By Bryan Clapper, Austin Daily Herald

A few weeks ago I was in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Minnesota Newspaper Association&8217;s Journalism Education Committee, of which I am a member: How do we promote journalism as a future career for students when there&8217;s nothing but bad news published about the industry?

Media companies are making record cuts &8212; the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and others larger and smaller cut full-time jobs to the tune of 711 in 2006 and a little more than 650 so far this year.

Those may sound like dire numbers, but when direct dial and automated exchanges replaced manual telephone operators, who literally plugged one phone line into another to complete a call, no one said it was the end of the telephone industry. Similarly, staff cuts in overstaffed newsrooms like the Star Tribune&8217;s (did the paper really need a full-time classical music reviewer?) shouldn&8217;t be viewed as a death knell for the print journalism industry.

Like any industry, we&8217;re going through major changes in the way we do business &8212; the way we think from the start of the day until the end, and the way that we spend our money.

Unfortunately, less of that money in the future will be spent on people who sit at a computer and type what they saw at a city council meeting.

The future of our business isn&8217;t dictated by a mysterious man behind a curtain; it&8217;s dictated by what the consumers of our product want. News consumers increasingly want news delivered to them in different media &8212; online, video, mobile text, etc. &8212; and in more manageable doses.

Fewer modern news consumers want long, in-depth reports of what happened at a city council meeting, for example, unless it is very basic and simply explains how it will affect them. This isn&8217;t to say that the new information consumers are less intelligent than their predecessors or anything, just that whether consciously or subconsciously, they want someone else to do the work for them. It makes sense to me &8212; even though I&8217;m kind of a political geek and have sat through some truly exhausting government meetings, I&8217;d still like to know quite quickly in a story if it affects me or not. If it doesn&8217;t affect me, there&8217;s little point in my reading it.

I&8217;m not ashamed to say it, and neither should any of our readers: If I don&8217;t care about a story, I don&8217;t read it. Granted, I&8217;m the editor of the Herald, so I read almost everything that goes in our paper, and quite often I find myself reading long pieces in papers from other cities just to appreciate the style and substance of the writing, when it comes down to it, I think like the average news consumer.

Some readers may be shaking their heads and disagreeing with me. They may be saying that readers are more interested in who got variances at the last planning and zoning commission meeting to build a garage that overlaps the property setback by six inches. If that&8217;s true, then were are all the audience members at routine government meetings?

Something I&8217;ve tried to teach our reporters here is that the meeting itself is not the event. Routine government news isn&8217;t event coverage, it&8217;s issue coverage. What are the issues discussed? How does an issue affect John Q. Public?

My point is not a lecture on how our reporters can better serve our readers, it&8217;s this: If journalists learn to adapt and change in order to better serve their consumers, both in substance and in form, there will always be newsrooms with jobs to fill. The papers that are massively hemorrhaging staff members didn&8217;t realize this early enough, or didn&8217;t do enough about it.

Take the poor full-time classical music critic for the Star Tribune as an example. While news consumers once had to turn to the pages of the Star Tribune to find out if the latest Kronos Quartet CD was any good, they now have a million places to find out, and not just from professionals. They can go to Amazon.com and not only listen to clips from the CD, but find out what fellow consumers are saying about it. Want to find out beforehand if it&8217;s worth shelling out ticket money to hear the Spaghetti Western String Company next time they perform in St. Paul? You don&8217;t need to pick up the Star Tribune to find out any more because there&8217;s a clip on YouTube of their last performance (I know, I checked).

For all its faults, journalism should still be considered by students who are interested in having a front-row seat to history, just as it has been for centuries. Individual media may come and go, but there will always be news to report.

Bryan Clapper can be reached at (507) 434-2230 or by e-mail at bryan.clapper@austindailyherald.com.