Northwestern University fired its head football coach after an investigation found evidence of hazing.
University officials first issued a two-week suspension for the coach, who was entering the fourth year of his 10-year, $57-million contract.
Then the Daily Northwestern published.
The student newspaper landed interviews with two players that detailed a series of despicable and degrading acts, the description of which reads a lot like sexual assault. The players alleged the coach knew about the hazing and used it as a part of discipline on freshman students.
The student journalists corroborated the accounts of the two players, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, by viewing photos and videos — which they didn’t publish to protect the identities of the victims.
Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism competes with the University of Missouri and Columbia University for the top journalism school in the nation.
Without these student reporters, it’s possible Northwestern could have hidden the true horror which occurred in the name of almighty football.
The editors and reporters in this story drew wide praise for a national scoop that exposed gross misconduct at their school.
As a former student newspaper editor, albeit on a much smaller scale, I salute them.
My question is: Where are these people going to find a job?
The New York Times, the alpha dog of American newspapers, decided to stop covering sports.
They canned all their sports reporters and editors, about 35 in all. They handed the baton of covering sports over to The Athletic, which the Times bought for $550 million last year.
The paragraphs of Dave Anderson and Red Smith once filled the Sports of the Times column, once a daily must-read for a thinking sports fan.
They threw it out. Let the internet people figure it out. That’s what they paid more than half a billion for.
Maybe the Northwestern student journalists will land jobs at The Athletic.
I doubt it. The website laid off 20 people — about 4% of its newsroom — last month.
Athletic leaders also announced a reorganization that involves decentralization of coverage.
Companies cut more than 17,000 journalism jobs this year alone, Axios reported in June.
Iowans are aware of the state of not just sports journalism, but the entire trade.
The Cedar Rapids Gazette, the state’s second-largest newspaper, recently cut jobs.
The Des Moines newspaper cuts jobs so often that I don’t know if I could name more than five people still in what is left of the newsroom. There may not be more than five people left in the newsroom.
I was laid off from that paper in May 2020.
I am a teacher now, but I keep a toe in journalism. I’m a part-time sports writer and columnist for the Marion County Express.
My columns sometimes appear in the Indianola Advocate and Iowa Capital Dispatch, a pair of online outfits.
I run a website, paragraphstacker.com, in which I must fundraise through GoFundMe to pay for domain name registration and other technical stuff for my columns and podcast, Talking Paragraphs.
I am a middle school teacher now. I would like to teach journalism someday.
But I don’t know what I would teach the next generation of reporters.
How I did the job isn’t how the job is done anymore. Reporters are taught to develop “personal brands,” like we were some kind of chewing gum, and focus on the almighty metrics.
My last years at the Des Moines paper were nightmarish. We were given a goal of pageviews — which roughly means how many people click on and read your story online.
If you made your numbers, which I rarely if ever did, they doubled your pageview goal for the next month.
This went on until you reached nirvana or were fired. We already know how my story went.
The three things that consistently lit up the pageviews board were sports, salacious crime, and stories that ranked tenderloins.
But now the industry is coming after the sports writers, too.
Like every greedy corporate hustler, they’re looking for a way to cover the news without ever paying a person a decent wage.
How can I teach young people the ways of reporting — the kind done by the Daily Northwestern journalists — when neither news companies nor the reading public value it?
I love being a journalist. I love reporting. I love writing. I love making a story live in the mind of a reader even if just for a few precious seconds.
That’s I still work part-time in journalism because being all the way out hurts too much.
I have no connections to Northwestern journalism other than a good friend who graduated from there.
If I could tell them anything, it would be this: Don’t tie your identity to your job, no matter how much you love it.
You are an endangered species still actively hunted. Newsrooms are hospices without the fentanyl drip.
I will not turn you away from this trade, despite the toll it takes on one’s soul.
Seek and publish the truth.
Protect your heart, because the vast indifference cuts the deepest wounds.