A poet and a one-man band

Last week I sat down beside the future of journalism to cover a meeting of the local town council. She came with a pizza; I brought a mug of tea. Until recently, both of us had been newspaper reporters. I still was. But she'd left the world of ink and paper behind to work for something called Patch.com.

Patch is a kind of collection of online news sites, developed in 2007 and purchased in 2009 by America Online. Each site focuses on a single town, something Patch's marketing department calls being "hyperlocal" (one of those words, like "Twitteratti" and "webinar," that is used exclusively by marketing departments). Every Patch editor acts as a kind of one-man band, writing news stories, commissioning freelancers to cover other stories, taking photographs, writing opinion pieces and making the whole thing look presentable.

You'd think this would keep the average Patch editor pretty busy, and you'd be right; the future of journalism had to leap up a couple of times during our council meeting to take a photograph, for example. On the other hand, Patch editors get to set their own hours, and because they're their own bosses, they're never interrupted in the middle of writing an in-depth story by an editor who wants them to drop everything to write a "how hot was it?" story about the weather, or re-write a press release to fill page three.

At least four former staff members of my newspaper now write for Patch, and the ones I've talked with say it isn't the pay (which is typical for a journalist, or roughly two-thirds the average kindergarten teacher's starting salary) but quality-of-life issues that drew them online. Those with kids found that working for a Web site meant not having to choose between a career in journalism and being able to provide day care. Others were better able to pursue their dreams, or a healthy lifestyle, or both outside of a newsroom: my colleague at the council meeting doubles as a professional triathlete.

And I'll admit it: the whole thing scares me a little. It's hard to be a print journalist (or a print anything, really) in 2010 and not feel like one of the last rats on a sinking ship. My mood isn't lifted when I look at what's out there in the world of jobs and see ads like this one — for a "super smart editor" — lifted from a friend's Facebook page: "Are you the kind of person who delights in your iPhone, Droid, or Blackberry? Have you been known to spend WAY too much time finding the coolest app and then telling your friends about it? Are you familiar with what kids are watching, playing, and doing online? Are you familiar with all of the fun and cool ways that kids can use apps and the Internet?"

It's not that I don't like new technology, or that I'm afraid of it (I'm not, really). I like finding new methods of self-expression (I'm writing a blog, after all) and although I think of myself as a writer, I'm reasonably good at taking a picture, recording a sound bite or designing a page. But that's not what I want to do professionally. And I'm not sure that trying to be all things to everyone is what newspapers ought to be doing these days, either.

I spent the final semester of my undergraduate life taking a course called "Baseball and American Culture," which I recommend to anyone looking for a way to earn college credit while watching Eight Men Out and attending baseball games. As a class, our final project for the course was to recreate a baseball game from the 1860s. One of my classmates made a bat; another researched team uniforms. My job was to learn about the world of 19th-century sportswriting.

What I discovered, after reading every baseball story the New York Times published in the summer of 1869, was that 19th-century sportswriting was pretty dull. Essentially, it reported what happened during the course of the game. Every now and then there were a few interesting details — the number of ladies in attendance, for example — but on the whole the stories simply told you what you'd want to know if you weren't able to see the game and cared about what happened.

Everything changed, of course, with the arrival of radio and television. When sports fans could see and hear for themselves what was happening on the field — as it happened — they no longer needed a sportswriter to tell them. So sportswriting changed: it became sharper, crisper, more interesting. I always look forward to reading about a game the day after I've gone to see it because I know an experienced sportswriter will have caught details I missed, or can provide context I know nothing about. And I love the way they write.

I think many of us who cover the news are facing the same kind of changes now that sportswriters faced back in the '30s and '40s. It used to be that the only way you could find out what happened at a city council meeting was to go yourself, or read about it in the paper the next day. It's now possible in many places to watch those meetings on public-access television, or stream them over the Web. I used to sort through the basement files of dusty old courthouses to find public records. Now they're available online -- which means that any sufficiently-determined member of the public can find them, too. And even though I work for a newspaper, I tend to find out about breaking national news stories more often these days through Facebook than through any traditional news source.

I don't think these changes mean the end of news, or even newspapers. But I do think it means that news reporting has to change — and not by asking reporters to "package" the news through photos, video, or Web design. I think news writing needs to become better, more nuanced and interesting. I think newspapers should do for journalism what the "slow food" movement has done for cuisine: they should be something our readers savor over the course of an evening, something they're willing to pay for because they can't get it anywhere else.

Of course, all of this could be self-serving on my part. I'd rather write than edit video clips, after all. And it's worth noting that the writing skills of my Patch colleagues hasn't suffered from their multi-tasking; on the contrary, the woman I refer to as the future of journalism is one of the better news writers I know, and I'm better for having her as a competitor. I'm far from qualified to predict what will end up saving newspapers, or what brought them to this point in the first place (though I have a few ideas). But I know what I like to read, and what I like to write, and I plan on doing both for as long as I can.