I’ve been a journalist for 20 years– through full-time jobs at Newsweek, MTV, CNN, ABC, Oxygen, and NPR; part-time ones at One Economy, KALW, and WNYC; the founding and (ongoing) rebuilding of PopandPolitics.com; and three non-fiction books on race, politics, and media. I’ve rolled with the punches and thrown a few. But now more than ever, the business that I entered at the age of sixteen, with my first national publication, is, well, in a hell of hurt. Many of my highly skilled friends who report, edit, or run newsrooms are unemployed, underemployed, or just plain scared.

I say this to set the table for a series of blog pots/musings. I’m a practitioner of journalism; a consumer of journalism; a critic… sometimes a journalism educator; sometimes an entrepreneur. I’m worried, and not just for myself. (I would be lying if I said I don’t have many jobs and opportunities; and disingenuous if I said I was calm.)

Lots of people are worried about the fate of reporting and media in America. Organizations are going bankrupt or out of business, including scores of America’s daily newspapers. Tens of thousands of journalists are being given their walking papers and finding they cannot re-enter the industry. We have created ways that entirely new forms of media can upend “old media,” but that digital victory is without a clear profit model. Yes, in the short term, media is the crushed anthill: damage, death, panic, rushing disorder. But I believe that journalists, like our smaller, more resilient, and far more numerous insect cousins, are prone and programmed to rebuild.

Rebuilding is great. But is it enough? What if we put the profit back in media? What if you can build new media empires that make the owners rich or the foundation heads lauded; the employees comfortable; and the consumers reasonably satisfied? What then? Do we in the business breathe with relief, pay off our credit card bills, and settle in for another round of who-gets-the-corner-office? We’re worried about the means and the method of rebuilding media. But judging from my personal on- and off- the record discussions with for- and non-profit media businesses, as well as interactions at an endless numbers of “whither this/whither that” panels and conferences (and looking at the demographics of who’s in the room)… we’re not ready to face our biggest demon. That demon is exclusion: the way many Americans are cut out of media production and consumption, and the way many of us in the business are sanguine about it.

We in the media are not “the people,” nor do we represent them as fully as we often claim to. “Citizen journalism,” as we now call it, may be valuable and produced by non-traditional journalists. But most of the people who create it are still more educated, more technologically skilled, and more likely to be white than the demographics of the overall U.S. population. (By and large, “citizen journalists” are also less skilled at tasks like investigative reporting and historical research than traditional journalists.)

When forty percent of Americans are of limited literacy, let alone whatever digital divide still remains, then we have a much bigger problem than trying to build innovative blog rings, aggregators, local news sites or content engines. When the ranks of non-white journalists, already limited, are falling faster in the era of cutbacks than they were before–we have a problem. When organizations question the objectivity of people who fall outside of institutional norms… in some newsrooms, say, gays and lesbians; in others, Southerners or rural people … but they DON’T question the means and motives of people who fit the majority: that is a problem. When the journalism organizations designed to champion diversity have drawn so many checks from corporations that they cannot afford to challenge business owners… or only realize too late (once the checks are gone) that they should be… that too is a problem.

We are only as good as our willingness to change. And while the journalism industry is willing to rebuild itself, I am not convinced we’re challenging ourselves to provide an ethical context around reporting on a diverse society in transition.

Recently I met in a newsroom with a younger journalist who said: “It’s ridiculous that the newsroom is this white in a city this diverse.”

I shrugged and nodded. It wasn’t a “you’re wrong” shrug and nod. It was more a “yeah, been there, done that, wrote the book, fought the layoff, got my butt whipped, still standing, what did you expect?” gesture. The reality is, I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t have anything to say that would have inspired this person.

Now, after much reflection, I do. I say to myself as much as to anyone else in media: “Keep fighting for your ideals… if you don’t win, you will at least know why you are in the game.” I believe good journalism usually comes from a mix of vocation, or personal calling, and avocation– the latter in the sense of having a “day job” rather than having a hobby. Most successful journalists I know are, as one college student who recently interviewed me put it, “hustlers”– people whose mix of skill, institutional memory, luck, and self-promotional tendencies make them formidable at staying in the game.

Most of us will have not just several jobs but several careers in our lifetime. I don’t count on being a working journalist forever. (No, I’m not planning to leave the profession any time soon.) I believe journalism has changed me, mainly but not always the land before time ii the great valley adventure dvd for the better. I will always have the eyes and ears of a journalist, which is a valuable skill but sometimes puts me in an alienating social position.

This series of blog columns, “The Journey of the Journalist,” is my attempt to think and write at the same time. It’s not a finished product in the same sense a magazine article or television piece is, but rather a data point for a conversation. My motivation is to share some of my journey and simultaneously record and reflect on it; to share and to learn; to listen and learn from others.

I don’t know what form this will ultimately take, but I’ve set off the journey.

See you on the road.

Peace,
Farai

@faraichideya
www.faraichideya.com

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