This afternoon in Baton Rouge, the family and many friends and colleagues of Jerry Ceppos are gathering to remember this good man and celebrate his life. Jerry died suddenly several months ago. My thoughts have been with Karen Ceppos and their children. His loss is profound for so many, including me.

Jerry was a consummate journalist and educator. He expertly guided a newsroom where I once worked, the San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley, at a time of explosive growth — a time that seems like fantasy today. At the Mercury News, Jerry was managing editor, then executive editor, then vice president of news for the parent company, Knight Ridder. After the company was sold, he became dean of journalism programs at the University of Nevada at Reno and then dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.

He hired me in 1994. I departed in 2005, after a decade in the best job I’ll ever have. After we both left the journalism business, I did guest lectures at Reno and LSU, and, for a semester, was a part-time visiting professor at LSU.

My professional debt to Jerry is incalculable. When I arrived in San Jose, I’d had an interesting but hardly exceptional decade-plus in journalism as a reporter and occasional commentator. When I became a full-time technology and business columnist, part of a great team that Jerry and his colleagues assembled, my work became far more fun, satisfying, and visible. I always told people that I had one of the two or three best jobs in journalism. I had wonderful colleagues, and we put out a news product that mattered.

Professional ties are one thing. What matter more, in the end, are the personal ones.

On the day I visited the Mercury News prior to taking the job, Jerry interviewed me near the end of a long day, the second-to-final conversation in what was known as the “dance card” of interviews with many different people. We had an hour. About 10 minutes into it, the conversation turned to wine. Jerry loved good wine. I’d written about wine for several other publications. Someone told Jerry that we had the grape in common. You can imagine how the rest of the hour went: quickly and enjoyably.

That wasn’t only the beginning of what became a happy and productive professional connection. More important, it was the start of a great friendship.

Over the years, we’ve had countless conversations ranging from trivial to deep. We and family and friends have gotten together for countless meals, and offered toasts over countless glasses ranging from experimental plonk to the complex perfection of a truly great wine.

We talked constantly about journalism — its value, its failures, its potential. We shared many misgivings. But we always, always had faith that it could be better and serve, truly serve, the people of the communities where having useful, accurate information still mattered.

I think Jerry knew this, but I don’t think I ever said in so many words how enormously grateful I was to him for what he’d done for me, but even more for our friendship. So when I heard about his death, I wished I could turn the clock back to say it directly.

Jerry was one of the people in my life to whom I owe almost more than I can express. They are generous people who believed in me, often at times when I did not believe in myself. Whatever good I’ve done stems, in a powerful fashion, from their help along the way.

I haven’t thanked them all the way I wish I’d thanked Jerry. Even if they already know, I need to tell them. Some of them are gone, and time does run out.

Test post for my class.

A terrific film about journalism disappeared almost instantly when it was released several years ago. It’s called “Shock and Awe” and is now on Amazon Prime.

It’s the story of how one major news organization — Knight Ridder’s Washington Bureau — bucked the nearly universal bended-knee cheerleading for war (in Iraq) that prevailed in the American press after 9/11.

It’s not a great film, but it’s a fine and meaningful one. Rob Reiner directed and co-starred with Woody Harrelson, James Marsden, Jessica Biel, Milla Jovovich, Tommy Lee Jones, and others.

Knight Ridder was up against not just a relentlessly dishonest Bush administration back then.

KR was also up against a relentlessly dishonest journalism establishment, led in particular by the New York Times, which was headlining government lies as a matter of routine “coverage” that helped start a futile war in Iraq that did so much damage there and here. There was some sporadic contrarian coverage in American journalism, but the overwhelming message was the one the government wanted the public — still traumatized by 9/11 — to hear.

Portraying KR’s John Walcott, Reiner says: “If every other news organization wants to be stenographers for the Bush administration, let them. We don’t write for people who send other people’s kids to war. We write for people whose kids get sent to war.”

I was working then at the San Jose Mercury News, part of the once-great Knight Ridder chain. What our DC bureau did back then was profoundly important.

Knight Ridder had its flaws (and so does the film). But I’ve never been so proud to be part of an organization.

Note: This is an exercise I assign to students in my Digital Media Literacy course at Arizona State University. I ask them to keep a record of how they use media in a 24-hour stretch.

5:30 a.m.: Wake up and (I should not do this) check emails on my phone to see if there’s anything urgent. There never is. So far, anyway.

6:30am: At breakfast, after we watch the first few minutes of a morning TV news program, I browse a number of journalism websites including the home pages of the New York Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Japan Times. Because I care a lot about the technology scene, I look at several of the best tech sites, notably ArsTechnica. The other regular media check-in each day is the private Facebook group for my small town in Northern California; that group is the closest thing to news we’ll ever have in a town that’s too small to support a news organization and is almost never noticed by the bigger media organizations in our vicinity.

7 a.m.: At the desk after breakfast, I usually have several Zoom meetings.

9 a.m.: I launch TweetDeck in a web browser to see what’s up on Twitter. The people I follow there always send me to a variety of other sites, via links they post. Twitter isn’t a great spot for original content, but it’s superb (if you follow the right people) as a place where people will point you to articles, videos, etc. that help you understand the world.

I get more serious reading done at the desk, using my personal computer, than on my phone. Among the media organizations I’ve bookmarked are the Atlantic, which has become a must-read for coronavirus information. (It was sad to see that the billionaires who own the Atlantic felt it necessary to lay off roughly a sixth of the staff in May; if they can’t see this through, who can?)

