As careful readers know, I’ve been away from Dallas since August on a Nieman Fellowship. It’s a one-year sinecure for journalists to step outside their newsrooms and take advantage of all the resources at Harvard — courses in any of its schools, the (estimating now) 3,000 lectures around campus every day, the brilliant professors, the cultural facilities, anything. It’s a good gig.

More importantly, we get to take advantage of our fellow fellows — 28 brilliant journalists from top news organizations all around the world. Amazing people all; after spending 10 months drinking cheap red wine with them, I’m proud to call them all friends. A few hours ago, we had our little graduation ceremony and got our little certificates from Drew Faust. We looked a bit like six-year-olds stepping out of kindergarten. (The metaphor is imperfect, since first grade isn’t a dying industry.)

Soon — some in a few days, some in a few months — we fellows will be heading back into the real world. For Nieman Fellows a decade ago, “the real world” would have meant returning to their old jobs. But of the 15 American fellows in my class, barely half will be returning to the news organization they applied for the fellowship from. In some cases, that’s their own choice; in others, it’s the recent brutality of our business, where layoffs and buyouts and cutbacks have turned journalism depressing. Romenesko, formerly the news world’s gossip column, lately feels more like its obit page. Newspapers are in a world of pain — not because their journalists have lost their skill or because people don’t want to read their work, but because the Internet has broken the business model that supported them for decades.

I love newspapers. There’s no environment in the world better than a newsroom when a big story breaks — the electricity, the frenzy, the communion of smart people asking questions and righting wrongs and sifting out the truth. Without newspapers, who do most of the real reporting in the news business, you’d know an awful lot less about your government, your city, and your world than you do. For decades they have funded the investigations and the beat reporting that have made America a better place to live.

But I also love the thing that is killing newspapers. It’s almost impossible to overstate the influence the Internet has had on my life. When I was a small-town kid in south Louisiana, starved for information about the world beyond the bayou, the idea of a machine that gives you access to every piece of information in the world would have seemed utopian. I got online via BBS in 1990, built my first web page in 1994, and started my first blog (on Blogger, where I was user no. 2,246) in 1999. I read 600-plus RSS feeds nearly every day, and the vast majority are produced by people who aren’t paid a dime. Whenever I hear a journalist bad-mouth Wikipedia or bloggers or Craigslist or the intelligence of the hoi polloi, I get mad and defend their honor.

I love the Internet. How ironic then, that one of my loves is killing the other. And there’s another irony, this one personal: I’ve kept my two loves separate. I tried to keep my blogging secret from my employer for years; I was never “the web guy” at my newspaper. I was an enthusiast for both sides, but never the twain did meet. Neither side seemed to understand the other, and it seemed like too much bother to try to play translator.

This is all preamble to an announcement. I won’t be going back to my old employer, The Dallas Morning News. It’s still a terrific newspaper; they’ve been great to me over the past eight years. But I think I can be of more service to journalism elsewhere — and try to break through the ironies of my life in the meantime.

Starting July 1, I’ll be the founding director of something altogether new called the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard. (The name, like everything else about it, is very much in beta.) It’s the Nieman Foundation’s attempt to help the journalism business figure out its future. How do reporters use the tools the Internet provides to improve their journalism? How do newsrooms have to change their values, their mindsets, and their procedures to adapt to the new era? And, maybe most important of all, can anyone make a decent living doing good journalism? We’ll be asking — and, hopefully, possibly, maybe, helping to answer — big questions like that. We’ve got some great partners, and I hope we can do good work.

Much more to come as the weeks and months go by. I’m sad to be leaving the DMN and Dallas. But I’m excited about the chance to do interesting work that has the potential for a big impact.

15 May 2008

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