We Are Still Needed – More Than Ever

(The following is adapted from the Keynote Convocation speech I gave at the San Jose State University Journalism School graduation on Thursday, May 22, 2008.)

When I started at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1992, our stories would have a half-million readers a day. Now, thanks to the internet, we frequently get several million sets of eyeballs on our top stories.

The trouble is that those eyeball sets don’t all pay 50 cents apiece. That’s why newspapers are losing money all over the country; the medium is morphing and we haven’t figured out how to tap the new money streams.

The upside is, we are still read. A lot.

And we are still needed – more than ever.

Society needs true reporters and editors who have been seasoned and trained to be able to objectively report what’s going on, dig beneath the surface, speak truth to power, hold leaders accountable, spin a smart feature, engagingly explain an important happening or societal trend – in other words, do all those stereotypical but utterly true things we’ve been getting paid to do for more than a century under the modern conception of journalism.

Ranting opinions in stream-of-consciousness blogs are entertaining, and sometimes they are even a valuable supplement to what we do. But they don’t replace us. At their best, they join – and that’s where I think some very hopeful signs of the future can be found.

Like Huffington, some web news sites are increasingly doing original reporting in addition to the stuff they pick up from traditional news outlets and tack in alongside all that opinionated ranting. The trouble is they are small operations, and have to be, by definition. Only 7 percent of the media industry’s advertising is online. You can’t pay for 250-person news staffs like The Chronicle’s on that. You instead get a few editors overseeing a legion of cheap freelancers, or you get one or two dozen journalists at places like Huffington. That’s about the size of a small-town newspaper.

But that will change, and that’s something to feel optimistic about.