This is an excellent observation by outgoing Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell about the changes in my profession:

Journalism is better than it was in my early days, and changes in technology have opened up a new world. My worry is that journalists aren’t as connected to readers as they were in the days of my youth, when the city’s newspaper was the equivalent of the public square. Then, reporters tended to be folks who often hadn’t graduated from, or even attended, college, and they weren’t looking to move to bigger papers. They knew the community well, didn’t make much money and lived like everyone else, except for chasing fires and crooks.

Now journalists are highly trained, mobile and, especially in Washington, more elite. We make a lot more money, drive better cars and have nicer homes. Some of us think we’re just a little more special than some of the folks we want to buy the paper or read us online.

Reporting wasn’t so much a profession when I landed my first newspaper job as a copy clerk in 1987, and we journalists didn’t expect to make money. We were driven by a passion that didn’t mind the promises of poverty preached in journalism school. (OK, I did drop out for a year because of those lectures, but then I landed that first job at The Tampa Tribune, and I was hooked.)

Howell also is right about the typical journalist’s ambition. It’s not that we didn’t have any. But it was focused on the local or state level. I always dreamed of becoming a statehouse reporter in West Virginia, for instance, and I worked with many journalists who knew their communities better than anyone. They were poorly paid local celebrities, and that was sufficient.

I know that’s no longer the case in the nation’s capital, where I have spent most of my career.

A former colleague of mine once observed that journalists in Washington pursue all stories with at least one eye on their next jobs and how the assignments will help them land those slots, be it a promotion on their current publication or a better job with a competitor. There is no loyalty to community, to publication or even to beat.

I haven’t decided yet whether that’s a good thing. Journalists do need to recharge their creative and intellectual batteries at times, and sometimes a job change is the way to do that. But too much job-hopping deprives readers of the institutional knowledge of journalists with a history of covering a community or a topic.

The elitism that spurs the job-hopping mindset, though, is definitely a bad thing. It also breeds the how-dare-you-criticize-me sensitivity that Howell saw during her ombudsman tenure:

An unpleasant fact about journalists is that we can be way too defensive. We dish it out a lot better than we take it. It’s not that we have thin skin; we often act as though we have no skin and bleed at the slightest touch.

I’ve seen that sensitivity many times myself, both as the editor of reporters with overinflated senses of self and as a media watcher who has been amazed at the contempt that journalists unashamedly display toward bloggers, readers and others who rightly take them to task. No matter the crime or the evidence, as far as many journalists are concerned, their critics are always wrong. They could not possibly know as much as Joe Reader.

So long as that attitude persists, “professional” journalism will continue to decline.