We were going to be Woodward and Bernstein.
I started college in the fall of 1974, weeks after Richard Nixon resigned. My dream was to work at The New York Times and to have a summer place on Cape Cod. Not that I’d ever been east of Minnesota, but that was the dream. And to do good by exposing corruption and malfeasance and dishonesty, just like Woodward and Bernstein.
When I got to South Dakota State University, I found a crew of similarly passionate friends, especially when I joined the college newspaper staff. Not that everyone wanted to live in New York or cover government, of course. But everyone was dedicated to doing the best, most honest journalism they could.
After college, I spent two months covering the Legislature for South Dakota Public Radio, then began more than nine years with United Press International when it was still a full-service wire service. But from there, I went into more targeted media–Advertising Age, Macmillan Computer Publishing, Thomson Financial Publishing, Writer’s Digest–that took me further and further from hard news reporting. These days, I work in marketing for the federal government, and do some writing and editing on the side. I now live in the metro area where Woodward and Bernstein reported their faces off and subscribe to the newspaper where they did it. I’m a quick train ride from New York, and not much more than that from Cape Cod. Dreams change.
Many of my college friends also transitioned. They’re college professors, attorneys, ad agency owners, healthcare consultants, political strategists. We’re passionate about what we do, but Woodward and Bernstein, we ain’t. Fewer than a dozen I know of are still involved in hard news journalism… and a couple have recently been downsized, including one who’s doing a killer blog on her job-hunting odyssey.
J-school grads always have moved on to positions with saner hours or more money or more prestige. But the death march this country’s daily newspapers are on because of our need for instant gratification, our insistence on having our news right here, right now, with the slant we expect and no “unnecessary” filters, surely has had big impact as well. And our demands, I think, often keep the reporters and editors from doing what we all wanted to do in the beginning–the best, most honest journalism possible.
I was a wannabe journalist, but could not land a job in the field when I graduated. The current scandals around the profession, so different from the admiration we felt in the post-Watergate years, must give us all pause. But I recently saw the original version of “The Front Page,” set in Chicago in the 1920s. In that day (and those that preceeded it), “journalism” was a fly-by-night, no holds barred, anything goes profession. It was only later that “ethics” and “professional training” emerged.