Mitch Albom / The Detroit Free Press

What I hope to do is talk a little bit about some ideas I have learned over the past 20 years in journalism.

One thing I have learned from being in both radio and television and newspaper worlds, and therefore working for all the competition simultaneously, is that we are not what we used to be. We are not the primary source of information for people any more. I think we’re all painfully aware of that. When the newspaper arrives on the porch, or by the time it gets to the kitchen table for its reading in the morning, most of the people — if they’ve watched CNN or listened to the radio or watched the night before — may already have a very good idea of what is going on. They may already have the who-what-where-when and why they teach us about in journalism school.

What this has engendered in the newspaper world is a need to approach writing and approach even our journalism from a different point of view, and that is that we have to arrest the readers’ attention. We are not necessarily just the paper of record anymore. We are not just necessarily there to give you the who-what-when-where-and-why. They’re doing it on the Internet, they’re doing it on television, they’re doing it on 24-hour cable news, they’re doing it on radio. So what do we have to offer that none of them can?

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