Moving from Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo., to Loyola University New Orleans promised to be quite a change. Friends asked me, “Have you been there?” The weather is hot and humid, they said, and the city is sinking because it was built on a swamp.
Man cannot live on cool, dry air alone, I assured myself, as I responded that my wife, Margaret, and I had vacationed twice in the past four years for a week in the Big Easy.
We had a very good time on both July visits, despite the heat. We enjoyed the live music, good food, historic architecture, and diverse culture of New Orleans.
We lived in Alamosa, just 90 miles north of Taos, N.M., for about 15 years. I taught journalism at the college while Margaret directed the public library. That was the longest stay we had enjoyed since our marriage in May 1975. Previously, I had worked for small to medium-sized newspapers in Kansas and Colorado, moving every couple years as I climbed the professional ladder.
I worked as a newspaper reporter, photographer, news editor, and managing editor for a decade before earning a master’s degree and entering academia. I earned my doctorate from the University of Missouri School of Journalism after completing a one-year sabbatical leave and a one-year leave of absence from ASC.
During my 13-year tenure at ASC, I taught reporting, feature writing, editing, paper and web page layout and design, media history, media law, editorial writing and photojournalism.
About 10 years ago, I became interested in using the Internet for publishing news after concluding it was a print medium: writing and reading text were the primary symbolic interactions between people using the Internet. Since then, World Wide Web sites have begun supplementing their screen-printed texts with graphics, photos, hypertext, audio and audio-video clips, leading what one Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher called “the killer medium.”
This blurring of traditional boundaries of print and broadcast media has been called convergence of media, and it is becoming known as interactive, multimedia communication. Virtually all newspapers and broadcasters are online today.
These vast changes in communications technology have created nothing less than a revolution in journalism that is changing the traditional jobs of news reporters.
According to a recent New York Times article, “The great leaps forward for print reporters … are wireless laptops and digital tape recorders with software that allows them to download a candidate’s speech immediately onto the laptops as an audio file.
For television reporters, it is the ubiquitous hand-held Minicam, which blurs the line between home video and politically revealing moments.”
Digital technology is changing the way reporters record, save, search and use information for the benefit of the public.
During periods of great and controversial change, sometimes called paradigm shifts, professionals, scholars, critics and scientists tend to argue a lot about traditional views and are forced to retreat to their core values and ask very basic questions such as “What Are Journalists For?”, the title of a recent scholarly book by Jay Rosen – one of the founders of the civic journalism reform movement that prodded traditional journalism throughout the ’90s.
I found my answer to Rosen’s question compatible with Loyola University’s mission statement of values seeking truth, pursuing social justice and serving others. I’ve seen these values practiced by Loyola students, faculty and staff, and I feel privileged to work with them. Furthermore, I am inspired to help them cope and succeed in the brave new e-world we face.
No matter how the news is delivered in the future, and paper will always be part of the mix, such core values ensure that the basic role of journalists will not change.
The more channels and sources of information available, the more citizens will need ethical and talented journalists to help them sort, prioritize and understand it.
I look forward to another creative, innovative and productive semester at Loyola. I also look forward to more of the live music, good food, historic architecture, and diverse culture of New Orleans.
~ Jack Morris is an assistant professor of communications.
