On May 25, 2008, I went back to where I started. The Journalism Department at San Francisco State University held its annual Graduation Celebration at 9 a.m. in McKenna Theatre, and I was on the program as Distinguished Journalism Alumnus, introduced by Jon Funabiki. Venise Wagner, the department chair, opened the morning. Martin Reynolds was named Journalism Alumnus of Year, introduced by Austin Long-Scott. Khari Johnson was the Class Honors Student, introduced by Cristina Azocar, and Christine Joy Ferrer was the Class Speaker, introduced by John Burks. The ceremony closed with a World Press Pass send-off by the journalism faculty.
The two documents here are the printed program
ed u2014 with the full list of graduates u2014 and my speaking text, marked 22, 2008. Speaking to a room full of new journalism graduates in the spring of 2008 meant speaking into a very bad news cycle for the news business, and I decided not to pretend otherwise.
This is a wonderful time to be a journalist. This is also a lousy time to be at a traditional journalism-based media company.
The rest of the talk was an argument for flexibility, built out of my own ru00e9sumu00e9. I told them I left school with one goal u2014 to become a news editor at a newspaper u2014 and never got there.
That was my career dream. It was a good goal, but I never reached it. I went around it. I went through it. I went over it.
Instead I counted seven careers: copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Chicago Tribune; graphics and picture editor at the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times; newsroom leader at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Arizona Republic; head of information technology at The Arizona Republic; online strategist at Central Newspapers; new media consultant; and educator, trainer and director of interactive learning at The Poynter Institute. My journalism education, I told them, had prepared me for maybe two of those jobs. My wife, Kate, has her own diagnosis for this pattern u2014 she calls me a u201cpioneer addict,u201d someone who is happy only when he creates something new, and she is right that pioneers are easy to spot by the lost look and the absence of a map.
The heart of the speech was a small piece of advice dressed up as journalism 101. Everyone in that theatre already knew the 5Ws. I suggested they add one more.
What you need to add is another W, a 6th W: the u201cWhat Ifu201d.
I framed 2008 as an inflection point u2014 the moment when an industry, a company or a person has to choose between protecting the old or jumping into a future where the rules are unclear. The railroads didnu2019t make that leap. Newspapers, I argued, could have decided in the 1980s that their business was helping people make sense of the world around them, u201cand not just crushing trees and smearing ink.u201d I warned the graduates they would witness the failure of some well-known newspaper and television companies during their careers, and also the birth of new forms of journalism, including nonprofit-supported experiments then under way in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.
I also reminded them that they were the first truly digital generation u2014 born about when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, in fifth grade when the first Palm Pilot shipped, in ninth grade when Napster arrived and took the music industryu2019s business model with it, in high school for Skype, in college for YouTube. My generation still marvels at the Internet; theirs would treat it the way we treat electricity, without noticing the lights are on.
It is your responsibility to think about what the future might hold. It is your responsibility to shape the future. Do you think that you arenu2019t ready for that responsibility? Sorry. Too late. You already have the job.
Rereading this in 2026, the predictions hold up better than I would like. Well-known newspaper companies did fail. Nonprofit newsrooms did grow into a real part of the ecosystem. The one line that makes me smile is my hope for an innovator who would combine the Wii with journalism u2014 a very 2008 way of asking a question that AI and immersive storytelling are now answering in ways I couldnu2019t have named then. The advice underneath it, though, is the same advice I spent the next decade acting on at Poynter, building News University to give working journalists a way to keep learning after the diploma. Formal education can only take you to the starting line. Preparation, as I told the class of 2008, comes from within.