The Role of a Lifetime?

If I strip down my role as a reporter to the barest bones explanation I can think of, it would be to report the news of day within a specified deadline. In a strict abstract sense, I could hypothetically write the nut graph of an event and be finished with my work. I reported the news. I can go home and watch television.
Of course, if every reporter reported the news in one or two paragraphs, newspapers would cease to exist – after all, if ten stories were all reported at a total length of 10 paragraphs, it would shrink the actual newspaper to the size of a one-page newsletter.
Space concerns aren't the only reasons why newspaper reporters are taught to fill their stories with multiple sources, etchings of dialogue, statistics and back-story. All of these elements give more information to the reader, allowing them to be more informed of what's going on the community and around the world. As such, the citizenry is able to know the issues, important or not, that are bound to affect them.
True, the newspaper isn't strictly meant to transmit the happenings of 24 hours. It is also a vehicle for entertainment, practical knowledge, humor, announcements and advertisements. And many of these elements are the primary reasons that individuals continue to read newspapers (for example, a reader might want to find out what's on television or how to cook a ham for Christmas).
Perhaps the greatest challenge that journalists face now and in the future is to get these casual readers to get interested in their community and the world. There are many ways to pursue this goal. For one, present the news that has an engaging, easy-to-read writing style. Ultra-serious pieces about county and city government aren't going to be particularly helpful for citizens who don't understand what the municipal or state employees are talking about.
Another way to produce a newspaper that more people will read and look to for news is to make sure that an assigned news story either has justifiable impact to people in the surrounding community. Often, reporters will venture out to do “feature” stories on road signs, a person with an unusual story to tell, etc. While these stories have room inside a daily paper, when they become the dominant motif, the news value and informative capital to the public is diluted.
Our role as journalists will obviously evolve with changing technology. But it is essential that we maintain a quest to make our copy more understandable, more engaging and more attractive to an audience whose focus is not necessarily square on the news. We’ve got to find and pursue stories that chronicle every day people, while still using our expert sources to give our readers perspective. This can be especially tricky, considering that newspaper journalists tend to use the same sources often as a force of necessity and habit.
It seems that if we don’t take it upon ourselves to earn our audience, we will lose it. Due to the increasing interactivity of blogs and lightning-quick Internet news services, newspaper journalists are essentially on barrowed time. Especially with the emergence of solid, albeit partisan, conservative-leaning media outlets like the Drudge Report, National Review Online and (to an extent) Fox News, not to mention their liberal counterparts (Daily Kos, the Nation, etc.), news junkies with a certain political leaning will likely look for their information and rhetoric from mediums that suit their needs, rather than a “non-partisan” newspaper.
What is at stake if the newspaper industry fails to keep up with the changing landscape? Plenty. If seasoned writers and reporters are cast aside and replaced by inexperienced and partisan observers, the public will not have a true picture of what is going on around them. When we talked in class about the pros and cons embedded reporters during a time of war, we have to wonder whether a blogger or a political analyst could tag along with an army unit and still record their trek with as much depth and fairness as a traditional reporter. Depending on their perspective and their training, the public might not get a complete idea of what is going on during a time of conflict. Instead, their getting a filtered view of a situation cast from the eyes of somebody with a specific agenda (i.e. publicity, money, the advancement of a certain point of view).
The “new” media of bloggers and politicized analysts will likely have trouble producing in-depth, investigative pieces. For one thing, the sheer amount of resources available to a traditional reporter allows him or her to conduct fairly substantial looks into aspects of government and society untenable to ordinary citizens. They also have the tools to ask hard questions if necessary. Also, the “new” media will have a tougher time being a watchdog for anything other than the people or entities they are against. Would a blogger with ads for the Democratic Party write a furiously critical post on the Democratic Party? Would a citizen who is pro-life print an article on extremism within the movement? Probably not. Although the “traditional” new media has been criticized for being either too liberal or (in rare cases) too conservative, it does a far better job at attacking both sides of the political spectrum than a blogger.
Ultimately, the role and the place of a newspaper reporter will likely change even more as technology and competitors continue to capture more of the public’s attention. But by focusing on improving our writing and getting to know who our audience is, there will likely be a place at the table for newspaper reporters for a long time to come.