We Didn't Abandon Journalism; Journalism Abandoned Us

After three days of nonstop crying, my eyelids looked like Michelin tires.
I could barely see through the swollen red slits as I fumbled through the kitchen catch-all drawer, feeling around for something shaped like a writing instrument.
I thought I was prepared. I’d been expecting it for months. But the reality of receiving that phone call and learning that I was no longer needed after nearly 25 years on the job was a bigger disappointment than I was ready to handle.
Journalism wasn’t simply a job, or even a career. It’d been my life. Childhood friends as far back as elementary school recall me carrying around a reporter’s notebook, prodding them with endless questions and then writing little stories for the school newspaper.
Journalism is all I’ve ever wanted to do. Now it seemed as if my life was over. I had lost my purpose.
Voila! My fingers groping in the catch-all drawer uncovered what felt like a pen. Now for paper…
How ironic, I thought, grabbing a nearby pad of stationery bearing the logo of a local funeral home. It’d been a free gift for spending $10,000 in February cremating my sister-in-law; who had died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma way before her time.
It seemed apropos for my last will and testament.
I was forming the “G” in “goodbye” when I realized the pen wasn’t working. I had to spread my swollen eyelids open with my thumb and forefinger to inspect it closer. The pen bore the logo of the newspaper that had just laid me off. It figured.
I wasn’t about to scratch the words, “Goodbye, cruel world,” into the stationery using the end of a nonworking pen from a company responsible for my despondency, so I searched for an alternative.
On the kitchen wall was my antique Felix the Cat chalkboard.
“Goodbye, cruel world,” I wrote in chalk.
I stood back to admire my handiwork and couldn’t help but chuckle. The words appeared ridiculous on Felix’ round tummy. Well, it’d have to suffice.
I then ordered Oliver North, my Yorkshire “terror,” into the woods behind my house to retrieve a poisonous snake.
Just days before, the 7-pound Yorkie, a German shepherd wannabe, cornered and killed a water moccasin next to our pool. Oliver brooks no creatures trespassing into his yard and particularly delights in taking on snakes, which he whips around his head, beating them against the concrete until they die a slow, bloody, painful death.
With Oliver’s assistance, I figured I’d go out in style, like Cleopatra with her asp.
Oliver just looked at me and gave a hoarse bark as if to tell me that he had no intention of contributing to my death by venomous snake.
“It’s OK, boy,” I sighed, patting him on the head. “I wasn’t serious anyway.”
Why should I commit suicide when the newspaper industry had done a fine job of it for me?
The industry has been slowly killing itself for years.
Too late the industry realized it was easier to get news form the Internet and Iphones than to open a newspaper.
In an attempt to comfort me after I was laid off, friends commented, “They took away your job, but they didn’t take away your talent.”
“Yes, but they took away my ability to get paid for it. That’s pretty important, too,” I replied.
A fellow University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism grad who also received his marching papers put it into perspective.
“We didn’t abandon journalism,” he said. “Journalism abandoned us.”
This is true. We steadfast reporters stuck it out through all the many transitions, trends and technological evolutions journalism has experienced. We’ve always adapted. From typewriters to Compaq computers to laptops; from large-format cameras to 35 mm to digital; from letterpress to offset to composing; from narrative to inverted pyramid style to condensed news for today’s readers with no time to read. We’ve done whatever was demanded of us.
But when journalism could no longer keep up with the technology and still make money, when it failed to find a way to transition effectively to the Internet, the industry tossed aside those journalists who had devoted their careers to bringing fair, factual, thought-provoking news to readers.
The result is the public now receives condensed chunks of news from those remaining in the media who no longer have the time or resources to thoroughly research stories or the forum to run those stories even if they were able to conduct in-depth research.
Even worse, the public gets its news from so-called citizen journalists who have no training, no ethical guidelines and whose motivations are suspect.
This is not what Thomas Carlyle envisioned when he referred to journalism as the Fourth Estate in the early 19th century.
For the past 200 years, journalists have served as watchdogs, exposing countless political and corporate misdoings that would otherwise never have come to light.
Now zoning meetings once publicized by newspapers and attended by scores of concerned residents receive no publicity. Developments are approved helter-skelter with little to no opposition.
Issues that should be of general concern, such as a significant rise in domestic violence and rape in Tampa Bay associated with the economic downturn, go unreported. I know. I was working on this story when I was laid off.
As for me and my friends who have gotten the boot, we’ve always been flexible. We’ve always been willing to embrace new technology if it means reaching more people with our stories. Give us twitter. Give us video. Give us blogs. Give us air cards. We just want to report the news.