Poynter's Butch Ward encourages newsrooms to talk about why journalism matters

Butch Ward, a former Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore News-American managing editor, is urging America's newsrooms to focus on "why journalism matters." In an essay on the Poynter Institute website, "The Big Switch from Hack to Flack," he recalls attending a recent American Society of  Newspaper Editors seminar on challenges to the First Amendment. He says the session caused him to reflect on the meaning of work . . . to a journalist, to a PR person and to his own father, who was a mechanical draftsman. He suggests that discouraged newsroom workers would do well to convene some critical thinking about the value of their work.

See: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=34&aid=117317
Also: http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=6420