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.

What Will Happen to News?

First, read this.

This is the kind of story that makes a former journalist like me weep and gnash my teeth and feel old, outdated and sad.

Yesterday I spoke with a former colleague from the Los Angeles Times, Allison Cohen, who has started her own local newspaper, the Los Feliz Ledger. I am having her come talk to my UCSD class about new things people are doing. In her case she is jumping in to cover local news because the LA Times has given up on it completely, and people still care. She had just crunched her numbers and she did as well this year (when the stock market crashed) as she did the year before, when LA seemed to be booming. She was profitable in a year. And she is ready to start another paper, and start a little newspaper war. I won't say where. That is her secret.

But still she says she loses sleep wondering what will happen to news, to quality journalism, to newspapers.

I am an optimist--so I believe that newspapers and stories will continue in some form. That people will still want to know what is going on. That even if newspapers die eventually society will feel the lack of a watchdog and a new kind of news will spring up. Maybe the stories will be told differently, maybe it will all be on-line, but society will care what is going on, and will realize the value of having someone keep an eye on the government, the schools, the cops, the world--and writing that first, great rough draft of history.

But she had a different view. She said she wondered if people would just stop caring. She said maybe newspapers will die and no one will blink an eye. Maybe people will just swallow tiny blurbs on-line of superficial coverage. She said newspapers are dying, news is getting thin, and she sees no great outcry from anyone except the journalists themselves.

I want to believe she is wrong.

But I can't stop thinking about what she said.

Journalism 101

Here is the course I will be teaching this spring at UCSD, as it will be listed in the course catalog for the literature department.

This is an introductory reporting course for adrenaline junkies, adventurers and true storytellers. In this practical journalism workshop students will learn how to write and report a basic news story, pitch and deliver a feature, turn around a lively profile, keep a blog, and perhaps pound out a passionate personal essay. The class will introduce different journalistic forms and discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. We will debate the role of journalism in society, and how (and why) journalism must evolve in the 21st century. On occasion guest journalists will speak.
Students will be required to read a newspaper daily, and must be ready to discuss print and on-line news coverage in each class. We will read and analyze articles from local and national newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the San Diego Tribune, the Huffington Post and the Onion. Students will complete this course having reported real stories, and been edited as if for publication. In addition to submitting articles, active class participation will count significantly towards the final grade.

Would you sign up?