For the Record

Flu outbreak: Walking the line between hyping and helping

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

There’s nothing like a disease outbreak to highlight the value of the media in alerting and informing the public in the face of an emergency.

There’s also nothing like it to bring out some of our more excessive behavior, essentially shouting “Run for your lives! (but, whatever you do, stay tuned, keep reading the website and don’t forget to buy the paper!).”

An outbreak of a form of influenza, which was known as swine flu before the World Health Organization changed the name, has killed scores in Mexico and infected others in the United States, Canada, Europe and New Zealand. It’s already having an effect on markets and travel plans, in addition to the obvious impact on public health.

The impact on markets could become more significant in time, but the impact on the media was practically immediate.

Cable television programmers went into crisis mode and a look at newspaper front pages and website home pages around the world showed a range of responses, from the almost hysterical to the concerned and more measured.

• In the New York Daily News: “SWINE FLU SPREADS!” (though it was played below a sports story on the New York Yankees losing to the Boston Red Sox).
• In the New York Post: “HOG WILD!” (also playing second to the Yankees’ humiliation, but illustrated with a pig sucking on a thermometer).
• In The Japan Times (using a Reuters story): “Swine flu in Mexico sparks global panic”
• In the South China Morning Post (which certainly has experience in covering bird flu and SARS): “Asia on high alert for swine flu as airports step up checks.”
• In The Guardian: “Swine flu: call for global action as outbreak spreads.”
• In the Toronto Sun: “CALM URGED AS FLU FEARS GROW.”

Surviving the shakeup: Young journos and a revolution in news

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards.

Finally. The U.S. newspaper industry has come up with a brilliant solution to its profitability problem and will embark on a new wave of hiring journalists to staff its newsrooms and… Darn, I always wake up at that point, then turn to Romenesko to confirm that, yes, I was dreaming.

For those of us who have two or three decades behind us in our careers, the outlook is daunting. But what about journalists who have three and more decades of work ahead of them? How do they get out of bed in the morning and face the day?

I asked my assistant, Ben Frumin, that question and suggested he write about it. As you’ll see, Ben, a product of Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism, faces the future with “a strange combination of short-term skepticism and long-term optimism.” It’s gratifying that the talented new generation of journalists still has faith in the future of our profession, even while much of the news industry struggles to reinvent itself. (Of course, his opinions are his own, as are mine.)

Let’s hear from Ben.

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It’s only April, and already 2009 has been the worst year in my lifetime (and in the lifetimes of journalists three times my age) for the U.S. newspaper industry. And judging from the frequent “Woes-R-Us” conversations I have with other 20-something reporters and writers, an entire generation of journalists is close to losing hope.