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.

Originally Written: March 2008, Provided to Coworkers: May 2008

It’s likely no one thought they’d be missed. No one cried when they were gone. No one wrote a eulogy for the passing.  But there is an unmistakable absence when the Texas legislature gathers every other year.  The lens of a television camera has nearly disappeared.

Two decades ago, legislators tripped over the darn things.  Nearly every big market station in the state based a news crew in Austin to keep an eye on the folks passing the laws and determining tax rates.   Then, came the consultants and accountants and investors, who determined that covering state legislation for television was a little too expensive and assuredly too boring.  Putting a helicopter in the air for a car chase, however, was both interesting and worth the thousands of dollars an hour it cost to collect and broadcast.  Not that there’s anything wrong with enjoying a good car chase, but in the business, we often heard that viewers have short attention spans and challenging them with complicated stories just wasn’t worth it.

So what’s happened since the cameras left Austin?  Little things, like electric deregulation, got passed.  Since then, Texas has had one of the nation’s fastest growing average electric rates.  The state deregulated tuition at public universities, and tuitions predictably skyrocketed.  Voters passed tort reform for medical malpractice lawsuits making it nearly impossible for family members of patients killed due to negligence on an operating table to sue.  Perhaps the decisions would have been the same if there had been ample television news coverage, but without a lens pointed at politicians, voters failed to see the robust debates of impassioned legislators or hear the reasoned analysis of impartial observers.

I’m a Texan who has reported for local television stations for more than 18 years. For most of that time, I’ve been an investigative reporter and have actively fought the trend toward oversimplification.  I believe in the intelligence of our viewers.  I believe the more informed the general public is about an issue, the less likely it is that bad policy will get passed.

I think it’s time for brave journalists to find new business models in which to practice their craft.   With declining revenue streams, the mainstream media simply cannot be counted on alone to uphold its responsibility to cover our state’s most important societal issues.  The weakness is not only at the legislature. Who is reporting on the environment? Who is actively monitoring the border? Who is asking why Texas has the highest percentage of residents without health insurance in the nation?  More importantly, on all of these issues, who is searching through reporting for reasoned solutions that could correct these problems?

I hope to help develop an independent unit of print and broadcast investigative journalists that can monitor issues of statewide importance and inform the public in every format, through the Internet, radio, television and print.  That’s the future; journalists produce the best stories possible and then deliver those stories in every medium in hopes of kick-starting a public discussion that leads to solutions.  To succeed, we will need supporters or perhaps, underwriters, with a similar belief that society functions best when journalism’s light shines bright.  If the funding exists, certainly some of the nation’s best reporters will line up for the opportunity to join a team focused on finding truth and solutions.

I mean no disrespect to the mainstream media, especially KDFW-TV, which has employed me and given me the opportunity to pursue important and complex stories.   But nobody can deny that the industry is evolving, fast, and not in a direction that truly benefits the public.  I believe so strongly that we have to find a new method of reporting that I’m willing to leave the best job I’ve ever had, as an investigative reporter at KDFW-TV in Dallas, to strike out on this new path.  Luckily, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to spend a year at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  Afterwards, I’ll return to Texas, better equipped to cover this grand state that I love, and hopefully as part of a new kind of journalism team dedicated to guarding and improving the life, health and welfare of Texans.

pressforthePeople is a simple idea with deep roots in our nation’s history.

Democracy started with and relies on “We the People.”

“We the People” created the Government.

“We the People” decided how to elect representatives. We asked them to protect our freedom. We allowed them to tax us. We demanded that they never restrict our unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But once the elected obtain power, what ensures that the people’s interests are at the heart of their decision-making?

Thomas Jefferson provided the solution: Those in power could never make a law that shut down the press or the voice of the people

Thus, the people opened an independent eye. The press kept watch on those in power and told the people what it saw. Informed people could speak up for themselves.

But many feel time diluted the traditional media’s effectiveness. Party trumps truth. Opinion clouds fact. Cost cutting closed the watchful eye.

Without good information, it is difficult for the people to participate. And without their participation, government becomes complacent about serving their needs.

We believe it is time for a “news” revolution. It is time for the press to return to old values. The new press should produce comprehensive streams of rigorously non-partisan original reporting on the issues that are most important to our lives: health, taxes, education, food, environment, energy, immigration and the countless decisions and influences on those who make decisions on our behalf.

Once informed, we the people should have a space where we can discuss the important issues of our times, confident that our opinions will be represented by those we elect. In this space, we should not have to submit to the intolerance, ranting and raving, mythmaking, deceptive campaigning and fear-mongering that is all too present in much of today’s public discourse.

pressforthePeople will provide the information and discussion space.

We will press to have your questions answered.

We will press your leaders to be accountable to the people.

We want to empower citizens by providing access to superior reporting and the platform for community organization necessary for the People once again to become powerful participants in democracy.

Join us so that you too can press for change, press for democracy, press for the people.