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Confessions of an Old Reporter
I spent 31 years as a reporter for a small-town newspaper. I want to make it clear it was a small-town newspaper, which is not the same thing as the mainstream media, if for no other reason than the reality a small-town reporter is closer to his subjects than a reporter for a newspaper in a major urban centre. (Forgive me for the occasional Canadian spelling.) It was a newspaper serving a strongly conservative community, in what was once called the Bible Belt. I don’t see that term used anymore. Has it fallen out of fashion? That made it possible for me to be conservative.
With that in mind, I find myself troubled to hold the media in as much contempt as I do at present. It bothers me to be contemptuous of people in an industry that provided occupation for many years. What follows are random thoughts about reporting.
I always called myself a reporter. I refused to call myself a journalist. I was a reporter. It was a job I took seriously but it was just a job and I never allowed myself to take myself too seriously. I was on the sidelines writing about other people doing things the community care about. I was emphatically not the story. Since when did journalists become convinced that they were the story? I honestly believe newspapers were better when reporters simply considered themselves to be working people.
I was a conservative but I never felt it was my place to guard the Conservative Party, or the Reformed Party, or the Progressive Conservative Party or favoured candidates. I would ask questions, and do my research, and write as honestly as I could, letting readers come to their own conclusions. I interviewed candidates for every party and always, as a matter of integrity, ask them what they believe, why they believe it and what they want to do with their principles.
I was trained to actually care to investigate how people think and act, regardless of their political positions. I was curious. When did the media stop being curious?
One last thing — I believe the print media is in trouble. There are too many ways for people to get information. Small-town newspapers will, however, be around for a while yet because they provide information nobody else can or will — they tell people what’s going on right where they live.
Published in Journalism
Indeed. Although I wonder how much of that is being missed with consolidations and such.
I too write for a small city newspaper. Its previous editor kept it focused on local news, and stuff you could not find elsewhere. Although liberal, he was a classic liberal, keeping the news objective, and allowing for a wide range of views.
He retired a few years ago. His successors have de-emphasized local news, increasingly relied on wire feeds and turned the news stories into editorials. Circulation has cratered. They cannot figure out why – and blame their readers.
It a shame. It is the oldest newspaper it Texas, and I wonder how much longer it will exist.
Buy it and become the editor.
Outside my budget. Besides buying it would make me the publisher.
I would think that social media like Next Door could cut into local print media.
Don’t be troubled. I worked almost all my working life in the financial sector (banking) and in the federal bureaucracy (Treasury) and I am sad but not troubled by my contempt for those areas today.
Thanks for the perspective. The job of newspaper reporter is one of the romanticized careers, one of the noble callings from a grittier time when — I imagine — life was a little harder and people a little more serious. I don’t imagine the reporter of the 1950s often was a graduate of journalism school. I wonder how many are today, and how that’s changed things.
Did you watch The Wire? The season that focused on the Baltimore paper was fascinating.
I checked onine what the salary range of a reporter in Alaska is, and it runs $40K-$60K. With low wages like that, you can get a reporter job without the degree.
From what I read, reporters in big cities in the 1950’s didn’t require a degree. That was true, however, with many more jobs than today. Credentialism hasn’t just effected journalism.
An outfit like the Washington Post probably requires Ivy League, or at least post graduate degrees to work there.
My father was a reporter, old school. Intensely curious, brave and honorable to a fault. He had a degree in (I think) history, and his work was very definitely not about him. Unlike Brian Williams, he really did get shot down in a helicopter [in Vietnam] and I’m not sure it was ever anything other than a family story. Dad predicted some, though not all of the present calamitous state of journalism (he wasn’t here for the whole internet thing) but he would be horrified…not surprised, perhaps, but definitely appalled by what his old employers (NYT, WaPo) have become.
I miss Dad.
I think we all miss him, GD.
Just the sort of action I’d expect out of Gregory Arahant. Bravo!
A worthy distinction.
Once it became an elitist profession that was perceived as having power, the leftist moved in and corrupted it. Also, they more completely seperated themselves from working people. As George Orwell wrote about coal miners,
“In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a
momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior
person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are
watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior
persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit.
Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author
of Marxism for Infants–all of us really owe the comparative decency of
our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their
throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and
belly muscles of steel.”
What journalist writes like that today?
Or has the self-reflection necessary to think like that?
I suspect that if one’s work is important enough, there is little reason to waste valuable time assessing one’s own character.
A friend of mine owns a series of small town newspapers throughout the midwest and western states. He told me that his business was booming because of all the reasons stated in the original post. They focused on local politics and local everything and the locals were dedicated to their town paper.
I think he’s retiring now, not quite sure. He had planned to leave the business to his son (I think fourth generation) but he died of a horrid and unexpected illness a few years ago and I none of his daughters are interested. But for the death of his son, I think his business would still be growing and thriving. It took the wind out of his sails.
