Journalists today face both the best of times and the worst of times.

         The good news is there is so much news to cover. And there is an unlimited audience out there that wants to feast on your excellent reporting.

         The bad news is that in this Facebook/Twitter age, your wonderful journalistic efforts face more competition then ever before from amateurs putting out their own news.

         For many years I have had the honor of lecturing to journalism students in Dr. Ken Smith’s Community Journalism class at the University of Wyoming.  Despite snowstorms we managed to get this lecture delivered to some eager students on Feb. 2.

         Although I have a prepared series of remarks, this year I prefaced it by the arrival of two recent foreign journalistic concepts, which have dominated media news in the past several months:

1.    Fake news.

2.     Alternative facts.

         Fake news is nothing new.  But nobody has ever seen so much of it as we saw during the recent Presidential campaign. The one billion Facebook readers were bombarded by fake news. 

Hillary got pilloried was my way to describe how Democrat Presidential Candidate Clinton was treated during the 2016 campaign. “Pilloried” describes how a public servant was demonized. By election-time, it was like Clinton should be sent to prison  that she was the worst political character in history.  I did not vote for her but she could not get a break.  She has spent 50 years in public service and a lot of it was good work.

         The UW students had been inundated with fake news like the rest of us.  My message to them was not only as citizens did they need to reject it, but also as future journalists. They need to provide honest, clear news with integrity. People will believe what you write if they believe you are an honest person. This sounds easy but it is not.

         Now this brings us to President Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway’s famous line on NBC’s Meet the Press over some recent news stories when she used the term “alternative facts.”  

         There have always been alternative points of view.

         Among the few times I have seen alternative facts is when people who watch an accident happen to see it from different directions and truly do see alternate versions of the incident.  But Conway was describing how her estimate of the crowds at Trump’s inauguration was much larger than the media’s.  This is a dangerous concept. Facts are facts.

         Ken Smith’s class includes students looking forward to careers in journalism, advertising, Internet work and public relations.

         Some years ago, we owned one of the largest ad agencies in Wyoming. In what I now think was a self-defeating idea on my part, I came to the conclusion that one of the best ways for a company to sell themselves was called “direct marketing.”

         For certain clients, this method is almost mind-bogglingly effective.  But it also is time-consuming and can be quite expensive. 

Often it is much more fun for the customer to put together a clever TV campaign that makes no sense and which is seen by practically no one.  And such a TV ad campaign is much more cost-effective for the ad agency.  In fact, when you do such a campaign, everyone has a good time.  Not much is sold, but who cares, right? But I digress.

         That concept of direct marketing is similar with what is happening today when consumers can communicate directly with their favorite companies. Direct communication is amazingly effective.

         The best example in recent history was Trump during the presidential campaign.  While he was heaping disdain on the conventional media, he was putting out 25 million tweets to his followers, sometimes three a day.  He said it best when he described that power: “It was like I had just bought The New York Times.” For the first time in history, a major candidate did not have to deal with the mainstream media.  He played them so well during that campaign – truly amazing.

         I ran into Ken Smith at the recent Wyoming Press Association state convention and he was proud of his students.

         As I roamed around the convention chatting with earnest young men and women journalists, it made me excited to see these folks busy practicing our journalism craft. 

Back when I was a reporter we operated in much clearer, simpler times. Would I trade places with them?  Not so sure about that.