More than 6,000 news people gathered in Chicago last week — many of them young, most of them minority, and nearly all of them announcing by their very presence that they have confidence and enthusiasm for journalism as a professional calling.
The occasion was the Unity conference, a quadrennial gathering of the annual conventions of the four minority journalism groups: The National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association and the Native American Journalists Association.
Actually, it feels odd as I write this to refer to the attendees as “minority,” since the journalists of color far outnumbered us representatives of the “majority.” I was there wearing one of my several Plain Dealer hats: as a recruiter looking to find talented prospects for next summer’s intern class. And I was a member of several minority groups myself: Older than most, whiter than most and far behind most in instinct and understanding of the electronics that will surely be a staple of the way people get their news in the coming years.
In other words, perfectly positioned to be inspired by what I saw of the future of this business.
When you love newspapers and the business of newspapering, it can be easy to fret for the future, for all the familiar reasons: Competition abounds. Circulation is leaking. Advertising revenue is down. Newsprint and fuel costs are up. People are too busy/preoccupied/disengaged to spend time with the newspaper. I heard little of that from the young journalists I talked with. They were all too busy enthusiastically showing off stories they had written, describing interviews they had done and recounting the many ways they had delivered it all to readers.
And so, young reporters talked about overcoming the awkwardness of interviewing an 18-year-old boy just days after he’d had his arm bitten off by an alligator near Lake Okeechobee, Fla.; of hearing residents of Albert Lea, Minn., mourning the loss of the region’s only Starbucks; of thrilling to the news that one of their stories from Boston had been picked up on the wires; of the challenge of talking to students at a school for new immigrants in San Francisco.
And of lessons learned from missed opportunities.
Bowdeya Tweh, a freshly minted journalism grad from Wayne State University in Michigan, is an intern this summer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was justifiably proud of a story he did about a quadriplegic man who, after taking a trip and finding that he couldn’t rent a van he could drive, founded Wheelchair Getaways, a company that rents vans to handicapped people. But Tweh couldn’t enjoy his good work fully, because as soon as it was printed, “I realized I should have gotten video of the man getting into his own van.”
That’s a shortcoming that we couldn’t even have imagined at the first Unity conference in Atlanta in 1994. Then, a reporter’s work was done after he submitted a photo assignment and turned in his story. But as we’re seeing increasingly on cleveland.com and throughout the country, there are many more ways to tell our stories, and it’s becoming second nature to young reporters.
“I like to write,” Tweh said, “and I like people to read my stories. But I like to do all the other things at the same time — broadcast, video, blogging . . . there are lots of ways to deliver the news to people.”
That eagerness to try new things is not limited to minority journalists, of course, but one thing that hasn’t changed much since that Atlanta conference is the number of minority journalists at U.S. newspapers, including The Plain Dealer. That’s why we had several representatives in Chicago last week.
I know that some of you are muttering that there’s no association of white journalists. Please don’t. These organizations that are part of Unity have a history of encouraging and mentoring young students and of showing them opportunities they didn’t know existed.
It’s important work. The job of covering a complex city like Cleveland requires journalists of all backgrounds and perspectives; we can’t do our best job without that.
There was a lot of talent on display at the conference. When you start to worry about the future of newspapers, there’s no antidote quite like a few thousand eager young news hounds who have wanted to tell stories all their lives, and are thrilled at the opportunity to do it.
You’ll be seeing some of their bylines when next summer’s intern class arrives in Cleveland.
