Cleveland Plain Dealer…
As newspapers reinvent themselves without paper who will responsibly inform our children
By Phillip Morris
Sunday, September 16, 2012 

Have you ever tried to explain to a really smart 9-year-old child what you do for a living? It's not quite as easy as it seems.

 If you fly airplanes, put out fires or arrest bad people, I suppose the job speaks for itself. That's why kids grow up pretending to be pilots or cops. 

But if you work in an industry like newspaper journalism (read: old school), an industry that is undergoing revolutionary change in terms of consumer demand and forcing its participants to reinvent in real time, the answer isn't so easy. 

I've never met a kid, for instance, who grew up pretending to be a newspaper reporter. The vocation is generally more of an acquired taste for curious adolescents and young adults, who carefully manage to steer clear of the life sciences or math. 

That's why I'm still thinking about the question that my young friend, CJ, asked the other day. 

How do you come up with your stories, he asked? How do you know what is important to write about? 

Great questions. CJ likely won't have the option to grow up to be a newspaper reporter. By the time he's a working man, the daily papers as we know them will mostly be gone. But still he deserves an answer. 

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