Off the I-15

While filming in Mr. Bonvillain’s 6th period class this week, a student pulled me aside.

“Are you with the local paper?” he asked.

I had a notebook in my back pocket, a camera around my neck, a pen behind my ear and video camera in my hand. As young as I look, I hope I can’t still pass for a high schooler. My cover was blown.

“Yeah.”

The student wrote for the Aztec Warrior, the high school paper, and wanted to know if journalism was still worth going into. Without even thinking, I responded.

“Definitely.”

He asked why, and here was my response. I pointed to the newspaper he was reading (he was looking at stock prices) and said even if we aren’t writing for these things, tapping my pen against the paper, we will still be writing. Journalism is changing, evident by the video camera I now carry in my bag. I told him some of the things going on in the Desert Dispatch newsroom with video, online and multimedia are changing the way we tell stories.

“It’s exiting,” I said. “And fun.”

Then I said that even all that information he gets “for free” on the Internet probably comes from journalists in some way. CNN.com, the New York Times Web site and even your favorite celebrity or music blog does not write itself. Somewhere, maybe hidden in their parents’ basement or at an uneven table at the local Starbucks, there is a person typing away.

But the real reason to still go into journalism, and this reason escaped me at the time, is that without journalists, without the local newspaper (regardless of how you regard us) there would be no one else to tell the community what was going on in that classroom, or what was said at the candidate forum at the high school tonight, or how the volleyball team does on Friday.

I invited the student to drop by the Desert Dispatch office to see what goes on in our newsroom. I open the invitation to any prospective journalist. Give me a call and I can show where journalism is heading at the Desert Dispatch.

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor

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