Journalism On Brink Of New, Exciting Era

By JANET E. COATS The Tampa Tribune

Published: Sep 29, 2007

When I started journalism school at the University of Missouri almost a quarter-century ago, there were three tools each student had to have.

You needed a pica pole, the metal ruler we used to measure out each page of the day's newspaper as we drew it on a layout sheet. You had to have a copy of The Associated Press Stylebook, which we were required to memorize. The final tool at Missouri was a copy of The Journalist's Creed, the guiding principles for the craft written by Walter Williams, the school's first dean. We had to memorize that, too.

The pica pole I keep in my desk is a relic now, a reminder of the days before computerized page design. I can search the AP stylebook electronically whenever I have trouble remembering when to use "further" or "farther." But The Journalist's Creed still lives within me just as it did in 1983, even as I manage the transition of The Tampa Tribune's journalism into a digital age.

"I believe that the public journal is a public trust," Williams wrote. "That all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is a betrayal of this trust."

I believe that is just as true today as it was when Williams wrote it in 1906. It is true whether the journalism we produce appears in print or online, whether it is thrown onto your doorstep in the predawn hours or beamed into your phone around the clock.

My belief in that principle once would have been universally held by journalists -- that serving the public trust is our role, and that it is a role society values.

There are many inside this industry who doubt that. Their doubts are linked to the challenges print journalism faces, their worries about what journalism looks like in an online world. Journalists make a living out of covering change -- the kind of dramatic change that makes news. But as that kind of change has come to our own business, we've often found ourselves paralyzed with fear.

The changes that have come to newspapers haven't exactly been fast-moving or particularly surprising. Circulation and newspaper household penetration numbers have been sliding for years, certainly for my entire career in this business. What we seemed certain of, even in the face of declining numbers, was our influence. We told ourselves that print journalists set the news agenda in this country, and everyone else eats from our table.

But lately, we don't seem quite as sure about that, either. With the explosion of online news sites, the audience has more choices than we could have dreamed of back in the days when you had two options -- subscribing to the morning paper or the afternoon paper.

Expectations have changed, too. People expect to be able to get their news any time they want it, on the computer or shot directly into their phones. Reporters and photographers are expected to use those tools to file news constantly, as it happens, documenting every incremental development in real time.

But perhaps the greatest change, beyond the mind-blowing array of technology options available, is the change in our readers. They've gone from passive recipients of news to active participants in the creation and editing of content. Now that the barrier to entry in the publishing business has been dramatically lowered -- it's no longer the millions it takes to buy a printing press, but the hundreds it takes to buy a computer -- we've opened up a world of opportunity to share viewpoints, to argue, to correct, to learn.

Journalists can embrace that world and figure out our proper place in it. Or we can sit in our ivory tower and keep watching as the water rises all around us.

I've grown impatient with this industry I love and its constant hand-wringing over whether print will survive. I know that print has a lot of life left in it, although perhaps in a different format than we've grown used to reading. I think we're pondering the wrong question when we obsess over the future of the printed page. The question we should consider, I think, is whether journalism will survive. As much as I love ink on paper, journalism is not about the package it appears in. It is about the ethical values journalists live by in their collection of the day's news.

In a digital world, our task is translating those values online -- and keeping them relevant to an audience that will take bits and pieces of our content and meld it, shape it, comment on it to create something altogether different from what the reporter started with.

To be successful, I think we have to take a page from our past even as we leave some of the old conventions and practices of journalism behind.

We have to remember our role as watchdogs, and we have to be bold in the pursuit of that task. I worry sometimes that the fact the public thinks so poorly of journalists keeps us from living up to that charge as fully as we should. We're well aware that the public perception of journalists is as scandalmongers, as biased advocates of one political point of view or another, as purveyors of gossip and tragedy.

I can't speak to how journalism is practiced inside the Beltway or in the power centers of New York. As someone who has made her living in local news reporting, that cynical view of media doesn't mesh with my experience working with journalists who cover local news. The journalists I've worked with, in Texas and Kansas, Virginia and Florida, have been hard-working people who cared about getting the story right. The local journalists I know try their best to understand complicated and arcane pieces of the public's business, then try their best to explain those matters in clear language to their readers.

