Current Conditions
37°F - CLEAR
(116) (71) (33)
He sat on a bench outside the newspaper building, his back against the old brick wall as a streetlight's orange illumination washed down on us. The police radio in his hand warbled about a three-car accident somewhere in the nightscape.
I won't expound about the rough spots in his past. That's his private business. But I was 23 years old and as unsettled as 23-year-olds can be, searching for identity and full of anger at just about everything. So I had to ask him: "What got you over it?"
He took his cigarette from his lips, hidden beneath a bushy mustache, exhaled smoke into the humid air, pointed to the ground and looked at me. "Right here," he said. "The job."
That was when I came to understand something about journalism, or more to the point, journalists.
•••
A job for most Americans is what they "do." It's the answer to a stranger's question: "What do you do?" But come closing time they leave their job at the workplace, because they would prefer not to have it define their existence.
But what journalists "do" is what they are at all times, whether they are in the newsroom or not. Meet a journalist on a holiday who claims not to be working, and you know a journalist who's lying.
The mind of a journalist cannot be turned off. We are always seeking — whether consciously or subconsciously — to understand our current environment and the motivations of the people we interact with, to gain a perspective on the present by dissecting the past and projecting the future.
Part anthropology, part sociology, journalism is an edifying and joyful way to proceed through life, pursuing a perpetual cadence of hows and whys, whether covering a press conference at City Hall or watching a trendy movie at the local theater.
A journalist's mind is driven by a current of curiosity flowing from years of research and the demands of editors who expect us to have a deep pool of knowledge regarding whatever topic we cover. That current produces constant waves of hard questions and tides of focused listening in professional and private life.
•••
At the end of the week, several journalists for the Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era, including me, will cease to work as news reporters here, as the two papers merge their products.
I don't write this for sympathy. We stayed in the newspaper business knowing the pitfalls of a faltering industry.
My goal, rather, is to provide a perspective. Facing a job cut is hard for anybody — assembly workers who suddenly find themselves having to learn computer technology or accountants who now have to shovel gravel. That's hard.
Here's what I want to say about journalists in transition:
The person for whom I truly feel sorry in the wake of this change is my wife, Alison. She, in her good nature, has pointed to job openings in other fields which promise great salaries and sparkling new careers. I could be a marketing manager or a public relations specialist, she suggests in her unwavering support of me.
Yet each time, as much as I try to avoid it, I feel like a sailor who's been told he can no longer direct his ship into the wide-open ocean, who instead must be landlocked and hemmed in.
Imagine a job in which you're asked to keep the powers-that-be accountable for their actions — mayors and senators, CEOs and presidents, governors and lobbyists. Seems unnatural to transition from investigating the powers that be to working for them.
How can we transition into another kind of work environment — P.R., let's say — and not lob hard questions at our new bosses, the way we used to at press conferences in the state Capitol, just because to do so could get us fired?
Now don't let journalists lament this time of transition. The skills we gleaned from this industry should prove valuable, and we have been blessed with a career rich in experience, even if it didn't make us rich in our bank accounts.
Follow me on this.
Anytime life grows difficult outside the newspaper, the job provides the distraction and the source of confidence. There's always a fresh story to pursue and a new deadline to meet, and that perpetual cycle taught me what my friend meant that night when we listened to the police radio.
The news industry doesn't stop for your personal life. Instead, the news uniquely enriches a journalist's life. Every journalist can list stories that set their hearts ablaze and illuminated a new understanding of our existence.
I once saw blind Dominicans open their eyes to see again. I was a boy on the bus like Timothy Crouse. I listened to a woman exult about life while dying from ALS. I ate dinner with a homeless thief trying to rebuild his life. I heard an aging U.S. Army major, a survivor of the hellish cauldrons of D-Day and Bastogne, cry out for a life of peace. And I witnessed a black American inaugurated as president of the United States.
Whatever comes next for my fellow ex-journalists, I hope that it is anything but ordinary. May we never lose our journalistic instincts, and may we always have a pen and notepad by our side.
Quote of the week
"The brighter you are, the more responsible you are to your culture."
—The late Diane Meily, social studies teacher at Penn Manor High School, writing on her chalkboard in 1996 during a Western World Civilizations class.
E-mail: dpidgeon@lnpnews.com
