Greenville Journal<\/a> and rejoined the Greenville News in 2012 to write again.<\/p>\n\u201cI think this is a good time to be in the newspaper business,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are a lot of people who disagree with me, but that\u2019s been my experience so far. \u201c<\/p>\n
After decades as the primary means of spreading information, this generation is almost completely unfamiliar with the medium. Riddle takes that as a challenge.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery single semester, I start out and ask how many have read newspapers, and I\u2019m lucky if one person has. Usually it\u2019s because they were in another class that required them to read The New York Times<\/em>,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd they all believe that journalism is dying. No, journalism is not dying. There has probably not been a more exciting time to be in journalism, largely because we have this opportunity to reinvent ourselves. \u201c<\/p>\nPart of that reinvention has been a shift to de-emphasizing the limits of print space in favor of embracing the limitlessness of the digital world.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was an actual turnabout at the Greenville News<\/em> and at Gannett to tell the richer, deeper stories in a meaningful way,\u201d Riddle said. \u201cWe are given the opportunity, the time and the space, to tell the story properly. . . We have to give readers the special stories that they can\u2019t get any place else.\u201d<\/p>\nThat\u2019s how Riddle was able to spend \u201ca good three months\u201d on the series after an editor asked for volunteers to visit a homeless camp nobody seemed to know anything about. One trip convinced her that this was more than a single story.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea that these people were living under the bridge was not news to people who worked with the homeless, certainly, but it was news to people living in Greenville generally. They had no idea,\u201d she said. \u201cThere was a community meeting at Furman that was a result of the series, where people came together to put their ideas out. One of the things that I found eye-opening was the stereotype that you have of homeless person doesn\u2019t hold true with everybody. You have the idea that if you\u2019re homeless you\u2019re mentally ill or you\u2019re a drug addict or an alcoholic, and while there are many (in that situation) there are a lot of people who lost their home because they lost their job or who had medical bills they couldn\u2019t afford to pay. Many of us are a lost job or a serious illness away from the streets ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Riddle teaches journalism in both the fall and spring semesters and has taught a May Experience class in investigative journalism. Her classes are generally full, and the students aren\u2019t the only beneficiaries.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust being around young people and getting them interested in newspapers and newspaper writing is a wonderful experience for me. It has helped me remember why I do this work,\u201d she said. \u201cThey have never written a newspaper story. They have written term papers, and that is a big shift to make. . .And there have been a number of students who have gone into journalism after being in the class, which I can\u2019t even believe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stories bemoaning the death of the industry arrive in a steady stream on the internet, next to the torrent blaming the \u201cmedia\u201d for seemingly all of society\u2019s ills. Riddle disagrees with both assertions, and her passion for something she considers vital to the country undoubtedly rubs off more than she knows.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t have an effective democracy without journalism,\u201d she said. \u201cOne day the print newspaper may well go away . . . but that doesn\u2019t mean journalism is gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Learn more about Lyn Riddle on her Web site.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Furman journalism instructor Lyn Riddle has \u201cno idea\u201d how many awards she has won over her nearly four-decade journalism career, and she also has no idea how many people she\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":13450,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-english"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}