Four years is a long time to be away from something you love.
My 25 years as editor and reporter at community papers, especially my stint in the small western Minnesota burg of Montevideo where I raised my kids and owned a business, left me with memories of feeling connected to the people I wrote about and a tremendous pride in recording a community's history.
Heading out last week on our road trip to visit seven community newspapers in three days - traveling over 900 miles - I wondered if I might find that my love affair with community journalism was just an illusion - that the years away from the trade had washed aside all negatives of 24-7 living, breathing the news and stories of the people who shared a geographical space with me.
As representatives of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, my co-teacher Joni Berg and I had our list of questions for the editors we were to visit, our digital gadgets to record our trip for a promised presentation on the state of community journalism, especially in rural Minnesota.
But for me, well, this trip was about something else - I hoped to find some shining star out there that I could hang on to regarding the future of journalism.
Living in the metro area, it's been hard watching the slow death of daily papers with their shrinking news holes, staff cuts and lost circulation. As paper and ink prices rise, the disease is hitting the suburban weeklies as well.
This has left me with questions about the future of the news business and the craft of newsgathering. Are "those" people right? Is the newspaper dead?
Maybe the situation is different at the smaller outlying community papers, especially the ones with local owners, I mused.
Lately I've been asking myself the question that students and their parents gotta be asking too - Why would any 18- to 21-year-old go to school for four years to be a journalist, amass debt only to look forward to a job that pays little and promises no stability?
With a new class year starting soon, new students eager to take up the quill, I need to match their enthusiasm.
This trip I hoped, would give it to me.
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