Spare the Eulogy for Middle-Aged Journalists

Bloggers like to depict veteran newspaper journalists as has-beens and never-gonna-bes. They call us "old media," as if we were dinosaurs wheezing toward extinction.

Graves aren't dug yet, but shovels are standing by.

Some of the harshest online critics are middle-aged journalists who made the leap and now dismiss the traditional values they left behind as just so many bad habits in need of breaking. The Chicago Tribune reported last week that Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of the Web site The Daily Beast, expressed pity for journalists my age.

"It's most difficult, I think, for the people who are in their 50s who are part of a big media organization where they've spent most of their lives," Brown said. "They see it all changing around them and there isn't time for them to make the adjustment, or they fear making it."

Fifty-five-year-old Brown is smart, creative and seemingly fearless. But she is too flip in assessing what worries many journalists like me.

Certainly, we are concerned about job stability. But veteran journalists are equally troubled by the online threat to standards we hold dear.

If anyone had told me five years ago that newspapers would allow anonymous comments and that we would have to respond to them, I would have invited them to come for a walk with me to the land of grown-ups. Now I regularly address authors of online comments by their made-up names and pretend this doesn't feel like junior high school all over again.

The so-called citizen journalism of most blogs is an affront to those of us who believe reporting and attribution must precede publication. Fact checking is tedious; it often derails juicy rumor and deflates many a story. And no matter how it turns out, every story is attached to our names. That should matter to anyone who cares about accountability.

If there's an upside for journalists in this economic upheaval, it's that most of us have a lot more in common these days with the people we cover.

In the decade leading up to these troubled times, some veteran journalists had begun to lament the changing trajectory of newspaper coverage.

Many of the old-timers were the first in their families to go to college, or they were hired straight out of high school or the military and worked their way up the newsroom ranks. It's easier to see the stories of hardworking Americans and immigrants when they reflect the narratives of your own family, your own neighborhood.

By the 1990s, the landscape in newsrooms across the country was also clearly changing. Longtime reporters and editors retired and increasingly were replaced by second- and even third-generation college graduates who had little in common with "the underdog," that handy euphemism we employ for those who suffer in silence and anonymity until we step in. Some of us detected a growing resistance of newspapers to covering these stories.

The economic turmoil of the past two years has changed much about America, including the rank and file of newsrooms. There is not a newspaper in the country left unscathed. Journalists lucky enough to still have jobs are now full of their own stories about slashed wages, lost colleagues and abandoned desks.

Shared experiences nurture empathy, and that's a handy skill when you're capturing in words, pictures and video the essence of another human being. Our privileged arm's-length status from the people we cover has evaporated, and the view from common ground is fueling some of the most poignant journalism in years.

One of the greatest challenges for print journalists now is to respond to change while staying rooted in the values that brought us to this profession. We feel more vulnerable because we are, but troubled times can soften edges and open hearts to the suffering around us.

We are a country of hurt right now. Home foreclosures, lost jobs, closed businesses — these are hard stories but are the biggest stories of our time.

Journalists have never been better prepared to tell them.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "... and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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