I rambled on a bit in our Intro to Digital Communications class about the past, but maybe ignored the future.

The future for journalists is bright, no matter the state of printed papers, magazines and all the other media impacted by the internet and digital media over the past couple decades.

During my ongoing ramble, I mentioned the competition from other newspapers, websites and blogs over the past 15 years, and some mistakes we made in trying to comply with the urgency of the internet. What I didn’t say — and I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging — is that we learned to do the task at hand well and watched several sites go out of business or stop trying because they couldn’t compete with us.

Why? Because we’re good at what we do. We know how to tell stories. We know how to be watchdogs. We know how to be fair. We know how to uncover the truth. We know how to make good pictures. We know how to cover the news. We’ve been doing it for 125 years, and we don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

The startup sites challenging us couldn’t do any of that well. They may have been able to get a story up quickly, but when people wanted to know what the real story was — what all the angles were and what it meant for them, they turned to us. Because we’re good at what we do, and take that very seriously.

Good news — good reporting — will never go out of style. Integrity and dependability will never go out of style. Good storytelling will never go out of style. Good reporters will never go out of style.

I’ve watched many ‘revolutions’ in the media business — digital instead of film photography, color on front pages, digital pagination, to name a few — since I was a cub reporter oh so many years ago, thrown out into the world with nothing more than a pencil, a pad and an old film Nikon, and they’ve all made us better reporters, better news-gatherers, better storytellers. Convergence and the Internet have done the same.

I see young reporters come into the business and they’re sharper than I ever was at their age, they have huge toolboxes and great skills. We add to those by teaching them about ethics, fairness, good reporting practices and by imparting our collective years of experience. And they teach us about the latest phone apps and social media platforms.

I’m hopeful about the future of journalism, which at its core will remain true, in whatever medium it’s displayed. There will always be a need for it, reporters willing to fill that need, and readers waiting (not as long as they used to) to consume it.