Thinking how things tie together...

So, I spent a semester talking to people about my project, learning new things about the world of print media and the people involved and learning new things about the blog world. I had some stimulating conversations and read intriguing articles. I took some pictures, and I am still working on my photography technique. I discovered that I can actually write a blog entry without sounding like a total goofball, but I obviously have a ways to go.

The four interviews I had with women involved with journalism proved to be very insightful. Though Marti was laid off from her job at the Tribune, she, like Becky, Diane and Heather, is still optimistic about the future of journalism in general. Diane is finding continued success in the small community of Yellow Springs, where the citizens rely on its weekly newspaper for their local news. Becky, like so many others, knows that print media is dying, but forsees a new medium for the delivery of news in the future. Finally, Heather is a positive example of a young person inspired to get into journalism who has stuck with it and found her niche.

I just walked across the stage at Earlham College's graduation a short 8 days ago with just as many questions hanging over my head as anyone else my age. Many friends of my parents and some of my friends ask if I want to go into journalism, but I am still not sure. This is my first experience with publishing anything online; I worked for my high school newspaper and spent most of my college career working for the Earlham Word. Will I go into journalism? Perhaps-- my first goal is to attend library school to get my Masters in Library and Information Science. I am going to continue to follow the saga of print journalism with interest. Who knows how things will change in five or 10 years?

Some useful links

Below is a list of links that anyone interested in this topic may find helpful. I consulted many of them while pursuing my project, and hope others may find them useful and interesting.

The State of the News Media 2009

The State of the News Media 2010

These two sites offer reports on American journalism from print to radio, are easy to navigate and provide a plethora of information. The current report is the seventh edition of the annual report.

The South Bend Tribune
The website of the South Bend Tribune.


Yellow Springs News
The online edition of the YS News.

Poynter Online
Poynter.org is updated every day with information for journalists and has a career section to help those struggling with their job search.

Ask the Recruiter
Joe Grimm, formerly of the Detroit Free Press, started this blog to help answer some of journalists' toughest career questions. The blog is updated daily and readers are invited to ask Joe questions, as well.

Online portfolio of Amanda Sommers, a Ball State journalism student
Amanda's portfolio is an example of how many employers no longer want hard-copy portfolios-- they want to see your work online as well for ease of access!

Tips for journalism grads
A post on 10,000words.net with 30 tips for recent graduates to learn to market themselves!

American Journalism Review
This is the web site for the American Journalism Review, a magazine published 6 times a year that covers everything from print to online media.



I will try to update this later with more links. Hopefully these will be of interest!

Journalism student plans venture into online world

Sorry for the delay in posting. I got my left hand slammed in a door a few weeks ago and have only just recently regained the ability to type with some semblance of speed. Sigh. I was able to do one final interview, but the student I spoke with was so busy wrapping up her school year, I was only able to conduct an email interview with her-- which still gave me some useful information.

Heather Fullenkamp, a bubbly 2009 Ball State graduate with a degree in Journalism Graphics, just completed her first year at the University's Journalism Graduate School, where she is studying basic Journalism. While she was an undergraduate at Ball State, she studied "a little of everything" under the Journalism Graphics umbrella, including graphic design, advertising, writing, marketing, web design and multimedia. Unfortunately, when Heather enrolled in the graduate school, she found her choices were much more limited.

"The only options for the Journalism Graduate School are basic Journalism, PR, and Literary Journalism...so I went with basic Journalism with the hopes of taking more graphics-based classes. Which I haven’t yet- but still plan to," she wrote in her email.

Like other young people who may be wary of going into the print journalism world post-graduation, Heather plans on using the skills she has learned to pursue a career in web design. She appreciates what studying journalism has taught her, she said. "I know that the skills I learned because of journalism...the skills to communicate clearly and efficiently, will go with me no matter where I end up."

Heather is certainly aware of the state of print journalism today, but like the other women I have interviewed over the course of this study, she is optimisic about the future of journalism in general. She wrote, "In our electronic world, many print items are being left to the collectors, but the fundamentals of those fields like English or journalism, will remain. It will always be important to know how to convey a message to a large audience."

In the current economic crisis, Heather is lucky-- she has also been able to use her skills to secure a job at WIPB-TV and Indiana Public Radio, where she has been doing web design and occasionall print design for two years. Her advice for recent grads like herself looking for work? Make yourself marketable! "The fundamental writing or print design skills will always be helpful, but it’s also important to step outside the box and familiarize yourself with as many different skills and capabilities as possible," she wrote.

