It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the transformation of the journalism profession over time.
Russell Baker reflects on the significant changes in journalism, contrasting the adventurous and vibrant nature of past newspaper reporters with the subdued and restrained reality of modern journalists who work in quieter, more sterile environments. It underscores how technological advancements and cultural shifts have altered not only the nature of the work but perhaps also the spirit and excitement that once accompanied it.
In practice
In a speech about the evolution of media at a conference, one might say, 'As Russell Baker noted, the transition from swashbuckling reporters to serious professionals reflects the broader changes in our work environments today.'
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
Nothing endures but change. There is nothing permanent except change. All is flux, nothing stays still.
Know that transformation sometimes begins with a fall. So never curse the fall. The ground is where humility lives. Take it. Learn it. Breathe it in. And then come back stronger, humbler and more aware of your need for Him. Come back having seen your own nothingness and His greatness.
Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - IS innately disruptive of “business as usual.” That is WHY it is effective.
A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.
For time flows on, and if it did not, it would be a bad prospect for those who do not sit at golden tables. Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new.
The earth does not need new continents, but new men.
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