Good, honest journalism will eventually come back, but I doubt the transformation will come through the major existing networks, newspapers, etc.
We need to get back to H. L. Mencken in his early days. Here is perhaps the finest description of what a journalist should be about from H. L. Mencken.
We are, I suspect, a somewhat feverish race, launching out into life prematurely and wearing out before most are full grown. My grandfather was married at nineteen; my father had a business of his own at twenty-one; I was the city editor of a daily newspaper at twenty-three.
I have known what hard work is. At the time of the Baltimore fire I worked continuously from eleven o’clock Sunday morning until the dawn of Wednesday. Another time, for six months running, I ran an average of 5,000 words of news copy per day, getting the news myself and writing it myself. The reporters of today lead lordly, voluptuous lives. There were no taxicabs in my time, and the telephone was a toy. One man did the work of two, three, or four.
What keeps me going at my trade, I suppose, is my continuous curiosity, my endless interest in the stupendous farce of human existence. It is the principal and perhaps only stock of a journalist; when it begins to slip from him he is fit only for the knacker’s yard.
To be short of ideas is an experience that I have yet to suffer; it is, indeed, almost incomprehensible to me. Short of ideas in the Republic of today? As well try to imagine a Prohibition enforcement officer short of money! They dart and bang about one’s ears like electrons in a molecule. A thousand new ones are born every day.
The hard job is to choose from among them, to get some coherence into them, to weave them into more or less orderly chains. In other words, the hard job is to reduce them to plausible and ingratiating words, to make them charming, to turn them into works of art. After thirty years of incessant endeavor in that direction I come to two conclusions about it: skill at is never (or only miraculously) inborn, and it cannot be taught.
How, then, is it to be acquired? By one method only; by hard work. By trial and error. By endless experiment. Is what was done today better than what was done last year? Does it move more gracefully? Is it better organized? Then keep on. But is it still clumsy, still stiff, still dull? Then back to the office stool!
Fortunately, the quest is without end. Of the other languages I know little, but of English I have learned something. Its charm is its infinite complexity, its impenetrable mystery. Do not suspect me of rhetoric when I say that it seems to change from year to year. Or maybe those of us who write it change. We hear new melodies, sometimes far below the staff. A new and rich color appears. There is here something magnificently fascinating. The lesson is never quite learned.
Schoomarms, of course, profess to teach it. To the lions with them! I am no pedagogue myself, but at forty-five a man naturally yearns to wave his beard at the apprentices to his trade. My advice, brethren, if you would do honor to our incomparable tongue, is that you pay little heed to books, even the best. Listen to it on the street. It is there that it is alive.
Glad there are a few of you REAL journalists left!
I wholeheartedly agree!