In the changing world of journalism, it is clear that someone interested in the field must be dynamic and able to work with many different aspects of journalism. It may seem daunting, but as younger people Heather has found, it will pay off.

Reporter sees new medium in future

The next interview I conducted was with Becky Emmons, a staff reporter at the South Bend Tribune. She was kind enough to drop by my house on a Sunday afternoon and we had a quick chat.

Becky started working at the South Bend Tribune in January 1972, a month after her graduation from Indiana University with a degree in Journalism and History. She said she was lucky to find a position so quickly at the time. "...Everyone wanted to be a reporter- it was a hot field, [so it was] hard to get a job," she said.

She didn't think she'd stick with it, but found that she liked the job a lot. She worked as assistant editor from 1975 to 1982, then decided to go part-time to spend more time with her four sons. She has remained part-time since, but has still noticed many changes in the atmosphere in the Tribune newsroom over the years, as well as many changes in the paper itself.

"There's not good morale [in the newsroom]," she said, referring to the state of the newsroom after the loss of many staffers due to the buyouts. "There are fewer people on staff now- fewer people doing more work."

Possibly due to this, she mentioned the biggest change she has seen at the paper: the exclusion of a lot of national and international news. "Gradually things have become more local. The front page is no longer what's happening in the world... people want to read local news on the cover." Since many people now get most of their news from the internet or television, the Tribune has really become "a great big hometown paper," Becky said. "But that's something we can do."

Becky said that it's in the past five years that becoming a journalist has faded from the "hot" list of jobs. "It happened very quickly," she said. The way she sees the future, though, is more positive. "[Journalism] has changed so much... there's [always] going to need to be news reporters and news gatherers, but it's going to be a different medium. Print media as we know it... not looking good."

For those who might be iffy about entering the field now, consider this. There will always be a need for people to find and write stories. Becky suggests an aspiring reporter hone up on his or her internet skills in addition to writing skills; with the increasing popularity of blogs and sites like Twitter, there's never been a better time to improve these skills.

Smaller newspapers find footing in struggling industry

I had a serendipitous moment a while back during one of my shifts at my job as a caller for my college's Phone-a-Thon. One of the girls in my class had told me several weeks before that her mother worked as a journalist. I was calling senior parents to talk about giving a donation to the Senior Gift when I came across a name in my stack I recognized. It was her mother, and we wound up having a very good conversation and she gave me permission to email her to set up a time we could have an interview.

Diane Chiddister is the editor and co-owner of the Yellow Springs News, a weekly paper that provides the small community of Yellow Springs, Ohio with its news. I drove out to Yellow Springs from Richmond one Thursday afternoon to meet up with her at the Emporium, a small coffee shop situated right on Yellow Springs' main drag.

The atmosphere of the small town of 4,000 on the day I visited reflected what Diane had to say about the success of the weekly paper in the community. Everyone was outside enjoying the warm afternoon, chatting with each other, being friendly-- it seemed like everyone there knew everyone else, in a neighborly sort of way.

"We're so odd and out of the mainstream here," said Diane about the newspaper. "What journalism really is about, especially small-town journalism, [is] curiosity about the world and about people." The decline in print media really has not affected newspapers in small communities like Yellow Springs, where residents depend on the paper to provide them with their local news. There are only nine independent weekly papers in Ohio now, she said, but still has faith in the future of these small papers.

"We can do what we want," she laughed. For example, my visit coincided with April Fool's Day, and Diane showed me the paper from that day with its false front page. Though the rest of the paper was normal, that page showed they could do something fun while still delivering the news to their community. Diane said that the people who work at the paper don't get paid much, but it's liveable-- and the paper pays for all health care, including premiums and up to the deductible, for the 15 staff members. This is another step out of the mainstream for the Yellow Springs News, said Diane, as most businesses don't pay all health care.

One pressure their paper has been feeling from the changes in the world of journalism led them to launch their new web site, http://ysnews.com/, on the day I had my interview with Diane.

