Everyone has a story. And told the right way, to the right audience, that story is going to be interesting to someone.
The problem is that the market continues to get too big and those little stories that people want to hear have no place in the papers the way they used to.
I remember being scared a few years back about what I was going to do after school since it looked like newspapers were failing left and right, and the first jobs to go were designers and copy editors. I love print design and decided early on to make that my concentration in the journalism field. The more I learned, the more I realized that I needed to have multiple skills sets to survive in this new dawn of journalism. This was an exciting discovery. Or so I thought.
What made it not so exciting was the realization that if I, as a multimedia journalist, am doing four different jobs that make up my current job, how was I gong to find the time to seek out those smaller stories that drive my passion for journalism?
The more people that leave = the more general work there is to do= more local stories that remain hidden.
For example:
Our local afternoon paper, The Albuquerque Tribune, closed its doors a few years back and the amazing hyper-localized journalism they delivered left with it.
“Things will be OK,” I told myself. The other paper will pick up the local angles that the Tribune left behind and we would all be happy again. That never happened though. In fact, not to my surprise now that I look back at it, the journalism got worse in our town. Now that there was only the giant and no David left to keep it honest, journalism quality plummeted on the local level. It seemed that the small attitude of the town disappeared with the small newspaper.
I soon stopped dreaming abut working at those big metro dailies and instead started looking for high quality medium to small sized papers. And I was so pleased in what I found. The small papers, in my opinion, are the unsung heroes and future of the journalism world. They look in all of the nooks and crannies and find hidden gems.
More and more too many papers are pushing national news that is way too old by the time it hits the racks the following morning. Old news before its out. Simple as that.
I personally would like to see the conglomerates that own the majority of the countries daily newspapers fail. I say this because once they fail to the point they don’t want to own them, newspapers will hopefully be bought by local companies and the newspaper in your town will reflect life in your town.
Of course the problem is how do we get back to true local journalism? Well if I knew that I would hope that someone would buy said idea from me, but until that happens… I’ll have to pretend to know how. The future lies in the youth. Like you haven;t heard that before right? Well its the truth. Younger people today have much more information readily available to them. This allows the creativity and ideas to be that more innovative when they surface. Now that there is no standard model left in the industry, the rules can be broken and reinvented.
I truly believe that if editors would embrace the new ideas our generation is coming up with, we will find that balance of innovation and tradition. And hopefully a little profit on the side.
Just remember big things can come from small packages, as well as newspapers.
But these time-tested pillars of success are beginning to topple.
