Note to self: Good news sells, too.

Wednesday night when I got around to updating my Facebook status, I was in a whole different state of mind than I was Monday morning after reading the NYT business section.

Apparently I was in a whole different state of mind than a few other folks, as well, based on the public and private reactions to my announcing that I had “Spent a day with smart high school students after spending a couple weeks with smart college students. I feel good about the future, including the future of journalism.” 

(Of course, this was before I read the Sun-Times Media Group’s 2008 annual report, full of cheerful phrases like “the economic obsolescence occurring in the newspaper and printing industry,” but I digress.)

So here’s the deal.  I was at Deerfield High School on Wednesday for their first English Department Literary Festival.  Not sure how literary I was compared to the poets and short-story writer in the other rooms, but I did get to talk with about 100 students about language and communication in our digital era. We discussed whether Shakespeare would have used Twitter; how the language they use to write on someone’s Facebook wall differs from more private discussions; and how context can change the meaning of even an individual word.  And they clearlu got one of my key points: that reading and writing are key ways for them not to just to learn about their world, but to learn about themselves.

When I found out afterward from my friend Sally Engebretson, an English teacher at Deerfield, that some of the most engaged and excited participants had been freshmen, I realized that I wasn’t just blowing smoke when I told them that their ability to communicate would be important as they matured into leaders.

(I also enjoyed telling them that “Evolution of Dance” has slipped into second place all-time on YouTube behind Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend.”  But again I digress.)

This highly positive experience twins up nicely with what’s going on at Medill.  This morning a couple of graduate students stopped by to discuss their ideas for a new way of fulfilling a particular kind of user’s news needs.  Last week I saw real journalism being done in the downtown newsroom, and real journalists being formed by interaction with professionals and professors (one and the same). Last Friday I saw some great development work on iPhone information delivery from a professor at another university.  And yesterday I met with professors and administrators from Kellogg and Medill to begin working through ideas that might re-infuse the news business with economic certainty.

In short, there are a lot of people pursuing good ideas here in the leafy groves, even though the leaves aren’t exactly out yet this April.  And many of the good ideas (and probably some of the goofy ones) will have come to fruition in time for those excited high school students to build on them in a couple of years.

As long as there is youth, there is reason for optimism.  And I would say the same for journalism, which helps create the climate in which optimism is neither naive nor foolhardy.

I’m glad Brenda Starr got to keep her ID card.  I think she’ll need it again, and I need to get right back to work on that.

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*I have heard people rant and rave and bellow
That we’re done and we might as well be dead,
But I’m only a cockeyed optimist
And I can’t get it into my head.

–Oscar Hammerstein II, “A Cockeyed Optimist,” South Pacific