Death brings sadness. There are a lot of sad journalists.
Death’s shadow hovers like a cloud over news organizations. Its sickle slices down to cut out victims. In the industry, a plague-like sickness weakens us all. No one is sure who next will feel the blade. As February faded, the Rocky Mountain News died just 55 days shy of its 150th birthday. Three weeks later, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last newspaper. How many more will fall before year’s end?
We could wallow in grief.
Alternatively, we could throw an old fashioned New Orleans Jazz Funeral. Play the dirge for the march to the cemetery, say goodbye, and cut the body loose. Pump up the volume for a jazzy celebration on the way home.
What’s to celebrate? For one thing, the noble calling of the recently departed, which just so happens to be our own calling, journalism. As members of this industry, we believe in the crucial importance of our craft. Simply put, journalism protects democracy.
Without journalists, Richard Nixon would have been President for 8 years.
Without journalists, the torture would have continued at Abu Graib.
Without journalists, the world would not have watched the tank man’s defiance in China, or heard Ghandi’s message, or seen the dogs bite in Birmingham.
I could go on.
While the technology is changing, and newspapers and television seem strangely dated, the need for journalism is as great or greater now than ever. Also, the hunger for journalism is as great or greater now than ever.
People didn’t wake up three months ago and decide they didn’t want to know what was going on in their world – a world filled with economic uncertainty, military hostilities, and threats of global warming disasters. Credible information is of dire importance.
So, if there’s a great demand on one hand, and a dramatic loss of supply on the other hand. What does that mean? I contend it means there’s a Market Opportunity. Fire up the band, we’re not only celebrating the noble cause lived by the recently departed. We are also celebrating historic opportunity.
Every so often, a seismic shift comes along that changes the world and those who are alive in those moments have a decision to make. My friend Andy Hoar put it this way: when the car was invented, those in the carriage industry had to choose whether to keep making wagons for horses or to add a gasoline motor to the wagon and put the horse to pasture. Technology changes. We either thrive in the future or die in the past.
Let’s thrive by creating the new journalism model for the future.
Let’s put this new technology to work to find better ways to practice this noble calling.
Let’s succeed not only as reporters, but also as businessmen.
Democracy is waiting and depending on our success.
If you’ll join me in this quest, please let me know.
Paul Adrian 