By The River

The drinks flowed freely last ngiht and so did the talk. What else would you expect at a gathering of journalists, many of whom won't be journalists for very much longer?

The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., will lose many longtime members of its newsroom staff to buy-outs between now and the end of the year. I'm leaving. So is the entire editorial board--Dale Davenport, Herb Field, John Goodrich and John Troutman. So are reporters Jim Lewis, Jerry Gleason, Frank Cozzoli, Ellen Lyon, Mary Bradley, Gerry Lenton, and Mary Warner. Nancy Eshelman, columnist, and Alan Hayakawa, online editor, are leaving. I don't talk much to the people in sports, and none were at the party--nighttime is sports time--but it is likely some of them are leaving, too. I'm probably missing a few others, too, especially on the copy desk, but you get the idea. The Patriot-News will be a very different place after Jan. 1 with so much talent going out the door.

The party was hosted by Mary Warner, who last covered religion and values for the paper, and her husband, Lebanon Valley College president Steve MacDonald, at their home in Bellevue Park. I've never seen a group of people so happy about losing their jobs. Indeed, the talk was more of the unlucky few who asked for buy-outs but who were told they had to stay.

Newspapers are dying, faster than anyone outside the industry realizes. Large cities, including in Pennsylvania, could be left with no newspaper at all before too long. There will always be journalism, but it will increasingly be delivered by television or online. Indeed, I hope to go to documentary film school so I will still have a venue for doing the kind of journalism I love. Plus some book and magazine writing. Maybe someone will start a credible new online newspaper in Harrisburg. It wouldn't be hard to staff.

It's a shame about newspapers, really is. I was in the Watergate Class of journalists who entered the profession in the mid-1970s after our heroes Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post brought down President Richard Nixon with their reporting of the Watergate scandal. And oh, the things we accomplished! Everything from the Philadelphia Inquirer's series exposing the abuses at Farview State Hospital in Pennsylvania to the Boston Globe's reporting of the Catholic Church sex scandals. And other stories too numerous to mention.My own reporting of the Centralia mine fire and its threat to the people of that small Pennsylvania town, which eventually led to the relocation of nearly everyone in the town at government expense, was in that same spirit. It was the golden age of investigative reporting.

I could talk about that for hours, and maybe those of us leaving the Patriot-News will eventually be sad we did. But like the people of Centralia, we have been given the opportunity for new lives, and I hope, better ones.