It’s 4:30 p.m., and I’m sitting alone in the newsroom.
The day staff are working on papers and finances, answering phones and getting ready to go home. I’m at my desk, listening to Ben Folds below a promo photo the Alligator received years ago.
In it, Danny Glover looks to the front of the newsroom, and on yellow legal paper above him, says, “I’m getting too old for this s--t!”
I have spent the last three years, on and off, at this paper, and it’s given a lot to me. I’m proud of photos taken, stories written, meetings held, stories rewritten and everything else that’s happened under this ‘70s frat house roof.
Even when the roof leaks.
Looking around, there’s memorabilia all around the newsroom to remind us on a daily basis that newspapers are over the hill. We’ve carried on anyway, postering two- and three-deep over these relics with inside jokes and good examples set by others.
There are even some good digs at us plastered up on these mismatched walls. My favorite is the “wall of shame/hall of fame” in Sports, displaying years of mistyped headlines, players’ names spelled wrong and failed attempts at sports humor.
In all fairness to Sports, if News had something similar, we’d need a bigger building.
I’ve heard that time speeds up as you get older, so maybe that’s why these last few months have brought a dizzying array of new journalism — good journalism — from good journalists like the ones I’ve worked with since moving to Gainesville.
And I’m incredibly proud to have been involved in some of it.
As a journalism student, I think we have an acute sense of what is going on in the industry. My first journalism professor spent the first class of the semester trying to convince us to switch majors before it was too late.
But the Alligator will persist, despite the vitriol we receive all the time. Or, for that matter, despite the hate any newspaper gets.
Just recently, The New York Times’ paywall overtook its digital ads in revenue. That’s as good of a sign as any of us will get.
Some of the great folks from the J-school and I will soon be crossing the graduation stage into the job market, essentially with no guarantee of a career in what we currently know to be journalism. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little scared, but I see where Alligator alum have gone in life, and it makes me a little more confident.
I’ve heard it said a lot, but it bears repeating: Journalism isn’t dead just yet.
I have a list of advice people have given me or I’ve seen somewhere that merited writing down. The most relevant one in my career right now is this: “Remember that everything we’re working with will be stoneaged soon. Figuring out why is the essence of innovation.”
There are some traditions worth keeping, like my Danny Glover photo, and there are others we can learn from to leave critics’ mouths hanging open the next time around.
For instance, I’m normally pretty punctual. This semester has been killer, though, and although I don’t think my output has suffered, my schedule has. Keeping that in mind, and in the true spirit of journalism, I wrote this goodbye column just before deadline. Que será, será.
Thanks for the times, y’all.
Matt Riva is the Alligator's online managing editor. A version of this column ran on page 6 on 12/3/2013 under the headline "Bye UF, remember: Journalism isn’t dead"
