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!)