Lessons from Lou Grant

Yesterday a fellow intern and I compared how we followed Monday's Metro accident. She constantly checked the Twitter feeds of four D.C. blogs on her iPhone. I, after hearing the initial details, waited until about 9 p.m. to read all the lead stories on washingtonpost.com.

She wanted up-to-the minute bursts of information as they became available. I wanted a complete summary of the facts and eyewitness accounts packaged together and organized by the newspaper after the hubbub died down.

I am methodical, meticulous person and easily susceptible to information overload. As everyone tries to predict the industry's future, I'm increasingly intrigued by its past. Yesterday AJR posted my profile of Alan Mutter aka the Newsosaur. Listening to Mutter recount the glory days of newspapers, his voice full of enthusiasm and nostalgia, made me want to know about that business. After seeing a clip from the "Lou Grant" show on his blog and hearing him mention the newsroom drama in our interview, I decided to check it out.

I just watched the first episode on Hulu. I did get some good interview tips, reminding me that even if the newsrooms I work in look different, the basics will remain the same. But, ironically, a scene in the show did make it clearer to me the benefit of tearing down the walls between the press and the public.

Grant wants to run a story on a police sex scandal on the front page, but the paper's publisher, Mrs. Pynchon, doesn't like the story. Grant says something about it being his job to decide what's important and what's not. Pynchon responds that she's the publisher and if she doesn't like it, it doesn't run.

Hearing their back and forth made me appreciate that nowadays, we increasingly decide what's important. Then again, I'm the one who keeps saying she prefers the packaged version so that I don't have to sift through everything to make that decision in the first place.

Hmm. It seems the point I was trying to make wasn't so easily answerable after all. Great. I chalk it up to another symptom of this post-graduation-realizing-there-are-no-easy-answers-in-life-phase.