Rosemary Goudreau

Rosemary Goudreau must be a tremendous writer because her forceful and direct speaking style engaged me like most speakers can't.

Her powerful, yet soft spoken approach belongs in a small room among intellectually driven students. While in her element she made the whole room feel for the dying print establishment. Her soft spoken voice transformed into a swan song when she discussed the dismal prospects for newspapers.

As the editorial page editor for the Tampa Tribune, she versed herself in the conflict of maintaining the values of a newspaper as an institution. "A newspaper provides a benchmark for the community to assess their values," she said.

Her most poignant advice concerning editorials was that they must be filled with facts, but are not confined to a world without emotional appeals. A view she shares with Mark Mahoney, who's work we read earlier that week.

One of the necessities of an editorial writer is the sense that you are making a difference. In fact, on her Tampa Tribune bio, that's the "Best part" of her former job.

I've always noticed that strongly held opinions exist outside the rational world. Goudreau's philosophy is that people want to make up their own minds based on the facts they are given. This makes perfect sense as an editorial writer.
However, what people really do is process facts in a highly subjective way.

For example, in 2006 I decided I didn't know enough about Islam. So I read the book "No God, but God" which goes over Islam's history in about 300 pages. It made a strong argument that the current conflict is a sort of Protestant Reformation within Islam between Sunnis, Shi'a and ethnic minorities like the Kurds. This argument was explicitly discussed in the Foreword and Epilogue.

I gave the same book to my father who was equally interested in learning about Islam. He took away that Islam has always and will always exist at the tip of a sword.

The book presented the same facts to each of us and we both came to different conclusions based on our tendency for liberal or conservative politics.

That being said, I'm sure newspapers are relevant when the public is not informed prior to reading. You could easily be influenced about sugar plantations in the everglades if you are not an environmentalist or a farmer. But the obscurity of those issues and the infrequency with which they turn up is hardly enough to justify a career with. And this is why newspapers are dying; the world they appealed to - one without 24/7 news channels and the fact killing machine known as the internet - is dead, buried and rotting in the earth.

Just like the institution's (newspaper) values are set in stone, people's beliefs are similarly inaccessible to facts.