They have, almost to a one, been people who love the place they live and want to see it get better. They have made it their lives' work to contribute to that effort by providing people with the information they need to make good decisions -- to govern themselves. Keeping journalism vital, no matter the format, isn't something that serves only the self-interests of journalists. The demise of independent, ethical, informed newsgathering would not bode well for the health of our democracy.

But we have to move beyond simply embracing our role -- our constitutional duty -- as the public watchdog. We have to open ourselves up to other voices. We have to recognize that our journalism is enriched by the participation of our readers in creating it.

The Internet has created a world of fact-checkers, readers who will challenge journalists, ask us to explain our methods, offer different points of view. Some journalists argue that during their days of dominance, newspapers created a common information base for the community. It was tougher, they argue, to avoid stories that might be hard or boring or not specific to your interests. The Internet makes it too easy to screen those stories out, to create a world where the only information you get is that which reinforces the views you already hold.

I can see the point, but I'm willing to make the trade for a more vibrant, inclusive, challenging marketplace of ideas for those of us who want to engage. That common base of information provided by newspapers back in the "good old days" too often excluded the views of racial minorities, women, young people, the poor or those whose social or religious viewpoints kept them out of the mainstream. We are well on our way to a more level playing field when it comes to introducing ideas to the public conversation.

The key to journalism's future, I think, lies in finding the right blends of "professionally" produced news with content that comes from non-journalists. At the Tribune and TBO.com, we've been discovering that power in exciting ways this year. We started posting photo galleries at TBO.com that combine pictures taken by Tribune photographers with photos submitted by our readers. The result has been a more dynamic view of life in Tampa.

We've long invited reader comments on our stories. Recently, we've redirected a corps of Tribune journalists to focus on providing continuous news at TBO.com. The number of local stories we're posting online has risen dramatically as a result, and that means we're giving readers more opportunities to talk about a wider variety of stories. We look at those reader comments faithfully, and we regularly derive tips or ideas that generate even more stories.

The partnership between those of us who do journalism for a living and the readers who submit content of their own means that we have more eyes on the community. I've often said the job of a newspaper is to reflect all aspects of life in the communities we serve. The blending of this content makes that mission attainable in a way that relying solely on our newsroom simply did not.

The final paragraph of Williams' Journalist's Creed imagines a "journalism which succeeds best -- and best deserves success " It is a journalism that "is stoutly independent, unmoved by pride of opinion or greed of power; constructive, tolerant but never careless, self-controlled, patient, always respectful of its readers but always unafraid." It is, wrote Williams, "a journalism of humanity, of and for today's world."

By combining the watchdog reporting we've practiced so long in print with an online world where true conversation is possible, where the focus can be both outward and inward, we have the best chance ever to create the successful journalism Williams wrote about. It is the power of both -- professional journalism practiced ethically and citizen journalism practiced responsibly -- that can create a journalism that really does make a community better.

News In A Digital Age

In the past year, the Tribune has changed the way we provide news and information online, adding new information options and increasing the amount of local news we provide at TBO.com:

The Continuous News Desk -- in August, we redeployed more than 20 journalists from the Tribune, TBO and Channel 8 newsrooms to work on a continuous news desk. The goal is to provide immediate, continuous coverage of breaking stories in the Tampa Bay area, around the clock. These journalists cover everything from major breaking crime stories to weather updates to traffic problems in the area. We feature continuous news reports on our home page, at TBO.com.

In August, we also started two new blogs -- Weather Dog and the Crime Blog -- that focus on two topics we know online readers are very interested in reading about. You can find those blogs and other blogs we offer at the TBO home page under the "Our Blogs" area at the bottom of the page.

Community Web sites -- Last spring, we launched community Web sites at TBO that give readers the opportunity to read about neighborhood news and to share their own news and photographs. The Web sites are companions to our community news sections, which appear in Hillsborough County editions on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Go to TBO.com, click on the "community" tab at the top of the page and you can view a menu of the local Web site offerings.

Prep sports coverage -- Our sports staff has created Web pages for every local high school, where readers can find the latest news, stats and photographs featuring their favorite teams. Go to TBO.com, click on the "sports" tab and then choose the "preps" category.

Snap! photo galleries -- Our Snap! photo galleries online give readers the chance to submit their own photographs and have them displayed along with photographs from The Tampa Tribune staff. Our Snap! galleries are available on the TBO home page.