Stephen Enzweiler Addresses Students at
UM School of Journalism

OXFORD, Miss. - September 25, 2007 - Journalist and short story author Stephen Enzweiler spoke to students at the University of Mississippi's School of Journalism today on the topic “Challenges in Today's Journalism.”

Speaking at Farley Hall, the location of the University's new School of Journalism, Enzweiler said that the industry today is no less competitive than it as thirty years ago when he was a reporter. But there are notable differences in the way news and information is disseminated and presented.

“There are many more choices of media from which people derive news,” Enzweiler said. “Before 1980, you got all your news from traditional mainstream newspapers and television network news. But the 1980’s and 1990’s witnessed an explosion of technology with the proliferation of the home computer and the internet. It gave people more choices for information. And with more choices came a shift away from the traditional media that had dominated our society for generations.”

According to a recent Pew Research Center study, only one-in-fifty Americans got their news from the internet a decade ago. Today, nearly one-in-three obtain news and information from an online source. However, those numbers are not entirely representative of what’s actually happening, according to Enzweiler. While this increase may seem significant on the surface, the majority of consumers still get their news from traditional sources, and the shift away from the traditional is a lot smaller than expected.

Currently, only 9% of the population regularly logs on to the internet to get the news. That number is significantly less than the 22% of the population that still listens to radio news more than 30 minutes a day, 24% that read newspapers for an average of 40 minutes a day, and nearly half the population that still spends almost an hour each day getting their news and information from television sources. The Pew study also points to a stabilization in the long-term decline in readership of newspapers and other traditional news media in the last few years.

“The bottom line,” Enzweiler concluded, “is that people want news their way, when they want it, and how they want it. This is tempered with a basic mistrust of reporting that doesn't come from known or accepted sources, especially in the smaller online blogs and magazines that inject opinion for fact or often don't adhere to accepted journalistic practices.”

Enzweiler has long believed that consumers not only want the news, but also want to enjoy getting it. There may be some truth in that. A Pew survey of newspaper readers (57%) say they find reading the paper "relaxing," compared to 44% of radio news consumers and 41% of TV news consumers. Only 33% of internet news users say they find it relaxing to get the news from internet sources.

“There is still great demand for traditional media," Enzweiler asserts. "But t here are challenges ahead. Technology has given our audiences greater control over news and information access than ever before. And as journalists, we are going to have to be more collaborative in our style and methods of working the news from now on.”

But the front line of the battle for the news remains with the skills of the schooled journalist who writes it. Enzweiler insists that everything starts with basic skills: recognizing the relevance of a story, hard work digging through the research, developing the story, long with the skill in writing it so it communicates effectively.

Enzweiler was in Oxford at the invitation of the Department of English to participate in the marathon reading of William Faulkner’s epic novel “Go Down Moses,” which took place at Rowan Oak.

Stephen Enzweiler is a journalist and short story fiction writer. He is also a former college creative writing professor and is presently at work on his first novel.