Backgrounder: Geneva Overholser

Journalism as we know it is over, according to Geneva Overholser, the chair of public affairs reporting at the Missouri School of Journalism and a former editorial board member of The New York Times.

Economic pressure on large media companies has reduced budgets and staff, while competition from the web has left many publications struggling to keep up, Overholser said in "On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change," a report she prepared for the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2006.

"Newspapers change hands weekly, new digital media outlets crop up daily," she said in the report. "Boardroom arguments rage at one embattled media company, Wall Street demands organizational change at another."

Perhaps the most difficult problem of all, she admits, is that these challenges are still emerging and the solutions remain largely unknown. In the meantime, journalists must shift their attitudes to acknowledge the scale of the new challenges before them and embrace the new possibilities, she said. What Overholser called the "near paralysis of unhappy nostalgia" must give way to open minds and an open discussion about the future.

"We seem to feel the only way we can work is to work the way we've always done it," she said in a 2006 interview with the Annenberg Center. "That's just not true. We will ride these yearnings for the past right down the tube." Not everyone will agree with her position, she said, but collectively, this discussion "can lead to a reinvention of journalism that is richer and better than the old."

Young journalists must be ready to thrive in an atmosphere of uncertainty and change, Overholser said. Steady career paths, like her own, are increasingly a thing of the past.

After earning a bachelor's degree in history at Wellesley College in 1970, Overholser attended Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She graduated in 1971 and then worked as a city hall reporter at the Colorado Springs Sun.

The Sun's local newsroom was of the sort that is quickly disappearing, Overholser said. "The scrappy little Colorado newsroom that made a reporter out of me 35 years ago hummed with opportunity. [We were] in a competitive race with a larger newspaper, [and] our readers passionately cheered us on. They relied on us—and frequently told us so—to tell them what they needed to know," she recalls in her report. "For most of us working in the craft in 1970, to be a journalist was very heavenly."

Seeking new challenges, and committed to her first husband, a teacher, Overholser left The Sun and the U.S. to follow her husband to Kinshasa, Zaire, and Paris. She freelanced and worked as a librarian in her husband's school. "[Traveling} made me a better journalist and a better editor," she told Northwestern University's alumni magazine in 2003. "It stimulated my curiosity and made me open to change."

When she returned to the U.S., Overholser took a job as a writer and then as a deputy editorial page editor for The Des Moines Register in 1981 and joined the editorial board of The New York Times in 1985. In 1988, she returned to The Register and became editor-in-chief, the first female editor in the paper's history. Under her editorship, The Register won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize Gold Metal for Public Service for “It Couldn’t Happen To Me: One Woman’s Story,” a series of articles about the rape of a woman from Iowa that famously included the woman’s name and photograph. Overholser left The Register in 1995 to become ombudsman at The Washington Post, a position she held until 1998.

Now, as the Missouri School of Journalism's Hurley Chair of Public Affairs Reporting, Overholser tries to instill a sense of opportunity in students and working journalists. "One must believe in the future and be open to the unknown," she said in the report. "These are not common attitudes among journalists today."

Overholser is optimistic that journalism can adapt, despite the challenges that loom, because even today most newspapers continue to make money and reporters continue to do important work. "Journalists have good reason to feel they are keepers of a sacred flame," she said. "But we're bad at identifying which bits of our dogma are truly essential."

Success will simply mean having an open mind about what aspects of the past need to be saved.

"Inverted pyramid and ink on paper?" she asks in her report. "No. A commitment to public service, and the fair representation of differing points of view? Yes."

Michael Rundle is a second-semester graduate student at NYU, studying print journalism.

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