9, 10, 11 a.m., 12, 1, 2, etc. p.m.: Like many others at this point, I spend several hours a day in my email, Slack channels, and other communications venues that are critical to my work. Those often lead me to other reading — research papers, news articles, and more. It never stops, and I will never reach the fabled “Inbox Zero.”

Several times a day I am in Zoom video meetings with colleagues, family, or friends. This is a major shift, and I suspect it may be longer-lasting than I’d originally imagined. Various family members gather each Sunday on video, and we’ve become closer than we were before. The vast improvements in these tools in recent years has made it possible, as has better Internet bandwidth that (so far) hasn’t failed during the pandemic.

3 p.m.: I write a fair amount each day, though not nearly as much as I did when I was a working journalist. Beyond emails, Slack, and other messaging applications that dominate work life, I spend way too much time posting on Twitter. I also write in my personal blog from time to time, and post about once a day — usually a photo — to Facebook.

I don’t listen to much music while I work. When I do it’s usually from my own collection of MP3s, ripped from my CD collection. I prefer instrumentals that aren’t musically challenging to accompany work, because otherwise I’d actively listen to the sounds, defeating the purpose of background music.

7 p.m.: We often watch videos in the evening — primarily films and TV programs via Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. At the moment we’re going through all five seasons (starting in the late 1970s) of the Muppet Show on Disney Plus. It is great.

9 p.m.: My main book reading is in the evening, on a Kindle. Currently I’m immersed in a near-future science-fiction novel (by someone I know) that will be released in a few weeks. I read about two books a week, fiction and nonfiction. Reading gives me a lot of satisfaction, and I wish I could do more.

How do I rate news outlets?

I give the news outlets I regularly follow high credibility scores. That includes the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal (except the editorial pages), and several others. They are not perfect — far from it in every case, to my constant endless despair — but they have practices that are visibly aimed at quality and integrity. And they usually correct their errors.

Big Journalism often frustrates me. But I still rely on it.

 

 

Joe Trippi, a longtime political operative (and friend), had me on his podcast this week to discuss my post asking journalists to be activists on behalf of democracy. A fine conversation, if I may say so…

My new post at Medium, following up on a longstanding theme, begs American journalists to recognize the growing emergency we face as one of the two major political parties works to undermine our republic — and to take action to help save government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

(This is adapted from my 2009 book Mediactive.)

My friend and Arizona State University colleague Tim McGuire said many years ago, “The fact is one stupid mistake when you are 19 today can kill your future.”

That’s true—today, anyway, as we learn that what we do online can often be rediscovered years later. Such is the case of Alexi McCammond, who was named editor of Teen Vogue and then dethroned after anti-Asian tweets from a decade ago were uncovered.

It’s been the common wisdom for years. Back in 2009, then-President Obama told 9th graders at a Virginia school:

“I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook — because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff.  And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search and — so that’s some practical political advice for you right there.”

Young people make mistakes and do stupid things. So do older people, of course. Luckily for me and most of my friends, my generation’s youthful stupidities are mostly lost in the mists of time, not preserved on somewhere in the digital cloud.

But the notion of punishing someone decades later for what he or she said or did as a teenager or college student isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous.

What matters is who you are today. If some said racist things as a teenager and is still demonstrating today that he or she harbors racist beliefs or acts in racist ways, I want no part of that person.

We’re going to have to cut each other some slack. There’s no alternative.

A journalism student of mine once asked if it was advisable to have a personal blog and, if so, to be outspoken on it. He’d apparently been warned that it could put a crimp in his future journalism career plans.

I can’t say how others would react. I do know that if I were hiring someone today I’d want to know what (not if) he or she posted online, not to find disqualifying factors but to see if that person had interesting things to say. I’d take for granted that I might find some things that were risqué or inappropriate for my current world. I’d expect to find things that would be “unjournalistic” in some ways, such as outspoken or foolish (or both) views on important people and issues. But I’d also remember my own ability, if not tendency, to be an idiot when I was that age. And I’d discount appropriately.

This is all about giving people what my friend Esther Dyson, a technology investor and seer, has called a “statute of limitations on stupidity.” If our norms don’t bend so that we can all start cutting each other more slack in this increasingly transparent society, we’ll only promote drones—the least imaginative, dullest people—into positions of authority. Now that’s really scary.

I hope we’ll make more progress on this than we’re showing at the moment. In some ways we are. Recall that it was impossible for a Catholic to be president until John F. Kennedy was elected. It was impossible for a divorced person to be elected until Ronald Reagan won. It was impossible for a former pot smoker to be president until Bill Clinton got elected. (Biden is stupidly undoing this with his firing of staffers who admit they ever used weed.) George W. Bush acknowledged having been a dissolute drunk until he was 40. And so on.

Sometime in the foreseeable future, we’ll elect a president who tweeted regularly, or had a blog or a Facebook or Instagram page when she was a teenager. By the standards of today, such a person would be utterly disqualified for any serious political job. But if we adapt as I believe we’ll have to, we’ll have grown as a society; we’ll have become not just more tolerant of flaws, but more understanding that we all have feet of clay in some respect. We’ll elect her anyway, because we’ll realize that the person she has become—and how that happened—is what counts.

How will her peers know all this? They’ll have figured it out for themselves, but they’ll have had some help, too. They’ll have been taught, from an early age.