By Dr. Kaylene Armstrong
NW News Advisor
My summer newspaper internship in 1974 was at a 30,000-daily paper near my hometown. Every day before “putting the paper to bed” (journalism talk for signing off on that day’s paper), the editor would send me to a small room just off the newsroom. Here the Associated Press and United Press International wire service teletypes clacked away.
The machines, each about the size of a waist-high file cabinet, were furiously typing out stories from around the world on paper fed in a continuous roll from inside the machine. With four of these clattering non-stop, the noise could be deafening. (Remember, this was before computers and the internet.)
I was in the room to do a final check of the latest stories coming off the teletypes, looking for any possible breaking news that we would have to rush into that day’s paper. That summer I was really watching for just one story: the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. It seemed as if the air throughout the newsroom crackled with anticipation every day when it was time to do the final wire check. Would today be the day?
Such an event would be the kind of story that would have the editors screaming, “Stop the presses!” The final check was supposed to keep that from happening.
The story finally came on Thursday, Aug. 8, about two weeks before I would be back at college for my junior year. It was an exciting day to be a journalist.
During my college days, I practically lived in the newsroom of the student newspaper on campus — my roommates threatened to move my bed there.
It was the years just after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals, and we all wanted to be investigative journalists like Woodward and Bernstein and others who kept digging until the truth came out.
We all wanted to make a difference in the world and secretly hoped every story that we wrote for the campus newspaper would be the one that did just that. We dreamed that one day our work for a professional newspaper might do the same thing. Most of us planned journalism careers.
Fast forward 44 years. Most of the students working on the student newspaper today don’t plan to work for a professional paper when they graduate. It’s no wonder. When the president of the United States verbally flogs journalists on a daily basis and claims any reporter who is critical of his administration is writing fake news, well, young people just don’t feel inspired to become journalists.
Even though the job is under fire from many parts of the government and society in general, journalism is still a job that is important and needs to be done.
The National Newspaper Association and other journalism organizations are trying to make sure journalism survives the onslaught from all the critics. For the 78th year, the NNA is promoting National Newspaper Week, Oct. 7-13.
The slogan this year is an appropriate one: Journalism matters, now more than ever.
One doesn’t have to delve too far into history to realize the value of having a free press over one severely controlled by the government.
Think Nazi Germany of the past or communist/dictator-controlled countries of the present where the citizenry has little access to any news let alone truth.
Some journalists in those severely controlled countries have believed so much in what they are doing that they have given their lives. In 2017, 46 journalists died doing their jobs around the world, most in those severely controlled countries but none in the U.S.
We don’t have to live in one of those countries to appreciate the freedom of the media to do their jobs. Sure, journalists may not always gets it right, but just remember that for every error in the media, literally hundreds of thousands of truths are told every day around this country in newspapers and various online publications as well as on television news shows.
And that really matters.