Feedback

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Somehow, I never consciously thought that the best way to do that is to ask the people. On some level, I suppose I was doing that when I talked to sources about various things, but on many levels I was drawing my own conclusions based on questions I had and observations I made. Besides, most sources were officials, not everyday people. And to ask people to tell us what to report and write might have been considered lazy or uninspired journalism. It was my job to know.

Like most journalists, I also wrote about what my editors deemed “newsworthy.” In fact, about the only feedback many journalists considered important was what came from their editors, and some even struggled with that.

In some ways, I think the old-school way to think about gathering and disseminating the news is still useful. One of the important arguments journalists have used is that we are charged with telling people things they might not know they need to know. We are to be their eyes and ears, seeing what they might never see and hearing what they might never hear.

What journalists now must do is avoid the level of arrogance and disregard that many in the past displayed toward the very public they claimed to be serving. It often manifested itself when some disgruntled soul got up the nerve to call the paper and complain about something a reporter had written. Sometimes, the exchanges would be downright nasty. But, of course, the caller started it.

I can remember sitting through such phone conversations, largely concerned with whether I had reported anything erroneously. That was rarely the case. But I now see that I probably was missing a much more important lesson – the knowledge that could be gained from listening to people. As a journalist, I never really saw that as part of my job. I wasn’t thinking about journalism as a business. It was a calling. I was like the preacher, assigned by God, to tell people the news, whether they wanted to hear it or not.

What I didn’t realize or fully appreciate was that there was a good chance that many of them were not hearing it because they might have never read beyond the first paragraph or so of the stories I wrote. But back then, we didn’t think about that a lot because the newspaper’s bottom line seemed healthy. Circulation numbers at the papers I worked for over the years were good.

Since then, the public, little by little, has been turning away from newspapers as a way to be informed. In other words, the public had been giving us feedback all along and we were too busy “giving them what they needed” to even see it. Of course, the circulation department folks saw it, but we never saw them as colleagues, so why would we listen to them? It just wasn’t the nature of journalism back in the day.

What we realize now is that feedback from the public is not always expressed verbally. Sometimes, actions really do speak louder than words. People will let you know what they think by what they do. Many have stopped reading newspapers.

The problem has become so acute today that the newspaper industry is in a state of crisis. Circulation and advertising revenues are falling in most markets. The consequences have been staff layoffs, lost space for stories, and low morale among journalists.

Now, newspapers are undergoing a great makeover, trying in various ways to appeal to an ever-changing public that is exposed to a growing number of avenues for how it acquires information. And the emphasis is on information more than on traditional notions of news, a reality that is driving many journalists who hail from a more traditional school of thought about journalism out of the profession – literally.