The column was filled with venom. You could tell the young writer didn't have a clue, but she thought she did. Her anger, so childish in a way, came through. It said loudly and clearly to the newspaper adviser: "Just who the hell do you think you are?"
Sorry, but that anger is misplaced and evidence of her cluelessness is demonstrated to all.
She said in her final column for the student newspaper that those who criticize her work are wrong. It isn't her fault if her work is less than perfect. If we want to criticize we need to criticize those who really should be blamed, her professors in the department of communication.
Blame my professors?
Is there no sense of personal responsibility? No understanding that you don't learn it all in a 16-week semester? No understanding that a part-time student journalist just cannot match the experience and wisdom accumulated over a 30-year career?
No. There was no such understanding demonstrated in this column published in the student newspaper last week.
Every day I see evidence that the age of newsprint just might be coming to an end. Our harsh economy seems likely to finish off what arrogant editors and publishers threw away in their rush to appease the gods of readership and profit. Newspaper have been shedding readers for a half century, and for the past quarter of a century one newspaper after another has been gobbled up by chains which owe their financial future to the barrons of Wall Street. Today those chickens are coming home to roost.
Many of our newspapers are only bloodless corpses today, and some of the others have the rattle of death hanging in their throats. For example, the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Co. properties. Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon extrordinaire of Chicago, has announced he's going to take the Tribune Co. into bankruptcy. That after he raided the employee pension plan to finance his purchase of the company. The only thing this would-be savior has shown is that the old business school adage that a businessman can run any company is baloney. Zell's complete failure as an owner is evidence every day. He created this debt heavy load himself and now finds he can't make payment on that debt. I guess for Sam Zell, he has discovered that running a media empire is vastly different that running the overblown real estate empire he created.
So, my arrogant student journalist will graduates in a few days. I wonder if there will be any journalism jobs there for her, and question just what we have prepared her to do. For her sake and for the sake of all our student journalists, I hope we soon find the model of the future for journalism.
