Thats true but I still don't care for the profession.
I don't blame you.
I was a reporter for 14 years, and a damned good one. I loved what I did, but I saw the profession start to crumble like a rotten Halloween pumpkin starting in the early 90s, and by the last third of the decade, I couldn't stomach being a part of it anymore.
It was the advent of 24-hour news channels in the 80s that started the slide, and then the internet in the 90s that crippled the industry.
Before CNN, people saw about an hour, hour and a half of news every day, and that was enough. When there was some sort of emergency or international crisis, networks would run a half hour of special reporting for a few nights, and that was all people needed. News doesn't usually change much on a minute-by-minute basis; updates 2 or 3 times a day is more than enough to keep most people informed.
When the 24-hour cable networks started making every single thing an urgent crisis, "breaking news OMG, don't miss this!!!", broadcast media became a carnival. But print media was able to avoid this, because we didn't have to come up with some hysterical, sensationalized crisis literally every 5 minutes. We didn't publish non-stop, every single minute, 24 hours a day - we published once a month, once a week, ot at worst once a day. We had plenty of time to get it right, and print media was slow to give in to the same pressures as broadcast media.
The internet put an end to that. By the mid-90s, every newspaper and magazine had a website, and they immediately started competing with one another to be - yeah, you guessed it - the one that got the story first, not the one that got it right. Print media too was now 24-hour, breaking news changing every single minuite in real time. Executives started pushing editors to worry more about being quick and catchy first, and accurate second.
So the editors started pushing the reporters to write snappy, exciting copy quickly, and get it online as fast as possible. We often no longer had time to do the research we needed to do, especially on the most urgent stories - which are exactly the ones you most
need to make sure you get right. My areas were poltics, government, and local business and economic development, and more and I just didn't have the time to do the research I needed to do.
In 1999, my editor (a really great guy who's stiil a close friend) had enough and quit, because he just couldn't be a part of that. He was replaced by just the kind of guy who we hated, and withgin two weeks I switched away from hard news to features, travel, tech, and human interest stories. But I was still so disgusted by the whole business I quit in 2000. Worked for a few years on a paper in a rural small town, in the South, where nobody gives a damn how fast anything gets done, before takiing a position at the Red Cross.
Now I just do occasional feature articles, or music. Did an article on the making of "Do You Think They Know It's Christmas" that just happened to be published on the internet on Christmas Eve afternoon, and when I woke up Christmas morning, there was an email in my inbox from Midge Ure - the "Live Aid" organizer who wrote the song and produced the video - saying he loved it, and thanking me for the time I spent getting so many details right and for bringing a tear to his eye on Chrisrtmas morning. That was worth more than any one paycheck from a newspaper ever was.
I don't blame anyone for being cynical about the news today, but I still know some reporters who are very decent, honest people, a couple of them with CNN who I met when we were coming up 30 years again the Twin Cities. They're good enough that they've got weight to tell an editor to shove it he pushes them too hard. But almost everyone I worked with until the 90s is out of the business now, and working in different communications-related fields, teaching, writing books, or doing "soft news" like moves, music, arts, etc.
