CCJ Traveling Curriculum [1] trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson [2] is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression [3] and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression [4]. She blogs regularly here [5].

It was a beautiful fall day, and Dana had put out an amazing Sunday brunch spread. The seven of us—well, okay, the four of us who weren’t bored cross-eyed by all the shop talk—sat around and did what journalists do best, which is gossip. Whatever happened to--? Has anybody heard from--? Didn’t they get divorced? What—he’s back at the Times?

 The occasion was a brunch hosted last Sunday by Scott Bronstein and his wife, Dana Cibulski. Marilyn Geewax was there, and so was Mark Sherman, along with assorted spouses and children. Marilyn, Scott, Mark and I worked together in the 1980s at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and over the years our paths have led us all to Wonk Paradise, otherwise known as Washington D.C. Our careers have expanded to encompass a fairly long list of media organizations:  the AJC, ABC News, CNN, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Cox Newspapers (and I’ve probably left something out). There was lots to talk about.

Underneath the banter, though, there was a subtext: our collective astonishment at the changes that have swept the news business since we were all (relative) youngsters 20 short years ago. As well-educated and informed observers of the huge tides of social change which have marked the last two decades, we were somehow still amazed that these changes had also radically altered our own careers. (Which just bolsters my theory that, deep down, a good journalist never loses a certain golly-gee naiveté.) 

But I’ll say this:  my cohort—the 40-to-50-somethings, I’ll call us—caught the crest of that gigantic wave, and now, at mid-career, we’re stuck on it. We’re too young for a buyout, too old to have been native-born citizens of cyberspace. (We’re at home there, but we’re still “naturalized” citizens.) Ours is an uneasy status. Some people, as Marilyn so colorfully put it, are “hanging on by the fingernails,” trying to keep on doing the same kind of job they’ve always done until they can hit a certain pension eligibility (a strategy which ignores the fact that the word “pension” no long carries any ironclad guarantees; ask the folks at Enron.) 

Most of us, though, are still in the game, learning to play by unfamiliar rules, geezers before our time. Here we are, still in our 40s (except for myself; I am an authentic geezer of 52), and already the raucous newsroom we knew as rookies has gone the way of the Dodo.

“There are so many empty desks in my office, we’re thinking of buying mannequins,” Marilyn said. (I can’t help quoting her a lot; Marilyn is highly quotable.) “Sometimes I wonder why I even bother going to the office.”

Why indeed? Gas is expensive and will only get more so; we’re eating through the ozone layer; most metropolitan areas have horrible commutes, and Washington’s traffic in particular can only be described as “hellish.” It’s getting increasingly hard to come up with any compelling argument for firing up a 450-horsepower vehicle to drive four miles so you can sit in front of a computer and a telephone which do exactly the same things as the ones you have at home.  

So these days, we talk to colleagues via e-mail; no more standing on a desk and yelling “COPY!” on deadline; no more colorful stories about the stripper who wandered in one day and started doing her routine for the restaurant critic. I miss it. But speaking as someone who has worked at home for 10 years now, I can tell you that the dull old boring ‘burbs are full of interesting people I would have never met when I worked downtown, making the rounds of the Usual Suspects in my Rolodex. They are mailmen and retired plumbers and UPS deliverymen; there’s the neighbor who used to teach in Thailand; there’s the Army sergeant next door who has challenged every 1960s-era stereotype I ever held about the military; and the home-schoolers up the street. The park down the street is home to a daily after-school gathering of parents from the local Montessori school—a diverse mix of Asian, African American, Hispanic and Southern redneck (me). Eliminate, or drastically curtail, office “face time” and a lot of reporters will realize they’ve been living in a bubble. And they will discover what foreign correspondents have always known:  it’s a real interesting world out there.

And this, in a way, may help us solve the problem that whole platoons of Harvard MBAs and think-tank focus groups have been working on for some time—i.e., how, in this new digital age, to “engage the audience.”

As we lingered over coffee last Sunday, Marilyn was telling us about her recent trip back to her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, which has never recovered from the devastating blow it suffered 30 years ago when the steel mill there closed. In what used to be a thriving downtown business district, she said, fire had gutted an abandoned building, which had then collapsed. Now weeds were growing through the rubble, because the city couldn’t even come up with the cash to raze the site.

“How can that happen?” she asked. “How can a whole community like that just die, and nobody seems to care?” (I’m paraphrasing, Marilyn; please don’t sue me.)

Just a few minutes earlier, Dana had been telling us about her relatives in southern Louisiana who were wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. After two years, they are still in limbo, trying to figure out if it’s worth rebuilding, where money to rebuild will come from, or, if rebuilding is not an option, where to go. Recently, Dana said, her mother got a check from her homeowner’s insurance company. The check was for $12,000. “I guess that’s the first installment,” her mother had said, and it had fallen to Dana, who was reading the fine print, to break the bad news:  “No, mom,” she had said, “that’s all there is.” Her mother had been paying premiums for half a century; the house represented her nest egg.

Two disasters, one economic and the other natural—and the question both raise is the same:  what’s the difference between our famous American self-reliance and collective social indifference? Where do you draw the line? Are there some disasters that just cannot be cleaned up? And, if so, what should the richest nation on earth do about the low-income people who are inevitably stuck with living in the debris?

The spirited discussion that ensued reminded me of a well-known axiom of good journalism:  you can’t make your audience feel passionately about a subject you don’t feel passionately about yourself. There was no shortage of passion at this Sunday brunch table. Could it be that maybe there was a vast audience of people out there who might also be interested in that discussion?  What if the way to “engage the audience” isn’t to target specific demographics or restrict ourselves to dishing out the kind of news the audience says it wants, but to pursue the questions we’re struggling to answer ourselves? 

Brunch broke up by 2 p.m. Monday morning loomed on the horizon: another work week in this brave new media world. It’s an unsettling world of layoffs, veteran colleagues who retire and take their experience with them, financial uncertainty. It’s an uncomfortable time to be a journalist, but it’s also a good time to regroup. “Media platforms” may change, but the basic job description of a journalist won’t. It’s a simple job, really:  you get out there, you discover something new, and you hold it up for the world to see.

“Holy cow, people!” you say. “Look at this!”

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Click here for more columns by Tracy Thompson. [7]