People, Things: America, [how] do you want your news?

A couple of months ago I visited the Johnson Space Center in Texas, where a tired one hour tour passes through NASA’s historic Mission Control Center.  Until 1992 this was a cutting edge communication hub, filled with the hum of important activity and the same state of the art technology that helped mankind take our world famous “giant leap” on the lunar surface.  The room now sits behind a glass wall, silent, empty, seemingly irrelevant, as tourists are ushered past, dumbfounded by the rotary telephones and keyboardless computers inside.

This image came to mind when I heard that the Rocky Mountain News, one of two newspapers in Denver, CO, published its final edition on Friday, just 2 months shy of its 150th birthday.  I can’t help but wonder if today’s newspaper newsroom, like the old Mission Control, will one day be a stop on journalism’s own tired tour?

The empty newsroom at the now defunct Rocky Mt. News (Photo: Rockymountainnews.com)

The story of the RMN’s demise is sadly becoming banal.  It was a mighty little newspaper (4 Pulitzers since 2000) and a farm team that funneled reporting talent to the likes of the inveterate New York Times.

Now it’s the latest casualty of what some are calling a multi-front war on journalism.  News outlets everywhere are succumbing to a recession on one front, the new media revolution on another, and on at least a third we’re fighting for a share of our readers’/listeners’/viewers’ ever shrinking appetites for journalism done de rigeur.

Like my visit to the defunct Mission Control Center, the death of the Rocky Mountain News is a lesson in the inevitability of change.  But, if I may I add, isn’t there opportunity in change, and discovery through it?

Over the past few months I’ve noticed more column inches and airtime devoted to that dreaded question: is journalism dying? (Here’s what a quick google search turns up on that question.) On the contrary I truly believe that journalism is still very much alive.  I would argue instead, as many others have, that our current media and methods are simply evolving.

So we are losing the newspaper, much like NASA upgraded to a fancy new Mission Control down the hall (and computers with keyboards), but don’t we still have astronauts in space, not to mention much better methods of keeping in touch with them?

As such, instead of navel gazing on the subject of our demise, perhaps we journalists could and should better spend our energy, to say nothing of our precious airtime, finding better ways to report the news for today’s audiences?  I suppose that means we could all put down our pens for a moment, and take a pause from informing the masses to try to better understand them?

That brings us to the million dollar question:  America, how do you want your news?

I humbly offer that until we can answer this, we keep trying, erring and trying again with the newest tools at our fingertips, taking risks and chucking norms in search of the next frontier.  To the staff of the Rocky Mountain News, I say DON’T GIVE UP!  You helped get us here, and despite your lament for the past, you can be part of journalism’s future.  Easier said than done, perhaps, but possible nonetheless.

Even as these times force me too to contemplate defecting, I am confident that there are enough people who value journalism that the field won’t falter, if for no other reason that that every time as chorus rises to the contrary, we do something like this:

Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page A01

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.