This was originally written and published in March 2009, while I was studying Digital Media in a class taught by Nicco Mele at the Kennedy School. It was used then, as now, to ask for help turning an idea into a company.

Death brings sadness. There are a lot of sad journalists.

Death’s shadow hovers like a cloud over news organizations. Its sickle slices down to cut out victims. In the industry, a plague-like sickness weakens us all. No one is sure who next will feel the blade. As February faded, the Rocky Mountain News died just 55 days shy of its 150th birthday. Three weeks later, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last newspaper. How many more will fall before year’s end?

We could wallow in grief.

Alternatively, we could throw an old fashioned New Orleans Jazz Funeral. Play the dirge for the march to the cemetery, say goodbye, and cut the body loose. Pump up the volume for a jazzy celebration on the way home.

What’s to celebrate? For one thing, the noble calling of the recently departed, which just so happens to be our own calling, journalism. As members of this industry, we believe in the crucial importance of our craft. Simply put, journalism protects democracy.

Without journalists, Richard Nixon would have been President for 8 years.

Without journalists, the torture would have continued at Abu Graib.

Without journalists, the world would not have watched the tank man’s defiance in China, or heard Ghandi’s message, or seen the dogs bite in Birmingham.

I could go on.

While the technology is changing, and newspapers and television seem strangely dated, the need for journalism is as great or greater now than ever. Also, the hunger for journalism is as great or greater now than ever.

People didn’t wake up three months ago and decide they didn’t want to know what was going on in their world – a world filled with economic uncertainty, military hostilities, and threats of global warming disasters. Credible information is of dire importance.

So, if there’s a great demand on one hand, and a dramatic loss of supply on the other hand. What does that mean? I contend it means there’s a Market Opportunity. Fire up the band, we’re not only celebrating the noble cause lived by the recently departed. We are also celebrating historic opportunity.

Every so often, a seismic shift comes along that changes the world and those who are alive in those moments have a decision to make. My friend Andy Hoar put it this way: when the car was invented, those in the carriage industry had to choose whether to keep making wagons for horses or to add a gasoline motor to the wagon and put the horse to pasture. Technology changes. We either thrive in the future or die in the past.

Let’s thrive by creating the new journalism model for the future.

Let’s put this new technology to work to find better ways to practice this noble calling.

Let’s succeed not only as reporters, but also as businessmen.

Democracy is waiting and depending on our success.

If you’ll join me in this quest, please take our survey, and tell us how you would like to be informed in the future.

Continuing our story. After I sent coworkers a letter explaining my decision to leave my job, Dallas/Fort Worth Television Critic Ed Bark was kind enough to do a story on why I was choosing to take a different path. Please check out his daily blog at unclebarky.com.  Journalist Ed Bark serves as an inspiration for us at pressforthePeople. He  followed a similar path. He also left the mainstream media, where he had worked for decades, in search of an outlet where he could critique the media with complete integrity.

Uncle Barky’s Bytes
News, views, and reviews from TV critic Ed Bark

Reporter Paul Adrian heading for Harvard, leaving Fox4
05/22/08 12:36 PM

Paul Adrian hopes to reinvent himself and his beat. Photo by Ed Bark.

By ED BARK
One of Fox4’s best and brightest, reporter Paul Adrian, will be leaving the station in late June to study for the next year at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

He then plans to return to his native Texas with an eye toward reinvigorating the lost art of covering state government.

Adrian, 40, hopes to set up his own independent unit of print and broadcast investigative journalists. That’s an ambitious undertaking, but Adrian figures the field is wide open, particularly in TV news.

“It scares me that so many people are leaving TV journalism,” Adrian says in an interview with unclebarky.com. “My goal is not to get out. My goal is to get into this field more deeply. I’m taking a big risk. It’ll be either a really smart thing I’m doing or a really dumb thing. But I’m willing to leave what’s been a wonderful job to go and try to become a better reporter.”

Adrian, who joined Fox4 seven years ago, stressed that he’s not unhappy with the station. But he’s disheartened by his profession’s growing disinterest in covering the Texas state legislature, whose decisions have far wider-ranging implications than live overhead chopper shots of the latest car wreck or police chase.

“Typically now, it’s a quick hit,” he says of state government coverage. “We’re down in Austin, the session opens and we’re back. It’s not Fox4’s problem. It’s an industry problem. We’ve collectively decided not to invest in this coverage, and it bugs me.”

In his letter of resignation, Adrian praised Fox4 news director Maria Barrs as “a great boss.”

“In my estimation,” he said, “the KDFW-TV news department has more going for it than any news team in the city and most in the country. I attribute a lot of our success to your leadership and your support of hard-hitting, in-depth journalism.”

His most recent investigative report for Fox4 was on the effectiveness of state tort reform enacted in 2003 to curb “frivolous” malpractice suits and keep doctors from leaving Texas. It’s not a subject that quickens the pulses of most news managers or viewers. But Adrian made it work in times when stories on miracle diets and new breakthroughs in cosmetic surgery are both encouraged and heavily promoted.

“Government is at the heart of the stories that I’m proudest of over the last seven years,” Adrian says. “But for better or worse, what we grew up with in television news is changing. So I’ve got to figure out, ‘How can I keep my craft alive?’ If I’m not at peace with myself, I’m going to be frustrated.”

Adrian and his wife, Jade Kurian, a reporter for the HD News network, have a 17-month-old daughter named Lark. They’ll mostly remain in North Texas while Adrian commutes back and forth for the next year.

“Any absence from journalism is going to create a longing to go out and do what I love to do — shine a light, expose problems and try to nudge our political leaders to do the right thing,” Adrian says.

Upon his planned return, he’ll try to do just that as an entrepreneur who hopes to service a wide range of broadcast clients.

“I hope I’m aligned with somebody in every TV market in the state,” Adrian says. “I just don’t think you can be informed enough on what’s good government and what isn’t.