I went down to Princeton this morning to speak to the Class of ’44, which counts frequent Curious Capitalist commenter dadfox among its members. The class is back for its 65th reunion, and it’s back in force, with hundreds of spouses and widows and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren along for the ride. It is a remarkable group, in that its members were rushed through Princeton’s curriculum in about two years and shipped off to war (or, in the case of chemical engineer dadfox, war-related work in an oil refinery in Texas). Twenty-two died in World War II, and the rest had nothing approaching a normal college experience—which perhaps explains why most of them are so obsessive about coming back for reunions.
The other speakers today were class member Sandy McDonnell, the former CEO of McDonnell-Douglas and a co-founder of something called the Character Education Partnership, and son-in-law-of-a-class-member Philip Caputo, author of the classic Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War and of an acclaimed 2005 novel that I now really want to read called Acts of Faith. I came on after those two, and I figured people didn’t want to hear another speech, especially not from me, so after a brief introduction of myself and my new book, I asked for questions. There were lots.
What did the ’44ers want to talk about? To my surprise, almost all of the questions were about the future of the news media. These octogenarians (and their Baby Boomer kids, who raised their hands a lot too) all wanted to know what is going to happen to newspapers, how news organizations can make money online, whether the media will be able to continue to play the role of check on government. My answer to the first two questions was basically, I dunno. As for the third, which was asked by Caputo (who won a Pulitzer in 1972 as part of a Chicago Tribune team reporting on election fraud in the Windy City), my answer was that on a national level it’s pretty clear that the business models (and the foundation money) are there to support some pretty robust Washington reporting even if every last legacy news organization bites the dust. But I worry about what’s going to happen at the state and local level.
Anyway, the lesson I took away from this was that the whole what-the-heck’s-going-to-happen-to-the-news-media discussion has crossed the line (it probably did a while ago) from inside-the-media obsession to Major National Issue. Meaning that I probably ought to write about it more often.