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Weekly UpdatesThere are days when I dream about quitting the newspaper business and opening my own coffee shop. I'd call it the Underdog Cafe. On rainy days, the lunch special would be tomato pie and biscuits. My lovable but dumb dog, Lucky, would bask in a pool of front-window light. Customers would feel so at home at the Underdog that sometimes--but not too often--they would forget to pay.
But the daydream always ends there, before the dinner menu is even sketched out.
After 23 years in the business, after seeing my white-haired brethren grudgingly accept buyouts, after the uncertainty of watching the corporate execs put our newspaper on the market--only to take it off when the economy tanked--not only am I still here at the Roanoke Times, but I still get excited when I happen onto a great story. That's why I stick with journalism, even as it threatens to bail on me.
Call me a Pollyanna; some of my favorite coworkers do. But there's a certain relief that came when I decided earlier this year to plant my entire body in the sand, Reporter's Notebook and all. I don't like the presses shutting down in Denver and Seattle. I hate the fact that thousands of American journalists have lost their jobs to buyouts and layoffs already this year, and many others have made the preemptive move of getting out before they're forced out.
But more than 40,000 newspaper journalists are still cranking away, and I'm grateful to be among them, having vowed to ride out the tsunami until they pry the company-owned laptop from my cold, ink-stained hands.
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As Poynter Online recruiting columnist and former Detroit Free Press recruiter Joe Grimm puts it, "Sometimes you might feel like you're being naive, but there's a certain relief that comes when you decide to stick with it and tell yourself: 'I'm tired of being uncertain; I'm staying put.' That's when people start sleeping again."
I've spent evenings, weekends and furlough days for the past few months talking to some of the hardy sleepers among us, sussing out the best psychological strategies for staying sane while staying put. Sometimes, the conversations buoyed my resolve; other times, they gave me heart palpitations.
A few journalists I contacted were so distraught they couldn't talk. Others obliged, but I had to employ my typing shorthand to deal with their rapid shifts between on and off the record because they were nervous about their editors' reactions to the story.
Reporter Lindsay Peterson says the discussion brought therapeutic relief. "It's like when your boyfriend breaks up with you, and you quit going out," she wrote after our talk, "and then a friend of his calls, and you spend three hours talking about him and whether you'll ever get back together again."
A my Ellis Nutt sees herself as a kind of midwife. A national award-winning enterprise reporter for Newark's Star-Ledger, Nutt believes she's witnessing the rebirth of journalism from a bedside seat, trying to manage the labor pains and hoping that, whatever happens, there will always be a way for her to tell stories and make the public's business known.
But, as any postpartum mom will tell you, the roughest part of labor is the time between the contractions; the uncertainty of not knowing when the next painful swell is coming and whether it will hurt more than the last.
Nutt was present at the end of 2008 when the Newhouse-owned paper lost 46 percent of its editorial staff. The farewells and obligatory cakes were staggered, with nearly half of the 150 staffers leaving on December 31. The grief was monolithic.
"It's sad to see so many good people falling away from the profession and so much institutional memory lost," she says. "Some days you feel like you're slowly being buried up to your neck, but you're still there, still breathing."
Journalists who cope best focus on what lured them into the business to start with, Nutt believes. "Journalism is needed now more than ever, from the smallest profiles of ordinary people to the investigations of where the bailout money is going."
This year, Nutt has investigated living kidney donations and the effects of reduced public funding on people with disabilities. "And you hear from people, and they thank you for listening to them and trying to tell their stories. And those are the things that never change. So you psych yourself up, because there are fewer people telling these stories, which means there are even more reasons for you to get out there and do them."
Because Nutt came to the profession later than most--at 54, she's worked for newspapers for 12 years--she retains an enthusiasm unusual for many staffers her age. She's perhaps also more apt to embrace collaboration with photographers, videographers and online producers, as journalists of all stripes try to build the medium of the future.
