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!)
No comments:
Post a Comment