"We've been feeling the frustration of being a weekly in a world that's used to round-the-clock news," she said. They plan on having daily postings, but are working to keep the paper separate from the website, she added. One part of it she is particularly excited about is the interactive forum on the site, which will be the "virtual version of people hanging out and talking to each other downtown," Diane said. The staff of the paper are used to a "weekly way of thinking," as she puts it. "[We are] doing [the website] because we feel like we have to do it-- we have to have a web presence." However, she feels like it will be adding something that will enhance the tight community already present in Yellow Springs.

That tight community fuels her hope for the continued publication of the Yellow Springs News. "In a place with a sense of community, you really do contribute to the community all the time," she said. "There's never a day where I don't feel valued... people tell us every day that they love our paper." While large and midsize newspapers may be having a hard time in the current times, smaller newspapers don't suffer much competition.

And as far as the future of print? Diane believes there is certainly a positive future ahead. "[There's] lots of opportunity in small communities for newspapers. It's a very meaningful job; you feel like you're doing something important and meaningful to the community."

Former reporter struggles after layoffs

I met with Marti Heline, a former reporter for the South Bend Tribune in South Bend, Indiana over lunch at Panera Bread several weeks ago. Marti is my best friend's mother and I had read many of her stories in the Tribune over the years, so she was a great first person to speak to for my project.

Marti was laid off in December of 2008 from her job as a reporter at the Tribune, where she'd worked for 31 years. The Tribune, like other newspapers of its size, had been affected by the economic changes; the eight people from its newsroom that had been let go were part of a general reduction in force, Marti said. "The paper felt like it needed to severely cut costs," and the letting go of employees was part of a larger process that she'd seen in the newsroom at the Tribune over the last ten years. The Tribune may have seemed stable, but they really got caught as national advertising revenue shrunk and more and more people realized that they could get their news online. This has been showing up everywhere: "since a peak in modern newsroom employment in 2001, nearly 10,000 reporting jobs out of a total of 56,000 have been lost," according to the New America Media via the American Society of News Editors.

So where do people like Marti go from here? She, like other Tribune staffers who had been let go, took a buyout offered by the paper, but this was only one week's pay for every year worked up to 26, Marti said. She is currently working as a freelance writer and editor, but is finding it difficult to secure another full-time job. "When you have family, [it's] harder to be flexible. I couldn't just pick up and move," she said, and she is not sure how long unemployment benefits will last.

"I've resigned myself to knowing I won't have another newspaper job. It's a real slap in the face, when it's the only thing you've done... it's hard to figure out how to reinvent yourself," Marti said. This is problematic nationwide with paper circulation dropping and journalists struggling to find jobs or keep their jobs. How will print media cope with this? Lots of papers have promoted themselves well with Facebook and Twitter, according to Marti. She, however, has hope for the future of print journalism.

"Some people thing newspapers are going to dry up and go away, but... more and more you're going to see combinations... combining of resources," she added. "There's always going to be a need for print journalists, the form is just changing." Her hope lies in the evolution of newspapers, adapting to changing technology and economy. Online news sources and web sites for newspapers are quickly becoming the more popular way for people to get their news, but survival, for print journalists, lies in adapting. "Everybody's got to keep reevaluating their role," Marti said. "There will always be a place for a trained, hardworking journalist to keep citizens informed."

Though she thinks the field of print journalism is one young people may think twice about entering now, she believes that it is still important. I asked her if she had any advice for a young person trying to get into the field, and what she offered was very helpful. (My apologies for all the crazy background noise in the video!)

Getting started

Welcome to my blog! I'm Sarah. I'm a senior at Earlham College, majoring in History and minoring in Journalism. For my independent study project in journalism this semester, I was inspired to look into the future of print journalism by seeing the situation some people I know are currently in. Newspapers around the country are slashing their budgets, cutting staff, hiring younger people they can pay less money to do more work-- what is left for people currently involved in delivering print news? Students like me who are interested in pursuing a life in journalism, what are we to do?

I decided to look at this subject from a "people perspective." So far, I have interviewed a woman who lost her job at a city newspaper a year ago and has yet to find a new job. I am also planning on talking to a woman who still has part-time employment at that same paper, and someone who is working at a fairly successful small weekly paper. I hope to publish my findings to this blog, adding photos and hopefully video that I have taken.

I want to look at the effects this perceived decline in print journalism has caused, and what this is doing to the people involved. What is multimedia and online journalism (and "citizen journalism") doing to professional journalists? I hope to explore this through several different voices in this blog.

My next post will be about my interview with Marti Heline, a former reporter for the South Bend Tribune and current freelance writer and editor.