Don't look to corporations for journalism jobs

If Barbara Iverson gave the commencement address to Journalism Grads:

My first advice is always check the "reply to:" addresses when you send an email. That said, here is a tidbit from a listserv that was meant to go only to a friend, not the list. I edited the message so as not make it easy to identify who actually wrote the message.

Students who are about to become graduates and move out into the world to live and work as adults, take heed. The world you move into is not the world of my Uncle Wally. Walter J. Leach was born in 1900, with a new century. He did not do too well in school, one because he had poor eyesight and the other because he liked to be out doing things, not sitting. At the beginning of WWI, when he was only 15, he ran away from home with a friend to help in the war effort. They were too young-looking to try and get in the service, so they went to Nitro, W.Va. and got jobs in a munitions plant run at that time by DuPont.

The work was dirty and Wally got lonely. They hopped a freight for home, but Wally fell from the train and broke his arm. A kindly farm lady took him in and posted a letter to his mother and father. "Grandpa Leach" (my great-grandfather) went and brought Wally home.

The upshot was that Wally was to become an apprentice printer for R.R. Donnelly Co. As a boy apprentice, Wally went to school in the morning hours at Donnellys, ate lunch there and then worked in the afternoons.

He liked Donnellys. He met the (then) young Gaylord Donnelly who worked in each of the departments of the company as was expected of him by his family as preparation to head the company up some day. "Gay" and my uncle remained friendly their whole lives. During the Depression, they kept Wally on, though there wasn't much work. He went to the top Donnelly at that time and asked if he could use the library at Donnellys to study lithography and photography. "Yes" was the answer, and he taught himself to how to do stone lithography. If you have seen the exquisite Rockwell Kent books published by Donnelly, including a version of Moby Dick with Kent's woodcuts, you've seen Uncle Walt's lithography.

Uncle Wally worked there until he was 65. Then he had the most wonderful pension and benefits. There was and probably still is a retirees club that met regularly and Walt never missed a session. In our family, Donnellys was respected and admired.

But my dear students, as you begin to hit the pavement or more likely the pixels, in your personal search for employment and professional work that satisfies your human needs, do you think there will be a Donnellys in your future? Is there a company that will educate you, keep you on while you study new things, provide generous health insurance until the day you die, provide you with a pension for as long as you live, and keep you on with them from the time you start working until you retire?

Let me get back to the embarrassed emailer. Here is the what the email said.

...I bet you heard we are losing 24 positions. The company has asked
for buyouts. If 24 folks don't request them, the remainder will be laid
off. It should all be said and done by the end of May.

I'm safe for now, and so is my [spouse]. But [my spouse] was told that [Large Midwestern Daily] would be cutting out the [particular beat] at all the papers except [large city in midwest] & [large city in west] in the next year or two. If [my spouse] doesn't get moved to a different beat we will have to move where [the spouse] can find a job. I know the online team wants [the spouse] to join them, so it may not be as dire as it sounds.

Donnellys isn't even Donnellys these days as far as that goes. Face it graduate, we live in an information age. The economic factors that matter are "attention, time, reputation, point of view" not "goods, commodities, transportation, and physical labor." In the age of Industry, scarcity was the pivot point around which buyer, seller, laborer and employer balanced and turned.

In an information age, scarcity isn't the problem because we often have too much input and information. The key to our age is knowledge and mastery of the niche, establishing a voice and reputation. We are stevedores of ideas and information, not of pig iron and girders.

But we are working for ourselves. We need to make time for work, time for play. We need to define what we will do for an employer and what we won't do. When there is no loyalty given, there should be none extended. Do not confuse striving for a shared goal with loyalty.

So graduates, when I make you "learn how to learn" though online tutorials and expose you to the confusion of working with several versions of the same software or send you quaking into the streets with a camera and recorder to bring back something original and create a context for what you bring back, don't whine. Thank me. I won't promise you health care or a lifelong pension. I surely won't employ you from cradle to grave, but I will push you to think on your feet, develop cognitive flexibility, and to ask questions, not to parrot answers that I don't have myself. I only ask that you start to work for yourself and don't go looking for the Donnellys that isn't there anymore.

Develop a sense of justice and decency to sustain because change is, and will be, the major unchanging attribute of your life. Do things because you want to. Not because someone told you to. If I do tell you do a story on something, so don't come back to me with filler. Make each story you do count. Get the context, find an entry point and ask, why should my audience --the viewer/user/readers give a damn about this? Work to get better for yourself.

It is your life. You are on your own. When you work as many of us must, to make ends meet, work for yourself even if it's Donnellys that gives you the paycheck. No corporate job in today's economic situation is worth sacrificing your good name or reputation over. Don't be like Dan Rather or Tim Russert and squander your personal reputation because you need to please the boss as is shown in Buying the War .

That boss doesn't respect you. That boss in fact, is probably scared of his or her boss. We are in a new era where we are going to need guilds and PACs to protect our interests but in the meantime, don't give up your integrity as a journalist and reporter to a corporation. Keep your reputation because you are going to need it. You can bank on it when the large corporation lays you off.