Last Updated: March 23, 1997
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"A time to rekindle your journalistic spirit" promises the ASNE flier inviting university faculty and administrators to apply for the Institute of Journalism Excellence. For me, the program did that and more: it renewed my respect and appreciation for the daily miracle that is newspapering and disabused me of the notion that downsizing, declining readership and anxiety about the future had filled newsrooms with dispirited men and women.
From my days as a high school stringer and later my first job in a smoke-filled newsroom with oil-stained floors and the sounds of clanking teletype machines, Linotypes and typewriters, I've always loved newspaper work and respected and liked most of the people I worked alongside.
After almost a decade away from daily newspaper work, I still got a rush last summer from knowing the news early and helping to spread it to other folks on newsprint and via the Internet.
The recently remodeled, smoke-free Minneapolis Star Tribune newsroom, occupying most of a city block, dwarfs all others I've worked in. With its potted plants and tastefully appointed interview areas placed among ergonomically designed work stations, it's also the most comfortable and best equipped. Carpeting and white noise mask most of the other noise. Yet, even in this comparatively luxurious physical setting, the overall feel of the newsroom had changed little in the past 10 years.
Granted, we're dealing with a sample of one newspaper, and seven weeks on the job hardly qualifies one to gauge staff morale, but I detected none of the dissatisfaction, much less the despair, that some say permeates newsrooms today. Maybe all the malcontents had left the building by the time I arrived for my night shift on the copy desk or Star Tribune Online. Perhaps the hard-working night copy desk and online staffs had no time to voice complaints.
Perhaps newspapers that participate in the program aren't typical. Most of my fellow IJE participants said they were pleasantly surprised at the absence of newsroom grousing about salaries or working conditions.
Another surprise we noted was the relatively leisure pace at which many reporters worked, spending two or three days on a story. One IJE participant worked with a reporting team now in its second year of research on a single project. This seeming lack of urgency parallels the more analytical, in depth nature of newspaper content today.
Newspaper journalists, on the whole, lag behind journalism teachers in their familiarity and daily use of the Internet, IJE participants observed. Star Tribune staffers for the company's Web site possess cutting-edge knowledge of the online world, but many reporters and copy editors seem only vaguely aware of the electronic work in progress two floors removed from the newsroom.
I've returned to the classroom with renewed enthusiasm for conveying to my students how tremendously satisfying newspaper careers can be, provided, of course, young graduates can survive near-poverty-level salaries during the early years, while at the same time repaying their college loans.
I describe to my students the immense care that Star Tribune copy editors poured into their work with words. Whether handling a lead, a graph buried deep inside a story, a headline or photo caption, no copy editor within my earshot ever expressed a "this-will-do" attitude about putting words together. Even in the deadline heat of producing multiple editions each night, copy editors consulted with each other to mull over various approaches to stories and headline options.
Words matter, I will continue to tell my students, whether those words reach
their audiences as print on paper or computer screens, as audio or as a combination
of type and sound. 
Bowles, a professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was attached to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
