A Gift From My Students...

who I have not even met yet.

Next Thursday night I teach my first journalism class at UCSD. I am polishing off my syllabus today. I have spent recent weeks pulling articles and recruiting interesting and various journalists to speak.

But already these students have given me a gift. They have reminded me how much I love journalism, and how deeply I believe in it. Editors, and any kind of writing teacher, always advise writers to write their stories like you are talking to a friend. In other words, you have to imagine your audience.

In recent weeks I have found that I am constantly talking to my students. I am giving them impromptu lectures on why journalism matters as I work out on the elliptical at the Y, and I am telling them stories of how great journalists are and what a privilege it is to work with great reporters as I shop for groceries. I am pleading with them to reinvent journalism--so that it survives--as I walk my son to school in the morning. I feel like I am on a mission: to go and teach them what I know so that they can travel into the future with the best tools of the olden days (my days!) . And can leave the rest behind. (My generation of journalists was oddly caught between the baby boomers and the next group coming up--who were shut out of this system in large part--but will get the chance to create something new).

And as I write these letters and lectures in my head I realize how much I love the world of journalism. Thinking of journalism in recent years has been so painful. I am watching the paper I loved and labored for being driven into the ground. It is literally disappearing before my eyes--sections are disappearing, bylines are disappearing, and the pages are getting smaller and smaller. My friends are being fired and the stories are declining in quality. An institution that took 100 years to build is going to be destroyed in five. So I have dwelt in the place of pain. And tried to focus on new things.

But now I can remember the joys of journalism. I feel it bubbling out from inside me. I can't wait to tell my students that journalism really is the greatest job in the world.

I got to travel to leper colonies in Japan, skunnel with students in Ventura, interview politicians local and state, talk to Marion Nestle, sit in on NIH sponsored prayer studies and cover wildfires, bank robberies and crazy court cases. I never won a Pulitzer, but I tried to change the world every day. I worked with some of the coolest, funniest, smartest, most interesting people in the world. And every day really was an adventure.

I would have done it all for free.