Well, you’re not specific as to who that is, and what papers those are. Local papers nationwide have been shutting down. In Alaska, the two biggest papers are the Fairbanks News Miner and the Anchorage Daily News. In the case of the Daily News, in the last year they changed ownership because of financial difficulties and laid off a lot of local staff.
The News Miner changed ownership to a non-profit in 2016, so private investors aren’t interested in it. I don’t know how solvent they actually are, but they seem to be a very tightly run organization.
Both cover local news extensively, though they both have national wire service contributions as well.
Yes, that was intentional. Take it for what it’s worth.
That day was a catastrophic event.
One thing I’ve noticed about some very-small-town midwestern newspapers is that they are filled with nanny-state articles from people from govt/university agencies who will presumably write for free. They will hector you on how to have a safe tailgating party, for example, or advise you to stay cool and hydrated when it’s hot out. On the other hand, you also get local sports news and detailed information on the deliberations of the village council, and blah-blah-blah from your elected politicians at the state level.
NextDoor is a mess – there may be a few concerned citizens who follow up on local events, but it’s a firehose of disconnected information. Car break-in! Cat missing! ISO skateboard repair parts! Cucumber giveaway!
There have been attempts to crowdsource hyperlocal news sites (can you tell I’ve been in a few meetings about these things?) but they sputter; there’s not enough money to support a robust staff, or the traffic is monopolized by Facebook and the local media outlets. I was editor of our newspaper’s attempt to do hyperlocal online, and it was not a joy.
Social media can create chatter and stir the silt, but lacks the remnant authority of a source that pays people, has institutional presence and journalistic standards. A commonly recognized authoritative site like a newspaper is like the obelisk in the town square – everyone sees it, knows it. Online sites are fragmented and disconnected – the difference, perhaps, between a battleship and an assortment of subs traveling at various depths, each unaware of the existence of the others.
Newspapers have to be hyper-local. They cannot compete on national or regional news with TV and the Internet for timeliness, but they can win the battle on thoroughness when it comes to covering local issues.
The problem comes when people are hired for local papers and have less interest in that than in Changing the World by focusing on stories outside of the home area. People are not going to buy your paper for non-local news, and every time you feature a story that’s not local on your front page, you’re giving people less and less reason to buy the paper (my other major gripe is with weekly or twice weekly papers that adhere to the current dictate for daily newspapers from the consultants, which is people don’t want lots of stories and copy on their front pages and want huge pictures because Gen Xers and Millenials are visually inclined. If you’re coming out once a week and have a gianormous picture on Page 1, paired with just 2-3 stories and maybe a sidebar or two, you’re telling your readers that “We’ve had a 3-7 days to put this together, and we have virtually no news worth featuring on our front page.” Another deal-killer for readers).
I also grew up in the (American) Bible Belt. Probably has fallen out of fashion because ‘copping to it’ is a bit like announcing to the world that you are a racist. Just sayen’
Years ago I saw a fascinating in-depth interview with Tom Snyder of NBC News.
He said the biggest change in journalism came with Watergate. Prior to that story a reporter’s motivation was to craft a cohesive well-written informative article. If the reporter could master this they would be considered for a more lucrative Editor’s job.
After Watergate every reporter’s motivation was to become celebrities like Woodward & Bernstein.
When it became obvious that the power they had was to set the narrative, and by setting the narrative they could empower their allies to accumulate political power.
I agree with Snyder (in this particular case). When expressing higher ideals than becoming celebrities like Woodward & Bernstein, new journalists talk about changing the world (note there is a similar desire expressed in the Silicon Valley culture).
If your top priority is to change the world, then truth becomes secondary.
I remember a journalism “professor”—he was really an old-time newsman, with a bulbous, alcoholic nose to prove it—who bemoaned that most of the college’s student newspaper staff didn’t want to cover news. They wanted to write editorials.
As callow 20-year-olds, they thought they had Something Very Important to Say. The prof was not impressed.
Two thoughts about the fading small-town paper.
First, there’s the obvious economic factor of alternatives to the Want Ads. Craigslist is a local information source that actually works, and it has undoubtedly hurt small papers.
Secondly, even though people and events close to us are more important than those far away, we still have finite attention: we can only spread our interest so thin. As our shared national culture grows more compelling — as television becomes better, national news becomes more salacious, national politics becomes more personal and sensational, social media creates vast shallow virtual communities — our attention shifts outward.
My final answer: When they stopped paying attention to local issues, and when everything became nothing more than a cog in the worldwide social media outrage machine.
One of the things that Ricochet hoped for, and promoted in the early days, was that members would function as “reporters” for their local issues, on the political, social, cultural, economic, and personal fronts. And that by doing so, they might engage, and possibly persuade, others to their point of view. Because, when it comes right down to it, all politics is local, regardless of who occupies the White House, or whatever we think is the “sky is falling” issue of the day.
We seem to have lost much of that early vision. And I can’t help but think that’s a pity.
Please report on what’s happening in your neck of the woods. Because as you go, so goes the nation. If you think it’s important, that is.
And I do.
Regarding your “secondly” point–do you think that’s a good thing? If not, what do you propose we do to restore the balance?