The 9/11 generation

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The following column is taken from API's quarterly publication, ROI.

Thousands of the activities we do almost by habit halted on Sept. 11, stopped cold by the suicide hijackings in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

For me, a newspaper recruiter, the attacks broke my fall schedule of visits to college campuses.

I had left Dulles Airport on Sept. 10 after addressing a roomful of copy editors at the American Press Institute. Within 24 hours, I was editing stories about what had happened to another passenger jet that had taken off from that same airport. I was glad to pass up my next few out-of-town campus interviews.

But, like the rest of America, I warily went back to my routine and was on the recruiting trail again. When I got to the campuses, I found that something had changed since the break. Something had changed in the students.

Our success in hiring tomorrow’s staffs depends on how well we understand that change.

Now, I know that 2001’s economy may have spoiled your appetite for talk about recruiting. The facts, though, say that the demographic curves that had us fretting about retention in 2000 will be with us a lot longer than 2001’s economic dip and, before we know it, we’ll be talking again about talent wars and fighting attrition.

So, here is what I have been finding on college campuses since 9/11, and what it means:

Across the country, there are students who feel that the news business is important — very important — and they want to have a meaningful role in it.

A sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who had worked on attack coverage said that it showed her how everyone in a newsroom must come together. She said it had reaffirmed her choice of journalism as a career choice.

A senior at Bowling Green State University in Ohio explained her feelings with the same word: reaffirmed. She said, “It really showed me that I was there to report something to the public, to give them the truth.”

A junior at Howard University said that he is most interested in covering sports, but that the response of his student paper to the attacks made him feel the responsibility that journalists have. He told me he now feels more sensitive to how he must report.

A sophomore at the University of Missouri-Columbia said during her interview, “Before Sept. 11, my entire generation grew up without this. It happened while we’re learning to be journalists.”

They are changed. The talent pool is transformed.

I have been interviewing on campuses since 1990, and I would bet that commitment to journalism is deeper now than at any time since the days of “All the President’s Men” in the mid-1970s.

Student journalists just old enough to vote have already covered a story bigger than anything their Watergate-vintage peers ever saw. They have published extras, worked without sleep, scrambled to reach ground zero and interviewed victims to explain the unimaginable.

The explosions scared us all, but they seared some of the people now making career choices. The students who tasted journalism on Sept. 11 feel they have made a difference, and they want to keep doing it. They feel, they see, they know that good journalism is important. They have not just found careers, they have found callings.

The dedication and commitment welling up in college newsrooms will mark the 21st century’s first generation of journalists, and this is good news for news companies that do journalism well.

In 2000, one practitioner of the now slumbering art of retention consultancy said that people will stay with jobs that challenge them and offer them meaningful work. People who cut their journalistic teeth on 9/11 will want to do meaty stories — pabulum won’t fill them up. They believe that journalism means something, and they will want to feel that their work does, too. They will be less content than ever to wait for years “paying dues” by filling space with hollow stories.

News executives who are content just to fill columns or airtime may have a harder time filling jobs and find themselves fanned by the revolving door of their hiring mill. Newsroom leaders who understand journalism — and who deliver it to audiences whose expectations have risen, too — will be able to get and keep top talent.

If you think journalists should be willing to work for less because the work is important — an acrobatic twist of logic — then you must keep your end of the bargain by giving journalists important work. If a staff member says there is a better deal at the business across the street, then you need to beat it. If your company can’t or won’t make the paycheck fuller, make the job more fulfilling.

In newsrooms where the leaders don’t understand this change, recovery will be just as wrenching as recession.

Joseph Grimm is the Recruiting and Development Editor at the Detroit Free Press.