Neuharth to students: Imagination only limit to your dreams
Remarks at 2002 Native American Newspaper Career Conference
By Allen H. Neuharth
Freedom Forum founder
05.06.02
Al Neuharth, founder of the Freedom Forum and USA TODAY, opened the third annual Native American Newspaper Career Conference with these remarks.
It’s really a privilege and a pleasure for me to be here with you tonight to help launch this third annual Native American Newspaper Career Conference.
For some of you, the idea of working on a newspaper or in any phase of journalism may be a strange or foreign concept. By the time you leave Thursday afternoon (May 2), I hope many or most of you will consider it as an exciting and rewarding career possibility.
My career in journalism started more than 60 years ago – here on the sacred soil of South Dakota. I was born in Eureka near the North Dakota border between Aberdeen and Mobridge. I slept there last night in the same room where I was born. I grew up in Alpena, between Huron and Mitchell. It was in Alpena that I became editor of my high school paper – the Echo – when I was 16. I’ve been a newspaper nut ever since.
I now live in Florida, where I receive my Social Security checks.
But occasionally I feel the need for another check, and I come back to South Dakota to get it.
It’s a reality check.
I get that reality check here among those who share my geographic roots. I get that reality check in the Black Hills, the Badlands, the Cheyenne and Missouri River valleys, on the back roads of South Dakota, at places called Pine Ridge and Rosebud, Rapid City and Sioux Falls. Today, I drove across Standing Rock Reservation, stopped for gas and rest in Eagle Butte. South Dakota is and always will be my home.
These are familiar surroundings that remind me of the dreams I had and inspiration I received and the free spirit I developed while growing up on the prairie.
The free spirit within me was helped by an experience that occurred just a few miles up the road, at Crazy Horse Memorial, almost 54 years ago.
It was June 1948. I was 24, a journalism student at the University of South Dakota, and I had a summer job as a reporter for the Rapid City Journal. My assignment: Go check out the dedication and start of one man’s dream to carve a mountain into the likeness of an Indian chief sitting atop a horse.
I could barely spell the man’s name — let alone pronounce it.
Z-I-O-L-K-O-W-S-K-I. Ziolkowski was his last name. Everyone called him by his first name, Korczak.
Some called him eccentric or crazy. I was skeptical at first – as were many others. Remarkably, Korczak had accepted the invitation of Chief Henry Standing Bear to transform a mountain into a sculpture honoring all Indian people of North America. But Korczak promised that Crazy Horse Memorial would be a cultural and educational project serving American Indians and promoting reconciliation.
When would it be completed? Korczak didn’t know and didn’t seem to think that mattered much. He just thought it was time to get started. He knew that all great journeys begin with a single step.
Well, almost 54 years after Korczak got started – during this week and at this conference – you are helping to make Korczak’s vision a reality. The colossal likeness of Crazy Horse now lives on that mountain. Tomorrow, on a trip up the mountain, you will stand beside him and look into his eyes.
This conference helps fulfill Korczak’s vision that this project would – first and foremost – be a center for education.
I learned a great lesson that day – June 3, 1948: Your imagination is the only limitation to your dreams. Have a goal, get started, draw strength from those who share your vision and disregard those who would limit your possibilities.
Possibilities are what you will explore during the next two days. Especially the possibility of telling stories and getting paid for it.
Storytellers. That’s the job of journalists. It began in the oral tradition, so beautifully depicted in the poster produced for this conference by Marty Two Bulls. The oral tradition then spread to the written word. The medium has evolved. First books and newspapers. Then radio. Then television. Now the Internet.
You will meet some model storytellers this week. Among them are many with Native American Indian heritage.
What a time this is for storytellers in newspapers, radio, TV and the Internet.
Thanks to the satellite and now the Internet, this world has become one huge global village, as Canada’s Marshall McLuhan said it would 40 years ago, one global village linked electronically through instant and constant communication.
There are no more barriers to communications anywhere in the world. That is creating an insatiable appetite for knowledge — for news and information — everywhere in the world.
People everywhere will want to know more, go more, do more and be more.
They will want their news and information when they want it, where they want it and how they want it.
They will want it at home and away, night and day, at work and at play.
They will want it in print, and on the air, and on the Internet — and maybe by ways and means not yet invented or dreamed of.
What an awesome challenge. What mind-boggling opportunities for those who make news and information and communications their business and their priority in the years ahead.
I noticed that you were given T-shirts with an interesting inscription on the front:
“News – The Truth Is Out There.”
Yes, it is. And we need to find the truth and report it – with greater conviction, with greater vigor.
Sadly, when it comes to Indian Country, some of the truth remains hidden. Many of the stories go untold.
The answer, in part, rests with you and what you can achieve.
American Indians are the most under-represented ethnic group in American journalism. That is an embarrassment to our industry and to society as a whole. It is unacceptable and must be corrected.
An employment survey released two weeks ago by the American Society of Newspaper Editors said there are only 307 Native American journalists working in newsrooms of daily newspapers throughout the USA. That’s 307 out of 55,000 journalists nationwide.
Improving employment diversity in America’s newsrooms is a priority of the Freedom Forum and the other fine organizations sponsoring this conference: the South Dakota Newspaper Association and the journalism departments at South Dakota State University and the University of South Dakota.
Why do we care?
Because the lack of newsroom diversity, particularly the scarcity of Native American journalists, is skewing coverage of American Indians. Stories are misreported — or not told at all. Coverage is incomplete. Coverage is unfair.
Without Native Americans on staff, newspapers often produce stereotypical and erroneous coverage of Indian issues and Indian people.
At the same time that the world is becoming a global village with instant and constant communication, the Native American voice isn’t being heard.
Having even one Native American in a newsroom makes a newspaper more aware of Indians in its community and more sensitive and intelligent in reporting stories about them. Better-informed and accurate coverage will promote understanding between Indian and non-Indian people and expand opportunities for Native Americans.
Journalism offers you the chance to make a difference for your tribe, for other Indian people and for the nation as a whole.
It’s a field where you can succeed. It’s a field where you can have fun, get paid and make an impact. And it’s a field where you are wanted.
I hope you will become intrigued about journalism during the next two days.
I hope you will consider journalism as a career.
I hope you will let the dreams begin.