Du jour know

The chatty young phlebotomist was polite but curious as she made small talk to calm her patient. “So, what do you do?”

“I’m a journalist.”

“Oh, how cool! Me too! I write in my journal every day. I’ve been journaling for years.”

I looked at the fire hose and nozzle she was about to plunge into my skinny vein and thought better about disabusing her of the notion that we were true colleagues.

“Do you get paid to journal?” she continued.

“A bit, when it’s published in the newspaper or on the website.”

“Wow. I’ll have to send you mine to get it published.”

I’ve since learned that she wasn’t totally wrong. Historians say the terms “journalist” and “journalism” were coined in the 1800s to reflect daily — du jour — reporting, newsgathering, dissemination. Tools that included the telegraph and news organizations that banded together into cooperatives and wire services made immediacy possible.

Now, as we know, immediacy means real time. Any event can be streamed. And if not streamed, podcast. ASMR (creepy!). Intentionally boring (zzZZZzZZzz).

Virality is a goal. Lack of it means failure.

But the Covington students incident is a stark reminder that the totality of a story may take a while to report. The old saw went “UPI gets it first; AP gets it right.” Santayana was correct: We’ve forgotten that being first can bite us.

My vampiric friend made the error about journalism that too many people — especially (choose your expletive) shareholders and hedge funds — all make. A trained journalist is not a stenographer, not a journaler. A trained journalist analyzes, assesses, adds perspective, checks all the angles. What looks like a crowd of 10,000 from the back can turn out to be 1,000 strategically scattered partisans when seen from above or from the front.

Stenographers and journalers are valuable in their own spheres, but not downstage center in newsgathering.

A trained journalist has embraced a calling. “I am a journalist” is what we say, not “I do journalism” or “I report the news.” At least, not as a first answer. It’s who we are (which is why we don’t often get along with people outside the profession. Sorry…).

Many great journalists saw their jobs taken from them today, as did I three months ago. That means far fewer people are left to get the perspectives needed to tell the whole story, to get all the facts, to get to the truth of the matter.

Ah, truth. The real victim.

Most, if not all, of those who were laid off will continue to describe themselves as journalists in perpetuity. It’s who we are, and that won’t change.

The way we make our living may.