The Lost Generation

By Alec Klein
June 26, 2009

One day in the not-too-distant future, I suspect children of the next generation will snicker at the notion that newspapers were actually delivered to your front door. What a task-intensive idea: Somebody hauling a stack of inky newspapers door to door all over town. How quaint, the children will laugh.

Yet there’s not much to laugh about the state of the news media now.

Little did I appreciate the coming industry troubles when I left The Washington Post as an investigative business reporter a year ago to become a journalism professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. I made the move out of a love of teaching, not because I could divine the tectonic changes the business is undergoing now.

But from my academic perch, I have seen the shell-shocked faces of graduate students in my investigative reporting class and undergraduates in my business reporting class as they begin the daunting prospect of looking for work. What many have found is they are graduating into joblessness. Some are seeking a job that doesn’t exist as we know it. Others don’t know what they will do. Still others don’t know where they will go.

I call them the “Lost Generation.”

Not because they’re disillusioned like Hemingway and Fitzgerald after World War I. Lost—because they’re facing the worst economy since the Great Depression. Newspapers are collapsing. Magazines are hemorrhaging. Business sections are disappearing. Investigative reporting, because of the high cost of doing it, is moving to nonprofits, if not shrinking.

Lost—because so many young journalists are entering the labor market as the unemployment rate hits 9.4 percent, the highest in more than a quarter century. Lost—because these college grads are competing for jobs with laid off people their parents’ age. Lost—because it’s tough now to get even some unpaid internships. Lost—because it’s not just the field of journalism that’s struggling. It’s Wall Street, where investment banking is suddenly a thing of the past. It’s the auto industry, what’s left of it. It’s everywhere.

These college grads are also known as part of the Millennial Generation: An indulgent, coddled lot (about 70 million of them), if you take the word of stuffy adults who have forgotten what it’s like to be young. Born between about 1980 and 2000, these millennials are tagged as idealistic, in need of instant gratification, accustomed to texting, Facebook poking and other social networking on the Web.

Yet if this generation suffers from an entitlement complex, they will also have to be resourceful; after all, where will the next generation of journalists go? What will happen to those who want to go into business and investigative reporting—perhaps two of the hardest hit areas?

The industry is changing so rapidly now that it’s too early to tell how it will coalesce, but already there are signs: Some journalists have figured out how to make a living from blogging. Others are creating nonprofits to delve into investigative reporting. And then there are those who are becoming freelancers—journalists as entrepreneurs—a brand unto themselves.

At a recent gathering of prospective students visiting Medill, a parent asked me the question of the moment: Does it make sense for him to send his child to a journalism school when the industry is in disarray?

To which I said: a resounding yes.

Innovation, lest we forget, is often born in times of distress. I also reminded the parent, there is more information available today than ever before—largely thanks to the Internet—so it’s not as if people are no longer interested in the news. On the contrary, we get news almost as soon as it happens: on our Blackberries, through our computers, wirelessly, invisibly.

But beyond that, I told the parent—and scores of prospective students in attendance—that one of the dirty little secrets of real life is that roughly nine of ten people I know hate their jobs, and the key is to not become one of them. You will bump into them years after college, and you’ll wonder what happened. Why aren’t they changing the world as they had dreamed? Where did the idealism go? What happened to the fire in their eyes?

I’m one of the lucky ones. I love what I do, teaching and writing. And I reminded the prospective students—and I say it here—that for all the economic strife today, we should not compromise our dreams, even if the road looks hard. Not many other professions can say what journalism can: that it is so important that the founding fathers of this nation protected it in the Constitution. That in journalism, you can make a difference. And that remains as true as ever.

Alec Klein is a bestselling author, award-winning investigative business reporter former of The Washington Post and now professor of journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism