A week to go, an open letter to my journo colleagues

By JoAnne Young

We call it a newsroom. Although the news rarely happens there.

 

In Lincoln, our room is on P Street, where a dozen city desk reporters join editors, photographers, sportswriters, a publisher and others to get the news from where it happens to the pages and screens of those who want to know – need to know – what’s going on. 

 

It’s been my career – that information gathering, researching, observing, writing, editing, posting -- actually one of my major identities, for 36 years. 

 

And while I am ready to get on to other things, it will be hard to walk out those newsroom doors in a week, and out of that life. I am grateful, however, that it is a choice I have been able to make at the time I want to make it. It hasn’t happened that way for some in this newsroom and others across the country. Between 2008 and 2019, U.S. newsrooms lost half of their workers, many of them with no choice in their departure. 

 

The Journal Star lost more than half … good, valuable people.

 

Beloved coworkers all. 

 

In my time here, we have gone through many changes together, changes that make or break relationships. For me, some of those friendships were cemented, some were cracked. But all have remained of constant importance.

 

Also important are the many people I have had the privilege to interview, to learn from and write about over these decades. 

 

I found out pretty quickly that we are more than reporters and writers. We also spend a lot of time listening to complaints about government, to happy endings and to stories about the sadness and worries in people’s lives. We hear about much more than we can write about.

 

I sometimes feel we are the journalist priests who hear our sources’ and our readers’ confessions. Off the record, they’ll say. And so it goes into the vault, never to be spoken about again. 

 

We hear their pleas for help, and it’s with regret that we sometimes have to tell them, “I really can’t do any more. You need to find an attorney, or call your senator, or write a letter to the editor.” Sometimes they just want someone to listen, and we do, and let them get out their unhappiness, regret, frustrations, sometimes rage.

 

In the past four years, after being labeled “enemies of the people,” there’s been an increase in  mean-spirited rhetoric touched off by political and philosophical divides. It’s often aimed at us personally, not just professionally. 

 

One man recently took exception to how I used a word in one of my stories. He wrote to explain to me the correct usage. I cordially told him why I used the word the way I did. He wrote back to continue explaining to me why I was wrong. Since I was in the middle of trying to write other stories, my second response was short. “Mr. _______, you clearly just want to argue. I do not.”

 

That, apparently, made him mad. “Go forth with your arrogant and know-it-all approach,” he wrote back. He said I should have less of an ego. I was rude not to address his legitimate questions about my use of the word. (Um, I thought I did that in the first 150 words I sent him.) He went on to say he would cancel his subscription. That I disgusted him.

 

All of this over the use of one word. 

 

But I digress. 

 

I was lucky enough to have had two offices in the past 14 years, two working groups, one at 926 P St. and one at the state Capitol, the most beautiful building in Nebraska, where a restless writer could get up from her computer, walk down the stairs, visit with interesting people, and watch the sun track across the images created by Hildreth Mieère on the Rotunda’s marble floor.

 

We have been fortunate to be able to offer our perspectives on Lincoln, the state and its people, not opinions but perspectives, in what we choose to cover and how we choose to cover it. 

 

People would like to tell us we should not be setting the agenda for what’s important. I think they are wrong. Yes, we must listen to readers, really listen, but we are in a position to see a sweeping view, through the wide lens and the macro lens, and then report it accurately and deeply … not just tell people what they think they want to hear. 

 

If we don’t use our own good judgment based on informed observations and news gathering, we are in danger, as Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers puts it, of being that long-legged waterbug that skims across the lake, barely causing a ripple or breaking the surface. 

 

Thank you all, past and present, for honing my personality. They say the brain is ever changing, that with every experience, every conversation, you are altered. You are not the same person today you were at age 20 or 40, or even yesterday. You have contributed to that person in me, with your smart observations, your dark humor, your passion, and your caring. 

 

You have been invaluable, especially, in the time of COVID-19, in the lifting up of the voices of Black Lives Matter, and the hard realities of quarantine and isolation. 

 

I put you somewhere in that line of essential workers. And I will always be one of your biggest supporters.