Day 287 - 6.21 miles (1,828.42 total)
I have a letter dated April 9, 1997 that I have kept since it was sent to my apartment in Plymouth, Mich. At the time, I was a young editor working for The Community Crier newspaper in Plymouth, a wealthy suburb in Detroit. The letter was from Rick Fitzgerald, the metro editor of the Ann Arbor News, offering me a job at his paper.
There are a few moments in my professional life that are special, starting with my graduation from Michigan State University with a degree in journalism, a profession I have loved with all my heart since I took my first J class at the university. That letter from Rick, which I reopened tonight, was one of them.
When I joined the staff of the Ann Arbor News, I knew I was walking into a special environment. The staff was a blend of young and experienced, an electric mix of people who knew their jobs were special and important. We were protecting the public trust. At the time, if you were a journalist, you commanded respect and a small dose of fear. There is a quote by Finley Peter Dunne: “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comforted.” That was a journalist’s job and all of us believed in it wholeheartedly.
After my grandfather died in my hometown of Grand Rapids, I sought employment at the Grand Rapids Press, my hometown newspaper. It was a tough place to get into at the time. Jobs were rare. It was an excellent newspaper run by an excellent newspaper company that cared about its workers and the important reporting these incredible professionals did every day. I hoped and expected that I would retire from the Press.
If you have never worked at a newspaper, it is hard to describe how close you get to those that you work with. I have lifelong friends that I made at every newspaper that employed me, from the tiny Manistique Pioneer-Tribune in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the Crier in Plymouth to the Ann Arbor News and the Grand Rapids Press. They are truly great people. Being a reporter is a tough job. Not everyone can say the work they do on a daily basis is reviewed and critiqued by 200,000 people. It is difficult, stressful and incredibly rewarding.
A little more than four years ago, I decided to leave the Press. I was concerned that the paper and the company that owned it was not doing enough to address the changes that were taking place because of the rise of the Internet. Our website was a disgrace and the paper seemed content to ride the printed newspaper into the ground. I was a business reporter and I closely followed the demise of the industry. Journalists have a gallows’ humor. “We are doomed,” I would tell co-workers. And I think we all knew it was true.
When I left the Press for an online magazine that covers the office furniture industry just over four years ago, my editor, Mike Lloyd thought I was crazy and he told me so during my exit interview. Why leave a safe, comfortable position as a reporter for a very strong daily newspaper for a job with an Internet company? I knew in my heart I was making the right decision. The industry was in trouble. I thought it had about 10 year before the bottom fell out. It took just two years after I left for the Press for the company to pull its two cornerstone pledges to its workers: The company would not eliminate your position because of the economy or changes to technology. Booth Newspapers, which owned the Press, changed its policy a couple years after I left and they have not stopped cutting jobs since.
Tonight, I walked to a going away party for one of my last friends to leave the Press. Darin Estep was was one of the top copy editors at the paper and literally gave his heart and soul to create important, informative, timely news for our community. It is the third such going away party I have gone to in as many weeks for journalists leaving the Press (some by choice, some whose jobs were eliminated).
I am proud and honored to say the journalists I have worked with throughout my career are the smartest, most interesting, best friends a man could ever know (including my current employer who truly knows the value of news). They make the world a better place and I am honored to call them my colleagues. I think I lived through the Golden Age of journalism, a time when reporters were more skilled and educated than any time before. Yet I can’t help feeling that I was there — I was part of the problem — at the time when journalism collapsed.
The Ann Arbor News closed in July 2009, replaced by AnnArbor.com, an online publication that has a fraction of the professionals I worked with during its heyday. Many good journalists and friends lost their jobs.
And no matter what management says, when Darin Estep left the building today, the Grand Rapids Press, as I knew it, ceased to exist. To be sure, there are a handful of fine journalists left at MLive. Chris Clark is still shooting the most amazing photos, Shandra Martinez and Jim Harger are manning the business desk and Bart Deiters is still keeping the cops honest. But when that scrawny newspaper hits my stoop in the afternoon, it is a different product.
I am certain that new, fresh news organizations will fill the gaps left behind by the depleted Press (now the MLive Media Group). The consumer’s appetite for news is as strong as ever. Still, it does not make this transition any less painful. I feel like I’ve lost a loved one. The journalist has taken her lumps over the past few decades, scorned by (mainly conservative) politicians who have pitted journalists against their readers. Unfortunately, the public will soon find that society without a cadre of journalists is a frightening, dangerous place.
I grew up in a time that adhered to a journalism that followed the rules of great editors like Herbert Bayard Swope, a three time Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the greatest reporters of his time. He said, “The secret of a successful newspaper is to take one story each day and bang the hell out of it. Give the public what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not.”
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