Woe is Media

It's time to save journalism from its saviors.

Matt Welch from the December 2002 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

The problem with these successful old men sitting atop the profession that now gives them the shingles is that they make a grown journalist want to take up a new career, such as self-mutilation. Lord only knows what kind of prophylactic effects they might have on the young. Journalism may be a flawed industry, imperfectly realized, with many trends pointing in the wrong direction. But gosh, it's pretty darn fun sometimes, even if you don't get invited to sit at long tables in Cambridge.

Jim Bellows, the octogenarian former editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Washington Star, Entertainment Tonight, and more, communicates more joy on every single page of his breezy memoir, The Last Editor, than Kovach, Rosenstiel, Downie, and Kaiser manage to muster in 501 combined. Read Bellows, and you'll want to stomp out into the world, launch new publications, and, in his simple motto, "do your best."

For that considerable number of American journalists who've had the pleasure of being involved with start-up media outlets in the last decade, his forward-looking enthusiasm may resonate stronger than the Ivy League gloom of the careerists. Last I heard, Bellows was heading out to New York to help start a new magazine, while still shooting the bull about creating a newspaper in Los Angeles.

Journalism may need some long-faced fellows to look backward and tell us how things have gone badly, but that species is in more than adequate supply. What we need are more Jim Bellowses, and the good news is that the current scene -- including but not limited to the wide-open World Wide Web -- looks promising on that score. The academic scolds can sort it all out later.