The new news

Journalism has been a passion of mine ever since I penned my first meeting report for the Mountain View ABC's 4-H Club. Once written, I accompanied my mother to downtown's Second Avenue where the Sandpoint News Bulletin produced the community's local weekly. I don't remember the details of handing over my three-paragraph story about the newly-elected club officers, the date and location for the next meeting and who gave demonstrations, but I do remember the exhilaration of reading my words in print. I was about 11 at the time.

The gratification for that piece of work came within days. That childhood reward for a little punk from the farm on North Boyer started a habit which has lasted a lifetime. In retrospect, the word "instant" didn't quite fit as a proper adjective to place in front of gratification, but in relative terms back in the late '50s, the reward for personal work came fairly quickly.

"Instant" definitely fits these days, but it's no longer virtually one-dimensional. We can sit at our computers and rattle off our thoughts, push a button and see the results of our work almost immediately. What a daily or hourly rush!

Along with gratification, though, comes an added benefit or hazard, depending on the situation. That phenomenon may be called "instant ratification" or "instant rantification." Our readers have the jump on us these days because our journalism has very little time to sit in the pot and simmer while folks get around to reading it and deciding what they think about what we think.

In some cases, they like what we say, thus ratifying the notions we've put forth. In others, they reel at our words, thus going off on rants, wasting no time letting us know the error of the thoughts we put into words appearing on their respective screens.

Gone are the days when Marianne Brown's 4-H club report appears in the paper for consumption Wednesday afternoon and for possible retaliation by letter writers pointing out her mistakes in the following week's edition.

Gone are the days when those local letter writers decide whether or not it's worth it to sit down and write a letter to the editor complaining about Marianne's glaring error in reporting the demonstration topics presented at the cooking club meeting. After all, it will be another week before anyone reads the paper again.

By that time, they know that most readers who really care probably have thrown their paper away and have forgotten that Josie Jones really did give a demonstration on how to whip up a purple cow, not how to bake a wienie boat. In most cases, potential letter writers might decide that it's hardly worth the effort and just let the purple cow journalistic debacle go into eternity.

These days, we have a journalism arena that not only provides access to instant response but also embraces it. I've learned that lesson fairly dramatically this week. Though not writing about something so simple as a 4-H club meeting report, I did figure that my gleeful assessment of the Boise State victory in the Fiesta Bowl was pretty safe stuff for a potatohead journalist and my potatohead audience.

What I had forgotten, however, was the scope of my audience. They're not all potatoheads, and they don't all like Broncos. No longer were the bulk of readers sitting in their Sandpoint living rooms next to the wood stove sipping coffee, reading the weekly news from Lake Pend Oreille country. No longer would most of them be in total agreement of what I had to say because, after all, we're all in this together.

With today's technology, that audience has expanded worldwide. In early 2007, the audience includes readers with a myriad of life experiences, a bagful of personal prejudices, sports savvy far beyond my realm and belief systems beyond my full comprehension. In addition, their age range, their ability to grab hold of instant information and their personal convictions provide a formidable challenge for any writer willing to tackle any subject.

I've learned a lot this week and have done a lot of introspection into my desire to keep on blogging after the reactions to my Jan. 2 posting. I'll admit to being thin-skinned, and, yes, I did reel a bit myself while reading some of the comments.

Some of my reactions were: but did they read all of what I said from beginning to end? Did they read only what they wanted to read and then react? Did I unwittingly provide some misconceptions? Did I ever dream that a sports posting would elicit such passionate responses?

This is the new news. We've come a long ways from the old days of the Sandpoint News Bulletin. And, in this new journalistic arena, folks like me, who can't rid ourselves of the passion to write about events and to write about our passionate thoughts, have got to keep up with the technological times and the potential audience reactions.

All the above discussion is leading to something I started reading this morning. It can be found at (http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/conversation/). A Spokesman-Review editor named Carla Savalli has been on a three-month hunt around the country to determine the future of the newsroom. She has completed her findings and has posted them at the "News Is a Conversation" blog.

So far, I've read only the introduction, but that document alone presents some interesting trends we can expect to see over the next decade. I did express my concerns to Carla that we old codgers of the world may find ourselves falling through the cracks if we don't keep up with the technology and the trends that are happening so quickly in the news business.

This week I've experienced firsthand the consequences of not being as cognizant as I should be to the new and expanded audience that my mutterings reach these days. If life could be so simple as it was back then with that hometown weekly, I would not be second-guessing every thought I put out there. Then, again, the exhilaration I experience on a daily basis knowing that lots of folks are reading my work feels just as good as it did when I read the headline for my first Mountain View ABC meeting report.

And, since that exhilaration still trumps the thumps some readers send me, I guess I'll just keep on blogging.