SPJ story: believers in tough times

Some 600 believers descended on Indianapolis in late August.

I was among them.

Each of us had a connection to a constitutional right every American shares, but very few of us exercise on a daily basis. For the first time in my 25-year career in journalism, I attended the national convention of the Society of Professional Journalists.

The right, of course, is contained in the First Amendment. The right to free speech and the press, and — if it were modified for current times — the right to blog, to provide outrageous content, words, pictures, video, true or not, to a worldwide audience via the World Wide Web.

Many of us take our right for granted, so it’s not discussed a great deal. There were workshops on new media, how to use Facebook, Twitter, and free Internet sites that allow us to “live stream.”

A white haired professor from the University of Florida showed us all the tools we need to be “Mojos” or mobile journalists. It involves a backpack, various USB cables, a laptop computer, a video camera the size of a cell phone and several electrical power supplies that can pull energy from numerous devices, and possibly from a live chicken.

There were snake-like devices to hold your flip cam steady to get the disaster shot to send via wireless to your office, where it can be instantly broadcast around the world.

All we need is an Iphone and livestream.com to bring you the world. Anybody can do it, and if you’ve got $500, you can set up shop as a self publishing Internet “content provider.”

No need for $10 million Goss presses anymore. No hard-drinking, late night working pressmen with ink under their fingernails, scaling monsters of manufacturing to make sure that magenta comes out just right on a maroon gophers uniform.

Still, there were seminars put on by old-fashioned journalists. The photographer for the New York Daily News told of the trauma that comes with continuing to click the horrific images of 9-11. It was his job, not his choice.

We heard from the small-town editor of the Lafayette, La., newspaper sending her entire staff of nine to cover Hurricane Katrina and then Hurricane Rita. Throw in a couple of fatal car accidents with local kids and the “usual” August drowning, and there’s enough trauma there for a lifetime.

Dozens of student journalists attended the convention, all with great enthusiasm for the profession, and with greater knowledge of the new tools than the veterans. Many will not be hired any time soon in an industry that has cut back, but they were still there to hear about the future of journalism. Many of them may shape where we’re going.

And, of course, there were seminars on just where our “business” is going. It’s been no secret the recession has taken its toll on journalism and newspapers, mostly because owners couldn’t see the risk of piling on debt for an industry that was about to have its business model rug pulled out from under it.

The journalists have paid the price. The editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press talked about a 30 percent reduction in his newsroom in the last few years. This kind of reduction in people whose job it is to monitor corruption in a democracy should scare every American.

Of the three people I met for the first time at a cocktail party, two had been laid off.

Still, somehow these members of the “Society” have endured to tell the stories we all need to hear in the most sensitive way possible, all the while, sometimes, sacrificing their own sanity. I’m glad they’re still with us. I’m glad they’re strong. I’m honored to be in their company.

Because they’re believers. They believe in the First Amendment. They believe in the power a story carries to create empathy and kindness and motivate action on the part of our world community.

I can’t imagine where we’d be without them.