The kids are all right

After watching El País cover a large-scale tragedy thoroughly, tirelessly, with courage and restraint, I dipped into my RSS reader and found Greg Linch’s post at TNTJ ( “Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists”). If you’re in the mood for inspiration, for something to make you stop sighing and crying about the current state of journalism, TNTJ is your ticket.

Linch provides a long list of all the things about which any journalist is rightfully uncertain today. Then he goes on to give us a brief “Chin up, mate” slap on the back — and that’s what brought me back to the runway in Spain where more than 100 people died yesterday.

Think about what the journalists of El País did. They spent hours making phone calls, gathering lists, putting up valuable information for families of people on the plane, explaining, investigating, collecting details and checking, rechecking.

This is not fun work. But it is important work.

Especially for those families. I saw the video of the scene in the airport, where family members who had just dropped off their loved ones were returning to find out what had happened — the crush of big TV cameras seemed grotesque. How would you feel, walking that gantlet while wondering if someone close to you has just died?

Good, solid reporting is not like that.

I heard some very ugly stories after the Virginia Tech shootings — stories about journalists from major U.S. newspapers acting like ghouls, harassing college students who had just lost their friends, or who had crouched under a desk themselves, not knowing whether they would die then. It made me feel bad about journalism, about the work, about the business. It made me feel worse than any of the job losses and sales and buyouts have made me feel — the image of a callous reporter wheedling with a sobbing college kid to talk about “how it felt” when the kid’s friend had just been shot to death.

But what I saw on the Web site of El País yesterday was service. The journalists were providing every scrap of information — names and locations of hospitals, an emergency phone number, maps, details about the airplane — that a person in or near Madrid would want to know. Information you would be crying out for if it were your airport, your neighbors and friends and family members.

That’s the kind of journalism we cannot afford to lose. And when a young person such as Greg Linch expresses his commitment to that — to doing journalism, to believing in something that a bunch of businessmen have done their best to destroy in the interest of profits, to continuing a public good (like the periodistas in Madrid) — then I can go on thinking that journalism will continue, and continue to serve the people.

The old models are broken and we can’t wait for someone else to fix them for us. Of what’s broken, there are some things that can be fixed and there are some that can’t.

Linch isn’t ready to lie down and give up. He would go down to the tarmac and do that awful job among the carnage, because that’s what journalism has to be, has to do. That’s what has to go on being done.

To get it done, we’ve got to support the next generation of journalists, the ones who are brave enough to face the uncertainty. What have you done for them lately? Give them a word of encouragement when you have a chance. We need them.