Since that day in 1992 when I joined the East High Scroll, I have spent just about every day working for a newspaper, many of those days asking the tough questions.

I’ve never wanted to do anything else. I love news and have become an almost equally admirer of the news business. I still don’t want to do anything else, but I recognized about three years ago the way we do it has to change.

I don’t work for a newspaper anymore. I work for a media company. I’m not just a journalist anymore. I’m a publisher, a reporter, a web editor, a curator, a marketer, an audience expert, an adverting sales rep and a social media guru.

Last night, I watched “State of Play” with three others journalists. I think they’d all agree that I am more comfortable with the changes in our industry than they are, but a part of me has great admiration for those like the character Russell Crowe plays in the film, Cal McAffrey. I wanted to be him.

McAffrey is as old school as they get. He is a die-hard print journalist with the contacts, intelligence, ego and manipulative personality that is needed to always get access to the right information. Even the opening scene is dead-on: Eating a bag of Cheetos in the car, singing to a tune on the radio, driving a 18-year-old car, throwing the empty bag of Cheetos into the backseat filled with notebooks and more empty food containers.

Some of suggested this is the death of the hero journalist.

Watching “State of Play,” I couldn’t help but think that I was witnessing the dying of a cinematic archetype: the Hero Journalist. – From Simon Dumenco

But it doesn’t have to be.

I’ve said this before. I work for Gazette Communications, a family-owned media company that owns a newspaper, a television station, a state-of-the-art printing facility and a few digital products. We are under the same financial pressures as most media companies. Cedar Rapids, IA., also experienced a catastrophic flood last summer that had already weakened the local economy.

For about the past 18 months, the company has acquired a young group of journalists who love what they do and I’ve had the privilege of working with them and calling them my friends. Most of them shined brightly during the flood coverage last June, and have continued to do so. Some are comfortable with change in the industry and other struggle with it.

Whenever I talk to them about leaving for a bigger newspaper or moving onto a different career, I always tell them this: You can do great journalism anywhere.

You don’t have to be at the New York Times of the Washington Post to be a great journalist or tell a great story. Likewise, great journalism isn’t just done in print. Today’s tools and reach of digital platforms and applications only increases the ability to do great work.

So remember, you can do great journalism anywhere. Be the Cal McAffrey of your community.

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• State Of News Media Survey: Things Are Bleak In Journalism (huffingtonpost.com)
• Thriller “State of Play” is fiction but explores real journalism (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

• How to upload an image to a blog. (I know journalists that don’t know how.)
• How to add a link to text in an online story.
• How to take and edit a photo and resize it for a web page.
• How to embed the code for a video in a web page and resize it.
• How to find relevant links to a story and add them to it.
• How to take a digital video, edit it, and publish it in several formats.
• How to make online stories discoverable.
• How to read HTML and be able to fix common problems.
• How to read CSS and be able to make modifications in stylesheets.
• How to survive in an always-on work day, and produce two or three times as much content as before.

 Do you have all these skills?

“How many people have to read a story before it goes in the paper?” asked a senior editor at a major metropolitan daily who is struggling to sustain the quality of his news report in an era of shrinking resources.

I think Mutter is asking the wrong question. His question is too late. It should have been asked across the board about five years ago. And to prove that he is taking some heat from what appears to be traditional Web 1.0, Media 1.0 journalists who care more about spelling in his blog than the content.

The real question is can newsrooms afford to continue to employ editors who operate within a traditional print-first box and have the we-know-what-are-readers-want mentality - to list only two of a handful of qualities that are killing the industry.

I feel that is the more pressing issue. If newsrooms employ or hire editors, or better yet subject matter experts, who continue to move forward in the new media world, encourage crowd sourcing projects, database reporting, audience participation and engagement – just to name a few things – you won’t have to ask the question are there too many editors. Their value would already be cemented in your newsroom.

By the way, I just noticed this, Mutter has a follow-up post today.

On that same topic, Steve Yelvington wrote a post about a guy in Belgium who got Drupal to output into Adobe InDesign for a college print product.