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June 1, 2006
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June 1, 2006 |
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EDITORIAL What it means to be a journalist You don’t own a small-town newspaper. It owns you. Amy Harper, a former editor of the News, wrote that in an article in the current “Guide to Yellow Springs” on the retirement of the paper’s old letterpress 14 years ago. Amy, of course, was right. Owning and running a community newspaper is a demanding job. There’s no such thing as a 40-hour-workweek. There’s always a project to complete or a problem to solve. If you’re not working, you’re thinking about work and how to improve your paper. If your heart is in it, and you want to do it right, you do more than what your title describes. You’re also a boss, manager, troubleshooter, public citizen, community advocate. Occupying your mind is a string of constant worries, such as the rising costs of health care, fuel and paper, and the challenge of adapting to new technology. You’re responsible for the livelihoods of dedicated employees, without whom you couldn’t publish the newspaper you love. But if you’re lucky, you’re not just a business owner, you’re also a journalist. And if you’re a journalist at a small-town newspaper, you have a great opportunity — and responsibility — to do meaningful work. You get to tell countless stories, interview interesting people and report on important decisions and essential issues in your community. You’re entrusted to keep readers informed about what’s going on in their small town, because if community journalists aren’t doing this work, chances are, no one else would. Through words and photos, you document the life of your community, the place where you live, one week at a time. You don’t do it for the money (you certainly won’t bring home a big paycheck at a community newspaper), or the byline, or the awards (although prizes are nice). You do it because you love writing and telling stories. You do it to make your community a better place in which to live and work. You do it to make a difference, a difference that you can literally feel every day. As a journalist, you have opportunities to help people make intelligent decisions that affect their lives and their community. You provide vital information that leads to change. You celebrate those who do good deeds and remember those who leave too soon. You strive to ensure that government operates in the open and that officials are held accountable. You fight to uphold freedom of speech and of the press. You make sure that citizens have a say in public policy. You’re rewarded whenever you open someone’s eyes to a problem or a new opportunity. And along the way, you yourself certainly learn much. You’re guided in this work by a core set of standards, or values, among them: tell the truth, get it right, be fair and impartial. Readers and your peers judge you by these standards. Try as you might, you make mistakes. But you have to keep working like hell to meet these standards, every day, in every thing you do. Because whether you’re a journalist, a business owner or both, all the hours and hard work mean nothing if you fail to live by those standards. Your credibility and integrity are everything when you run a business and when you make your living as a journalist. You can never truly be successful if your word is worthless, if you act unethically, if you can’t be trusted. That’s why you can be a gifted writer or a brilliant business owner, but at the end of the day, what’s most important are the values and the integrity by which you live and work.
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