Busy News Days

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." -- Frank Church, 1897

   The news cycle is now 24 hours, compared to less than half that in the days when print dominated journalism.
   At the time, it took that long for a reporter to gather a breaking news story, write it and submit it to an editor, who would then revise and edit it and decide where in the newspaper it would go.
   The next step would be for printers to set it in type and make up a page, which would then be formed into a plate for printers to install with other plates onto a press to produce copies of the newspaper.
   The papers were then loaded onto trucks for delivery to distributors, who carried them to stores and homes.
   The deadline for reporters was typically 9:30 p.m. for a morning newspaper, and the production process lasted until the papers were delivered to homes by 7 a.m.
   However, then came radio, television and finally computers, which now enable consumers to watch news events live or to read about them within minutes as reporters write their stories on portable computers and post them immediately on the internet.
   So while unions lament the loss of jobs for typesetters, printers and others in the formerly labor intensive production process, there has been a greater surge of jobs in newsrooms for reporters and writers.
   In addition, there are many more journalism jobs for reporters, writers, editors and production personnel at radio, television, computer and internet operations.
   Result: Consumers get more news in greater detail, faster and sooner with less effort. At the same time, newspapers have adapted to the changes, forming new relationships with broadcast facilities as well as setting up their own computer systems for consumers to get information via the internet.
   In short, people are better served by the new technology, giving them more and better news and information sooner.
   The downside is that politicians and corporate marketers have also learned how to use the new technology to transmit their messages, enabling them to bypass journalists.
   At one time, people would say you can't believe everything you read in the newspaper. That was at a time when some print media were neutral and objective, and some were not.
  The same is true today, and that includes television and internet outlets. And because of the greater volume of information available, the responsibility to judge reliability of news sources is far greater for readers, TV watchers and internet cruisers. At the same time, journalists have a greater obligation for increased competence to meet the higher responsibility borne by consumers.
   However, the highest responsibility remains with the people who read newspapers, watch television and cruise the internet.
   You still can't believe everything you read, leaving editors and reporters with more responsibility than ever to be truthful.
   But the tradition of printing truth in this day of constant attacks on "fake news media" lives on, it's just as strong now as it was in the 19th Century.
  That was when eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon asked her father whether Santa Claus really existed. His response was, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." 
   And as the New York City newspaper editorial writer Frank Church put it in his reply, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."
   Too many people, Church wrote, "have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age."
   We remain in a skeptical age, when cynicism over the doings of senior politicians is the inevitable result of their hypocrisy. Yet it remains the duty of journalists to continue to print truth despite the barrage of insults hurled at them.
   May it ever be so. Freedom and democracy depend on it.