Last night I finally caught up with the fifth season of The Wire. Besides having the best writers in television (Richard Price and Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos for gosh sakes!), the show has a dark look at the inside of a contemporary newsroom--full of layoffs, cutbacks, and overworked reporters.
David Simon created the show after he got laid off from his reporting job at a major newspaper (meet him in this essay). His fictional city editor Augustus "Gus" Haynes grapples with small staffs and corporate interests in his newsroom, but the story never discusses how the Internet is killing print outlets around the country.
Instead of feeling sorry for yourself this season, read this. Here are two examples of journalists struggling to reinvent themselves in this new era, the kind of stories writers need to read right now.
At the Huffington Post, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nancy Cleeland is detailing her struggle to maintain her career after she lost her dream job at the Los Angeles Times. Check it out:
"I'm across the country at an influential Washington D.C. think tank -- the Economic Policy Institute -- puzzling over how to pour two decades of newspaper experience into a new job of translating economic research and policy for a broad audience ... But there's a key difference: My writing now will be unabashedly informed by a point of view."
Then, check out Paul Lamb over at MediaShift Lab, this business technology expert is advising newspapers how to use mobile phone innovations in the newsroom. Read "When Phones Become Reporters." (thanks to Maud Newton for the Simon essay)
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