“Reflections on Journalism”
An Address by Linda Greenhouse
Phi Beta Kappa Annual Dinner
Alpha of Connecticut Chapter
Yale University
February 8, 2010
I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in the spring of my senior year – one of the “senior 16” as opposed to the more celebrated “junior 8” among the members of my class at Radcliffe College – the former Radcliffe College, which in my day was the route of entry into Harvard for female students. Our induction ceremony was small – nothing like this festive event. The Radcliffe chapter was only Iota of Massachusetts, founded in 1914 – compared to Harvard, Alpha of course, dating to 1779. (The chapters are now combined – Alpha Iota – but Harvard will always be Alpha, at least in its own mind.)
Thinking about what to say tonight, I decided to try to put my mind back to where you are today, on the verge of stepping out from this wonderful and sheltering place into a somewhat frightening world. In my time, it was frightening not because of the financial meltdown and the straitened assumptions of the last two years, but because of the war in Vietnam and civil unrest at home. Yet we were motivated by the notion that we could make things better. You can decide for yourselves whether that promise was fulfilled. Be charitable, and spare me your conclusions.
Although many of my male friends faced military service, and most of my female classmates were headed to some kind of graduate education, I was eager to get out in the world. I wanted to be a journalist. It was a desire born at Hamden High School, a few miles from here, and honed by four years on the Harvard Crimson. Hamden had a weekly newspaper in those days, the Hamden Chronicle, which printed our high school paper in its printing plant. That process put the high school editors in touch with a man I think of only as Mr. Lenahan, although I’m quite sure he had a first name. He was the editor and publisher of the Chronicle. He wore a cardigan sweater, smoked a pipe, knew everything that was going on in town, and was repaid by near universal respect. He treated the high school editors with kindly interest. He was a wonderful role model – although of course I knew I could never grow up to be like him. The paper’s only female staff member, as far as I can recall, was one who wrote the weekly society column. She was the mother of a high school classmate, and I thought she was pretty cool, too.
Today, of course, the Chronicle is no more – it got merged into some conglomeration of local papers. If Hamden has a local paper, as opposed to a shopping flier dressed up with a few articles, I haven’t run into it in my year back in this area. And journalism, as you know, is in the midst of drastic and fundamental change, unthinkable in its scale only a few years ago. The change is playing out in your generation’s news-acquiring habits, which in turn affect the distribution of my former employer’s newspaper, in the debate now playing out here at Yale over whether to continue the free – read, subsidized – (nothing is ever really free) – distribution of the New York Times on campus.
Some change is for the better, of course. The Times managing editor is a woman, Jill Abramson, whom some of you may have encountered in the class that she teaches here. The foreign news editor and national news editor are also women. That array of female talent and titles would have been unthinkable not too may years ago.
But for any on you interested in going into journalism, it’s a discouraging prospect. Newspapers shed some 30,000 jobs in the past two years. Young journalists who are lucky graduate from free internships to blogs and web sites that, if they pay for content at all, pay less than someone can make working at Starbucks – without the good health benefits that Starbucks offers – indeed, without any benefits at all.
One site I read about recently offers an income of “up to $500 a month.” The small print explains that this income will come in the form of articles, the pay for which will range from $25 to $100, which will be paid only if the article posted on the site receives a minimum of 250 unique page views. No one could plan to live independently of parental support under this kind of arrangement, let alone contemplate sustaining a career, raising a family, and putting their own children through college. Journalism and journalists, it seems have become sadly devalued in today’s marketplace. I am hardly the only one to notice. Law schools and other graduate schools are filled with students who in an earlier day might have become journalists, who could have looked forward to having an excellent adventure learning about how the world works while making enough money to live on. It’s a journalistic brain-drain that I think has disturbing implications for our democracy.
My generation didn’t manage to save the world, despite our bold promises to ourselves and our elders. Maybe the best and the brightest of your generation can take on the somewhat more limited but no less immodest challenge of saving journalism. There is no magic bullet – no way to bring back the old days of hot lead and newsprint, and I’m not advocating that. I appreciate living in a wired world. When I was first in Washington covering the Supreme Court, part of my duty was to pick up a second set of the court’s opinions every day so that they could be shipped by overnight pouch to the New York Times editorial board, which would ponder them and opine to the world, perhaps some 48 hours after the decision had been issued. Now, of course, anyone can read the full opinions and some pretty smart commentary before lunchtime with a few mouse clicks. I couldn’t do my job otherwise.
So I’m not yearning for the good old days – I’m searching for the good new ones. It’s a challenge worthy of your attention and creative talents. Start small. Be willing to pay for content. Keep reading. Encourage your friends to do the same. Hold the blogs and sites you visit to the same standards you expect from the Yale Daily News. Believe that quality pays, and that people will pay for quality. Join the search for new business models. If you’re really drawn to journalism, don’t give up on it before giving it a chance. It’s just possible that we’re at the dawn of something new and exciting. The stories you tell may be your own. And I’ll be reading them.
Linda Greenhouse is a Pulitzer Prize-winning legal writer. For the past three decades, she reported on the Supreme Court for The New York Times. Currently, Greenhouse is Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. She was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Senate in October 2009.
Greenhouse's comments are represented here as they were given to the national office by the speaker.