Tom Leonard is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism and the university librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. The following are his remarks delivered at the Federal Trade Commission’s “News Media Workshop” held on December 1 and 2, 2009:

Discussing journalism, a few years after he launched a successful newspaper in New York in the 1840s, Horace Greeley wrote, "I have been fortunate here, as the world says. . . (but) I need money badly, and I am an assemblage of pains . . . You do not realize how little the mere talent of writing well has to do with success . . . there are a thousand in this city who can write very good prose . . . while there are not fifty who can earn their bread by it."

This should be enough for all of us to put away our notions of a Golden Age for reporters and editors, when markets were open, quality journalism thrived, and the public lined up with advertisers, handing money over with a smile.