An unchanged mission in a changing age

At first, today's lesson seemed to be that everything is changing.

Newspapers are taking a battering from the rise of the Internet, and as Mark Briggs of The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., said in his presentation this morning, it's raining on the journalism industry. If we're going to survive the storm, he said, we're going to need the right gear.

The right gear is no longer just notepads and sharpened pencils. In this oh-so-modern 21st century, we need voice recorders; we need digital video cameras; we need multimedia editing skills and fluency in a language filled with words like "RSS Feed" and "XML" -- a language that didn't even exist when we were born.

John Seigenthaler (Photo by Devin Wagner, Spring 2008).

But has everything actually changed? During John Seigenthaler's inspirational presentation on the history of the First Amendment this afternoon, I realized that as much as the Internet has altered the face of journalism, our mission remains fundamentally unchanged. Ever since the founding of our nation, journalists have played an indispensible role in democracy, Seigenthaler, founder of the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center in Nashville, demonstrated. As the country has gone through tough times -- and continues to go through tough times -- journalists have held fast to their mission of keeping society informed; of seeking out the truth; of fulfilling the great promise that our forefathers laid out in those 45 words of the First Amendment.

If anything, the rise of the Internet Age and the changes newspapers are currently undergoing are causes for celebration. We now have at our disposal more tools than ever to tell stories, and journalism will be the better for it. In print and on the Internet, in audio presentations and through multimedia packages, we will keep on chasing the story and exposing the truth, continuing to perform journalism's vital and enduring role in our society.