It’s easy to feel so damn uncertain, you know?
In anything, I mean. But especially in this thing called “journalism.” What’s to many a pariah of the modern age. What’s to some a bad word. Not something you bring up in mixed company, unless you want the question of “how’s business,” like anyone who’s anyone doesn’t already know.
Bad. Business is bad. And getting worse.
Just a few more years (months?) and it’ll all be gone, the breaking news, the bylines, tossed in the trash like yesterday’s fishwrap. Ask nearly anyone. The gig’s up. Time to move on.
I don’t buy it. Maybe, possibly, how it is now. Maybe the voice while we’re driving. Maybe the video of the man in a raincoat. Maybe that thing in the box at the stop sign.
But not what’s in it. Not the news. Not the what-just-happened, the what’s-around-us, the what-comes-next. That’s not going anywhere.
How could it? Every day seems more confusing than the next. The world grows more complicated by the minute. Lose the J-word, and the whole thing swells to a notch below unmanageable.
Journalists can take solace in one thing: people like to know. They like to figure it out. They like to learn about the world, and they like to trust they’re hearing the truth. Whether that truth looks like a paragraph or a picture, and whether it costs a subscription or a song, doesn’t much matter.
I don’t pretend to “get” the whos or hows or how much. I can’t say how we’ll pay or get paid for any of it. I’m as uncertain about the future of reporting as a job as I am about my own.
But I can still feel confident about something. That what I hear has importance. That what I share has value. And that what I do can make a difference.
And that makes me feel like it might be getting better.
