Something "New"

This week has turned my journalism job-seeking world upside down, first with a New York Times article my mom e-mailed me about the trouble newspapers are having deriving ad revenue from their websites; second with some unexpected advice from a talk by Chicago Public Radio correspondent Natalie Moore; and third with the news that my top-choice internship site, the Chicago Tribune, might not have the money to hire interns this summer.

Sunday: according to the NYTimes, newspapers that have been experiencing small but steady growths in their online-revenue (money from selling-ad space) over the past five years are starting to see that growth taper. This might be old news for editors like the ones at my hometown paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, who held two meetings with their crop of college-aged interns this past summer to ask us how the paper could use the internet to make more money. As a reporter who’s job is to share interesting things with a wide audience, sometimes I forget that the chief job of a newspaper is to make money. And, somewhat paradoxically, it will have to resort to whatever non-news-related gimmicks necessary to attract readers in the twenty-first century.

Wednesday: I attended my second Divinity School Luncheon. If you're on campus and free Wednesdays between noon and 1:30, I strongly urge you to attend. Besides the gamut of speakers from around Chicago (last year I saw photographer, blogger and public school teacher Will Okun, whom you may remember from Nick Kristof's Win-a-Trip contest, speak about the challenges high school students in Chicago face) they serve a fabulous and reasonably priced, home-cooked vegetarian meal.

Natalie Moore, the one-woman wonder of Chicago Public Radio's South Side bureau spoke during the luncheon about the importance of covering local issues for the station.

“I grew up on the South Side, and I didn’t really feel like my community was represented [by the media],” she said. Most news stories were about crime.

“There’s Pilsen, Bronzeville, Beverly, all kinds of neighborhoods very rich in their stories. You just can’t lump the South Side into one category.”

“People would ask me,” She continued, “Why does Public Radio need a bureau on the South Side? No one asked me that question when I worked for a suburban bureau!”

Moore shared sound clips from some of her stories on South Side issues, such as the arrival of a Starbucks and other high-end retail to a neighborhood, the complications of affordable public housing, and unemployment.

The chance to bring a more complex perspective to South Side new coverage wasn’t Moore’s only reason for going on air. Before landing her first radio job with Chicago Public Radio, Moore worked for several newspapers and freelanced.

Her best advice to aspiring print journalists, she said, is to “be nimble,” even if that means writing on the Internet or for radio.

“You want to write? Think about what you want to do, not necessarily whom you want to do it for.”

As an antidote to the lack of jobs in newspapers, Moore thinks young journalists should look to radio. “NPR is hiring. It’s not that newspapers aren’t a good product, but the leadership of public radio in the past 10 years has really gone in a different direction. And at some point, you’re going to have to know how to gather audio for a newspaper’s website anyway.”

Thursday: To kick-off the University’s new Careers in Journalism program, Sheila Solomon, the Chicago Tribune job/intern recruiter, shared her advice on finding a summer internship in the changing media climate. The good news according to Sheila, is that “given what’s going on in the world, good journalism is more important than ever.” The bad news is, if I want to cut my teeth at a major daily newspaper in a large city, I should probably look further than Michigan Ave; the Chicago Tribune isn’t sure it will have the money to host paid interns next year.

Sheila’s advice was vague but uplifting. She didn’t want to get our hopes up or sound too pessimistic about the state of an industry we’re trying to jump headfirst into.

“The Tribune is looking for new,” she said. “We want to continually give readers something else to add more value: layers.”
Layering, Sheila explained, is what happens when a breaking story is posted online, but more information and a different spin on things is present in the paper the next day.

What attracts her most about a job candidate Sheila says, is ingenuity.

“You will have to shoot video and audio for [your paper’s] website. And some newspapers will need you to help them develop that site, if they don’t have much. ”

“Look beyond being a reporter; look beyond being a publisher; invent whatever the next medium is going to be.”