Everywoman News

As an assistant journalism professor at the Medill School of Northwestern University, I will post regular comments about events in the media landscape that affect the lives of women. I am an author, journalist, workshop instructor, keynote speaker and mother. I look forward to your comments in this space. To learn more about me, please visit my website.