“I was there when …”

Just a little late-night philosophizing.

Twenty or thirty years from now, what will we tell our children, grandchildren or students about journalism in the first few decades of the 21st century?

Will we look back with a wistful sigh and tell them we were there when journalism died?

Nah.

Will we remember these years as a golden age?

Nope, not that either. That phrase implies something that’s developed, mature, thriving, flourishing — like the Age of Pericles or the Pax Romana, a time when things were going great, but not a whole lot was changing. No, definitely not that.

But we’ll remember this period as an exciting one. Scary? Absolutely. Terrifying, even. The grit-your-teeth, reach-for-the-Rolaids years. But exciting. We’ll remember it as a time when everything we knew was starting to crumble, and so we tried everything. When we tried a whole lot of things that failed — but most importantly, when we tried a lot of things. When we didn’t know exactly what to do next, so we experimented like crazy, coming up with one plan after another … sometimes throwing them by the wayside, sometimes trying them only to watch them crash and burn, and sometimes making them succeed.

Again: We’ll remember that we tried a lot, and we failed a lot, but most importantly, we tried.

We tried, and we learned.

Is anything more exciting than that?

Comments