Editorial pages and hip-hop meet at last: opinion writers from younger generation offer fresh perspective.

At the Duluth News Tribune, our editorial page staff has nearly seventy years in combined journalism experience.

That's between two people.

We're hardly atypical, and if the editorial page is journalism's ivory tower, it's made of mastodon tusks. Though the law prohibits age discrimination against anyone between eighteen and seventy, editorial writers are supposed to be experts in everything, and a long memory helps. Clearly, there's a value in having writers who can recall Donald Rumsfeld the White House chief of staff when opining on Donald Rumsfeld the secretary of Defense.

But what about making sense of this passage:

    And as a matter of fact, Rumsfeld,
       now that I think back
    Without 9/11, you couldn't have a war
       in Iraq....

The lyrics are from the hip-hop group Immortal Technique, and should they ever come up at the editorial board of the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York, it would fall to twenty-four-year-old Erica Bryant to explain them.

"We're doing a special two-day report on hip-hop. She's going to lead us on that," says James Lawrence, the editorial page editor who first became acquainted with Bryant when the then-high school student sent him her clips from a teen magazine. Impressed, he invited her to sit in on editorial board meetings, leading to two internships and, after Boston University and a year of study in France, a job offer in July 2003.

Having been groomed by the paper, Bryant was a known quantity to staffers and readers. But generational issues do come up.

"They'll mention Jimmy Carter and will forget that Bill Clinton is the first president I have a working knowledge of," she says of editorial board meetings. "I would sit silently and pretend to know what was going on. But [later] I would remind them I wasn't alive then. It's not embarrassing to say that."

Cultural literacy cuts both ways. "We were discussing 50 Cent," she says, pronouncing the rapper's name correctly as "Fitty." "An editor asked me, 'Is the "Cent" capitalized?"

"I do a lot of technology editorials. I wrote one on the problems with music downloading using the Internet. I explained what MP3 players were and Internet terms, like spim."

Spim?

"That's spam sent over instant messages. Hackers do it."

Bryant isn't a complete anomaly. Among those who began editorial writing careers in their twenties are Brian Wittes of The Washington Post and Jonathan Capeheart, who was part of the New York Daily News' Pulitzer Prize-winning team in 2000. Journalistic icon--or scoundrel, depending on your political persuasion--Pat Buchanan burst on the scene decades ago at twenty-three as the youngest editorial writer at the St. Louis Globe Democrat. A political lightning rod, Buchanan is an easy target for many who would say the right to shoot your mouth off in mass media should be reserved for those with years of shoe-leather reporting experience.

Still, in Rochester, Bryant's editorial colleagues have a new appreciation for their on-staff youth resource, even if it hasn't been shared by those they cover. "When we have meetings with delegations in Albany, there may be twenty fifty-year-old men and then me. Sometimes they call me 'honey' and 'little lady,' but I don't take it personally," she says, echoing what women journalists of all ages have had to put up with for years and the thick skin needed to do so.

That's a good attribute for editorial writers in general, as twenty-nine-year-old Brian Lewis, who became the associate editorial page editor at the Springfield News Leader in Missouri a year ago, can attest. After the paper noted that two of its former Catholic bishops were in Rome deciding on a new pope, he received an earful from a clergy sexual-abuse activist.

"She said that's nothing to be proud of--one of those bishops is Cardinal Law," he recalls, describing the disgraced former Boston archbishop whose tenure in Springfield long preceded his own. A Notre Dame theology grad and former religion reporter in Nashville and Wichita, Lewis says gaps in his knowledge are opportunities to ask questions.

"If someone makes a cultural reference you don't know, you say, 'Wait a minute. What are you talking about?'" he says. "That's what we should do as journalists anyway."

Robin Washington, with twenty-eight years in journalism, is editorial page editor of the Duluth News Tribune. E-mail rwashington@ duluthnews.com