last word
Dan Rottenberg
HEATHER M. ROSS | STAFF WRITER
J ournalism is not dead. But it is
different. “Most young people these
days don’t want to go into journalism,”
Dan Rottenberg said.

Rottenberg, 80, has spent nearly all
of his life in the profession. He started
when he was 8, working with a one-
page newspaper in New York. Since
then, he has had many jobs but always
in journalism. Throughout his career,
Rottenberg has learned a lot about
journalism and how the field changes
with time and decided the best way to
pass that knowledge to the next genera-
tion is through a book, “The Education
of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on
the Front Lines of Free Speech,”
Rottenberg believes books have
power. He still receives emails and
letters of thanks for a book he wrote
nearly 50 years ago.

In 1977, Rottenberg published “Finding
Our Fathers” to share what he learned
while tracing his ancestry. Now, there
are many local organizations, research
projects and DNA-based approaches to
tracking down relatives and ancestors,
but in the ’70s it wasn’t so.

“Jews have a lot of disadvantages in
chasing their ancestry, but they have
some advantages, [too],” Rottenberg
said, “Everybody needs a sense of who
they are and where they came from.”
Being Jewish and a journalist has
changed since he graduated from the
University of Pennsylvania, Rottenberg
said. “In 1964, it wasn’t easy for a Jew to
get a job in management at a newspaper.

[There were] plenty of Jewish reporters
but not at the top ranks,” he said.

Things are different now, according
to Rottenberg, a member of Society
Hill Synagogue for more than 50 years.

Rottenberg returned to authorship to
address another need in society, writ-
ing “The Education of a Journalist” to
encourage students.

“There’s always going to be a place
32 for journalism. People will always need
information. They need to find out
what’s going on,” he said.

Rottenberg wants to encourage the
next generation of journalists the same
way he was sparked. When he was in
seventh grade, Judith Crist of the New
York Herald Tribune spoke at a school
assembly. She spoke passionately about
the importance of finding the truth
and putting it in print.

“This is your mission: You should
find out what’s going on and share it
with your audience,” Rottenberg said,
recalling Crist’s speech.

Rottenberg’s career has included
stints as a reporter with The Wall
Street Journal, as a columnist with
AUGUST 11, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
The Philadelphia Inquirer and editing
positions with Philadelphia Magazine,
Welcomat (now Philadelphia Weekly)
and Broad Street Weekly, among others.

Everywhere he went he was fol-
lowing his passion, he said, which
was chasing the truth. Sometimes he
chased truth into trouble: He was sued
seven times during his career, win-
ning all seven cases.

“I was a pioneer of the alternative
journalism movement,” Rottenberg
said. He explained that the movement was
about newspapers rebelling against
the establishment, with alternative
newspapers not being oriented toward
money but instead trying to change
things for the better. Rottenberg said
the goal was to “cover the stories other
papers weren’t covering. We used the
power of embarrassment to improve
things.” Rottenberg said that much of the cul-
tural revolution of the ’60s was missed
because larger, established papers were
missing Blacks, women and young people.

“If you don’t like your local newspa-
per, you can start your own. With the
internet, anyone can be a journalist or
pretend to be a journalist,” Rottenberg
said, also emphasizing the importance
of a journalistic education. “Today,
there is a need for authoritative profes-
sional journalists.”
With newspapers moving their con-
tent online, many people find it diffi-
cult to know which sources are news,
which are opinion and which are satire
or misinformation.

Rottenberg covers the shift to the
internet in the book’s last chapter, “Be
Careful What You Wish For.”
However, Rottenberg remains optimis-
tic about the future of online journalism.

“We are not at the end of history. The
internet is a (relatively) new phenome-
non, and people are going to figure out
how to know what is reliable and what
isn’t,” he said.

Rottenberg has advice for discerning
fact from rumor online: “It’s a matter of
developing a sense of skepticism. Just
because something is online doesn’t
mean that it’s true. Treat the media the
way you treat your friends — there’s
some you trust more than others. You
have to develop that sense of who is
trustworthy and who isn’t.”
Rottenberg believes that people can,
and will, adjust to the movement of
news from print to online.

Rottenberg said his persistent opti-
mism and success can be attributed to
his longstanding marriage to his wife,
Barbara. “To have a spouse, a partner. When
the whole world is telling me how
terrible I am, it’s nice to come home,
and there’s someone happy to see you,”
Rottenberg said. JE
Courtesy of Dan Rottenberg
FIGHTS FOR JOURNALISM’S FUTURE