Doing journalism will save journalism

For most of my newspaper journalism career (it's older than you might think), I've been hearing the powers that be talk about how readership was declining and the age of our readers was getting older and older.As a cub reporter at The Miami Herald back in the 1990s, I recall sitting in company meetings where we were treated to presentations that showed where things would be if the trends continued - and that was before the internet really became a thing. We didn't even have a website then, but no one cared, because only super high-tech folks had accounts on CompuServ. AOL was barely a thing, having been founded just a few years earlier. It was on the verge of exploding, but even then, there was no such thing as a digital-only news company."How do we get young people to read newspapers?" we'd be asked in meeting after meeting. As a young person, I was among those being asked.Of course, we were news junkies and not regular people, so asking us was a bit of a problem to start with. The bigger problem? No one implemented any changes suggested by the young readers.There would be focus groups and committees set up and all sorts of things meant to stem the tide of young people not reading the newspaper. They were going to cable news - CNN had proved its mettle during the first Gulf War, and was the new hotness. Even the Big Three broadcasters (CBS, NBC, ABC) were feeling the heat, and they'd already taken away a lot of newspaper readership over the previous few decades (after radio did that in the decades before that).Would we ever get those readers back? Plus, big retailers were merging and going out of business, which meant fewer full-page ads. Afternoon papers were shutting down.How were we going to get young readers back?Nevermind the fact that younger people had long since ceased to be a big audience for papers, particularly for local newspapers, because they tended not to be as invested in local news until they had a mortgage and families that made them care more about their city and county governments.All the while, news staffs were cut, listicles were created, infographics became big."We're eating more beets!" blared a Doonesbury cartoon (and book) mocking what was seen as the dumbing-down of newspapers, back in the 1980s.We all know what happened with the rise of the internet and Craigslist taking away classified ad revenue and the aggregators and then sites such as Politico and Huffington Post (now HuffPost) and all their descendants.Every year, there were fewer and fewer people in newsrooms, and coverage became thinner and thinner. The amount of time reporters had to spend "feeding the beast" - filling the empty column inches in the newspapers - precluded them from doing the quality journalism necessary, in many cases.Reporters and editors tried. But it really isn't possible to do more with less. That's a myth. Maybe you can for a little while, but long-term it just doesn't work. You have to have more of something in order to do more with less. Something's gotta give.Now news organizations need to realize they need to go back to their roots: Do great journalism. People are hungry for it. Sure, we all like a good dog video - who doesn't?What's going to save journalism? Doing real journalism. Serving our communities and telling them what they need and want to know.With the occasional dog or cat video.Image by StockUnlimited