Don Cayo: In my opinion

Focus on future: Today’s journalists are well-equipped to handle the challenges that lie ahead

After a half-century plying his craft, this veteran columnist gives a thank you, a goodbye and some hope for the future of journalism.

Fifty years is long enough.

Well, 50 years, nine months and 10 days if you want to get picky about it. But whether the more or less half century I’ve been having fun (mostly) as a journalist is rounded off to the nearest decade or delineated with precision, the case can be made that it’s somebody else’s turn. So I’m retiring as of today.

Retiring columnists often look back in the final piece they file. Retell some quirky anecdotes, drop some names of the famous and ought-to-be-famous, maybe boast a bit about some triumphs, and that sort of thing. But I’d rather look forward. In personal terms, my future looks inviting. More time for grandkids, my photography hobby, volunteer work, maybe some travel, and lots of mucking about.

In professional terms — that is, looking at my industry’s future — the picture’s not so pretty. These are tough, tough times for journalism in general and newspapers in particular. A part of me is thankful I’m so old I haven’t had to fret about how long media companies can continue paying all their workers. If, rather than retiring now on my own terms, I had seen my job vanish a few weeks or months or years earlier, I’d have been OK. Younger colleagues with family responsibilities are much more vulnerable.

But even though I put my hand up for this departure, part of me is jealous of co-workers still on the job. Because the bigger the challenge, the bigger the potential reward.

I have confidence that newsrooms — or, rather, the people in newsrooms — can meet the challenges of 21st century journalism. Today’s “content providers” are — unlike old newspaper hacks like me — a talented tribe of digital natives who are fully comfortable with today’s complex web of technology and those newfangled “media platforms.”

The worrisome question is whether companies they work for can figure out how to keep the paycheques coming. But my guess is that somebody — although it may not be the oldfashioned newspapers or TV and radio stations we have today — will eventually figure out how to keep these talented folks on the job.

When that day comes, today’s young journalists will be more than ready to attain new heights. Reporters and photographers have always lamented the lack of time to pursue more stories in depth, and in this era of shrunken newsrooms the demands on their time are compounded. But I believe the toofew young people who land jobs in today’s newsrooms are among the best ever. For one thing, they start out better trained by journalism schools that have not only proliferated, but also improved in the decades since I was a straight-from-high-school cub reporter. And today, a time when there are far more journalism grads than journalism jobs, the ones who find work tend to be the cream of the crop.

Add to this the quantity and quality of hands-on experience these newbies get. In my day, those of us who started in small newsrooms — I was Number Three in a three-man newsroom — were almost immediately given major assignments and very little help, while those lucky enough to land a first job in a sophisticated newsroom like The Vancouver Sun could expect to have their copy rewritten by seasoned veterans for several months, if not years. Both approaches created better journalists, but I think the faster learning curve was for those who survived the trial by fire.

Today, it’s sink-or-swim in every newsroom — there’s little time for rewrites or for coaching. And our swimmers — those young writers whose bylines you see daily, often on the front page — come out of the process very strong, indeed.

Let me end my column and my career at The Sun by thanking readers, especially those of you who have written from time to time to comment on things I’ve said or to suggest things I should say. The absolute best perk of this job has been the stuff I’ve learned from you.

I hope you enjoy the still-tobe-told stories by the up-andcoming generation of journalists — in whatever form and on whatever platform — as much as I expect to.

I hope you enjoy the still-to-be-told stories by the up-andcoming generation of journalists—in whatever form and on whatever platform— as much as I expect to.