Nutt co-writes narration for video scripts that accompany her stories, reports and posts stories online for the paper's continuous news desk and tries to learn online skills from much younger staffers. While she's always working on at least one enterprise project, she likes to simultaneously tackle short-range stories, too.
"I know great reporters who just don't see themselves moving into the next phase of the business. But I'm not someone who only wants to work on projects; I like working on deadline. I'll pitch in and take dictation for someone in the field. I still love the excitement of being in a newsroom, and I don't mind having to learn new things."
Amid the shrunken newsroom at the Star-Ledger, a complicated camaraderie, borne of relief, survivor's guilt and excitement for the future, has emerged, she says. "We're starting over, and there is not quite optimism, but at least a sense of curiosity about what's going to happen.
"We're the ones left in the lifeboat. We made it off the ship, and we're out in the big ocean. But we're alive, and we're together, and one way or another, we are going to get to shore."
Already, Bill Reiter can hear his colleagues at McClatchy's Kansas City Star laughing. His buddies from J-school, too, the ones who call him when they're feeling nervous about the state of the industry.
In the testosterone temple that is the American newsroom, Reiter knows he'll be teased for his unbridled optimism, his belief that journalism's glass is still half full. "I feel like I live in Middle Earth, and the dark cloud has covered the land," Reiter says.
What right does he have to be so happy about his job? After all, he's a mortgage-holder with a journalist-wife and a kid on the way, and he works as a sports enterprise reporter at a paper that has had four rounds of layoffs, saying goodbye to more than 100 staffers.
There's plenty to do at work; he feels lucky to get to write Sunday takeouts on a Bill Reiter near-weekly basis. But he also spends half his free time "trying to talk fellow journalists off the ledge."
Here's what he tells them: "I can't save the newspaper industry, and I can't stop layoffs, and I can't impact the recession. I know this is a cliche, but I can only do the best work that I can do, and I happen to still love it. If you still love it, love it while you can." Besides, in this economy, no profession is layoff-proof.
Reiter, 31, believes journalists are craving colleagues and editors who inspire them, who trust them and who know that the key to rowing through the rocky shoals of reinvention is telling great stories.
"Everywhere I look there are signs that people are desperate to feel good about journalism," he says. The Web site sportsjournalists.com--where sports reporters typically complain about the uselessness of awards--took an uncharacteristic turn as participants urged the complainers to "be quiet; give us something to celebrate, for once!" Reiter recalls.
His buddy Reid Forgrave noticed the same response at a beer-and-bitch session following the latest Iowa Newspaper Association awards dinner. Forgrave, a reporter for Gannett's Des Moines Register, says the usual complaints about "my editor wouldn't let me write a 40-inch story; it Reid Forgrave had to be 25" were gone.
"The old complaints almost seem like a luxury now," says Forgrave, 30. Even with the announcements of Gannett-wide furloughs, "People weren't too happy about sacrificing a week's pay, but they weren't as irate as you might expect. It was more like, 'At least we're not getting laid off.'"
What keeps him going is the readers who are desperate to tell their stories. The day before his weeklong furlough was to begin in February, a source tipped him off to a 70-year-old woman being kicked out of her house because it was in foreclosure--even though she'd paid her rent.
"Those are the stories that I'm most scared of losing. You can always say foreclosures are up 4.2 percent, but when you show it happening to an old woman who's on her front lawn with her granddaughters going through her stuff ..."
Even though he can't always do it, Forgrave knows he does better work when he protects himself from newsroom negativity, even if it means trying to distance himself from some coworkers and the poisonous drumbeat of Romenesko postings. It would help, he adds, if more editors across the country doled out "honest, positive encouragement that plays to our conscience, to our calling--the reason we got into the business in the first place," Forgrave says.
He likes to take the long view, imagining the industry five or 10 years into the future: "We've figured out how to make money on the Web and we're back to the place where we're not all Chicken Little anymore.
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"It will probably have been good for us to have had the spotlight shone on us. For once, we'll feel more in tune with the people we're covering ... down to the level of what newspaper writers used to be and back to the people that we should be writing about more--the voiceless."
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