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

Our fearless founder, Farai Chideya, interviewed Sen Obama yesterday for “News & Notes,” the show she hosts for NPR, for those of you living in LA, where the show tapes but doesn’t air! Here’s a taste:

Farai: You want to withdraw from Iraq by early summer next year… those will be powerful images of US convoys leaving Iraq and making their way to Turkey. Couldn’t it ruin you if people come to associate you with defeat?

Obama: Oh, I think people at this point have a pretty good sense of whose war this is. The critical task for us now is not only stabilizing the situation in Iraq and getting our combat troops out, it’s also that we’ve got al-Qaida, as strong as it has been since 9/11, regrouping in Afghanistan and along the Pakistan border. And we’ve got real serious problems there. And we’re not going to be able to tackle those issues, which I think the American people understand are one of the most prominent threats we face, unless we are not entirely bogged down in this mess in Iraq.

Farai: You have said that your daughters, because of their economic privilege, should not benefit from affirmative action in the same way that some other people might. If elected, will you fight to keep affirmative action alive? If so, to benefit whom?

Obama: Oh, I’m a firm believer in affirmative action. The question that was asked was, do I think that my daughters are disadvantaged. And I said no, because their father is a United States senator and both their parents are working professionals. But what I also said is that there is a strong and ongoing intersection between race and class in this country, that racism is still an issue that has to battled. Affirmative action is an important tool, although a limited tool, for us to deal with these issues. I say limited simply because a large portion of our young people right now never even benefit from affirmative action because they’re not graduating from high school. And unless we do a better job with early childhood education, fixing crumbling schools, investing to make sure that we’ve got an excellent teacher in front of every classroom, and then making college affordable, we’re not even going to reach the point where our children can benefit from affirmative action.

Check out the whole interview at the links above.