It’s actually amazing how many people claim to be misquoted when the published or broadcast quote is fully documented. Then they’ll argue that the quote was out of context, when, in fact, a look at the record shows it to be perfectly in context. Ultimately, they just wish they had said something different, or better, or didn’t fall over when the camera was trained at them.

There is always hope that our fading republic still breathes.

But given that it was a reporter from my paper who soured you on journalism forever, I had to do a little research and find out what happened. So I looked up the story in our archive.

Indeed, you were quoted pretty much as you said you were — “It’s a passion, man. It’s all about passion.” — but you’re not really giving the whole context here.

The story was spot-news coverage of a hackers convention in St. Paul (in 2000, not 2001). And you weren’t even addressed in the body of the story — you had your photo taken and you were quoted in the cutline. It’s entirely possible you didn’t even speak to the reporter who wrote the story, it may have been the photographer. In general, a photo caption isn’t the place you would typically find a whole lot of in-depth discourse. The “story” of a photo really is the photo itself, if that makes any sense.

Whatever the case, again, you weren’t a subject in the actual story which — and I suppose you could say I am biased here — read to me as a pretty straightforward, if a bit cheeky, “scene setting” news piece. In very general terms, daily newspapers provide news and “slice-of-life” type pieces about the community at large, written for a general readership. And in those terms, the story was a great success in my eyes.

The reporter who wrote it covers tech issues and certainly knew what he was talking about, and went out of his way to humanize hackers and point out that — unlike some people think — the vast majority are pretty damn smart and are more concerned about making the computer world a better, not worse, place.

All of that said, you were upset. And that’s a drag — it’s never a good thing for my industry to see someone from the general public (as opposed to a murderer or crooked politician or whatever) emerge from the experience of talking to a reporter feeling like they’ve been misrepresented or violated.

But when you paint an entire industry in such negative terms, it’s really not fair. (And this is this is the point in my windy reply where I’m talking about some of the anti-MSM discussion here in the broader sense, and it’s no longer aimed at Cary alone.)

Some people seem to have this idea that the mainstream media is inherently evil, but when it comes down to it, the media ultimately consists of a bunch of people who are your neighbors, friends and relatives. Yes, the bigger the newspaper/TV station is, the more likely it is to be owned by a major company (that’s located outside of the area) but the newsrooms are filled with people who live and breathe the same air as everyone else. I’ve worked for a family-owned paper, and I’ve also worked for a paper owned by the largest newspaper company in the business. (Now I work for the second-largest chain, and in a few weeks it’ll be the fourth-largest.) But in every case, the vast majority of decisions about how and what and why news is covered have been made on a local level, not from some faceless corporate office hundreds of miles away. Indeed, I might even say some of the heaviest handed decision making from above came from that family-owned newspaper.

And most of those people who make those decisions got into the business because, well, it’s all about the passion, man. Very few people on the frontlines — I’m talking about writers and editors — ever get rich from working in the media. If they’re lucky, they’ll eventually get to a point where they make a comfortable living.

I can tell you personally, my first newsroom job after graduating from four years of college was as a part-time features clerk where I made $3.85 an hour. I made more money in my other part-time gig as a cashier/stockboy at a liquor store (and, ironically enough, I had a stricter dress code there as well). The first few years of my full-time employment, when I was a general-assignment arts and entertainment reporter and columnist, my salary was barely above that of a shift manager at a fast-food place. It’s a similar story for smaller-market TV reporters. And radio people — well, they usually are at the bottom of the media payscale, and they have the least amount of job security.

Many of the people in my journalism classes from college never even made it into media jobs in the first place, and throughout my career, I’ve been surrounded by co-workers who have left the industry because when it comes down to it, you really have to want to be a reporter. The hours can suck — it’s never a 9-5 job — and it can be really difficult and draining and, at times, soul killing.

I kept at it because I really love what I do and, eventually, all that hard work started to pay off. I’m busier and work harder now than I have in my 12-year career, but I do it because I love it and I can’t imagine doing anything else for a living. I would say the same about the majority of my colleagues and friends in the industry.

I’m not trying to get sympathy here — that’s not my intention at all. Just trying to shine a little light and maybe put a human face on this industry so many people get so angry about.

I had planned to go off on a whole ‘nother tangent about how newspapers are totally different beasts from TV stations, as are commercial radio stations from public radio stations — not to mention alt-weeklies and independent publications like The Rake and whatnot. They all serve different needs and, quite honestly, are often staffed by very different types of people with different goals. But I’m tired, and I’ve already blathered on too much. I’ll just wrap up by saying I wish there were even more media outlets. The more voices out there, the better it is for everyone.

Oh, and the KSTP piece was pretty sleazy! But it is what it is — one sleazy TV news report, not an indictment of an entire industry.