Undoubtedly we’ve all heard of the many lists that Forbes generates each year. They range from best cities to find employment to best colleges to best cities to retire in. While we realize that one should view such lists with skepticism, it’s hard not to pay attention when the ranking concerns your own industry.
Recently Forbes came out with its Best and Worst Jobs list for 2013. Thanks to ever-shrinking newsrooms, dwindling budgets and competition from online news organizations, newspaper reporter was ranked as the nation’s single worst job for 2013. In fact, Forbes listed being a newspaper reporter as a worse job than garbage collector, lumberjack and oil rig worker.
The profession has been ranked among the worst jobs for many years now, due to low pay, high levels of stress from working under deadlines, a poor hiring outlook and the requirement for many positions to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In the last decade, thousands of newspaper reporter positions (including many in St. Louis) have been eliminated. In fact, the job now actually has a negative growth outlook, meaning there will be fewer newspaper reporters in the future. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics anticipates that the number of traditional print newspapers reporter jobs will decline 6 percent by 2020.
While we’re not exactly sure what the single worst job in the world might be, we know it is not newspaper reporter, at least not the way we practice the craft at The St. Louis American. We are not ambulance or disaster chasers who run from one gruesome scandal to the next, hastily gathering the scant known facts while heating it all up with hype and innuendo. Rather, we report week after week on the same local community, looking for marginal – sometimes, marked – improvement in our core areas of concern, which are the vital signs of any community: education, health, public engagement, business and employment opportunity, and athletic and artistic excellence.
In our 85 years of continuous publication, we have sent journalists out of our small, local newsroom to major newspapers in larger cities. A family tree connecting The American to publications and news organization where our reporters have gone on to excel would include the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News and the Denver Post. We also have seen our reporters successfully recast themselves as communications staffers for congressmen and influential non-profit organizations.
But perhaps the best proof that reporter is not the worst job that has emerged from our newsroom is how long quality journalists have stayed with us. Wiley Price has been our staff photojournalist intermittently for 30 years and entered the Missouri Photojournalist Hall of Fame strictly for the work he did for us. Our sports editor Earl Austin Jr. has a knowledge of local sports that is the envy of every news organization in town, but he has stayed with his hometown newspaper since 1995. It is not the absence of other opportunities that keep them at The American, but a shared sense of caring while taking a credible, positive approach to telling a community’s story.
Further, unlike the chain publications that keep shedding journalists by the dozens, we are an independent publication owned by a single local individual. But, in fact, because of our model for producing community journalism, all of us – including the publisher – have the same boss: the community we serve. And while we want to give our community a voice, we know as journalists we must be credible and that means it remains our job to tell the truth.
