Integrating The News Into Your Life
(Media)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the processes behind creating The News, whether the final product is useful to my life and those of my friends and neighbors, and how to make it more so.
When I was a kid growing up in Kent, Ohio, my folks subscribed to three newspapers.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer came out in the mornings, and gave the big picture filtered through its big-city perspective. Like many large papers in the 1960s and ’70s, it was packed with pages and full of news, at least until the demise of its major competition, the Cleveland Press, which died in 1982.
The Akron Beacon-Journal came out in the afternoons, an oddity for a fairly large-circulation paper. A few years after the Press’s demise, the Beacon switched to mornings. But when I was growing up, it represented an independent take on many of the pronouncements from the Cleveland paper. The later deadline gave its reporters time to one-up stories of regional interest. Then the Plain Dealer would do the same the next morning. And opinion columnists at both papers would take great pains to deflate or reshape each other’s points of view. The competition among papers, while it lasted, was great for the reader because the differing viewpoints allowed us to see stories from more than one side. Issues became 3-D instead of one-sided and flat.
The afternoon also brought us the Record-Courier, a strictly local paper serving mostly Kent and Ravenna, and to a lesser extent the rest of Portage County. It was a typical small, family-run American newspaper: run on the cheap, paying reporters pretty paltry wages, with the sort of results you’d expect. The occasional decent reporter would leave for greener pastures before long, leaving inexperience in his or her wake.
You got to find out a lot about who had come to visit the old-money families the paper’s owners thought were important enough to dominate the “society” pages, and you got a flavor for the nuts-and-bolts city and county governmental meetings, although not many details from the back rooms where real decisions were made.
Because there was no local competition, issues were rather one-sided and flat, as far as the reader was concerned.
TV news was the place to go for national and international news, which you watched at 6 or 7 in the evenings. There was no 24-hour CNN and, pretty much then as now, local TV “news” was mostly bereft of same.
Fast-forward 35 years. My wife and I stopped taking the Houston Chronicle a few months after giving it a trial when we moved to that city in 1998. They only seemed to employ one city government reporter, and one for county government. You couldn’t find out what was really going on at City Hall, let alone learn anything whatsoever about your own neighborhood. Like almost every American city, there was no daily newspaper competition, and the TV “news” coverage revolved around the most spectacular road accidents and shootings. We felt we were receiving very close to no relevant local news whatsoever. And the city and county government coverage was rather flat and one-sided.
Today, I don’t subscribe to any “physical” newspapers, despite having grown up with newsprint-stained fingers and then spending 20 years reporting and editing the news for several print publications. If the Chronicle was irrelevant in Houston, it’s even more so in Fort Bend County. We tried the Herald-Coaster, but frankly, the reporters don’t get out of the Richmond-Rosenberg area often enough, and they don’t ask nearly enough tough questions of public officials or employ sufficient skepticism.
Not that we don’t read any newspapers. I read the Chronicle everyday, and the Herald-Coaster two or three times a week. I also read the New York Times and Washington Post every day, and the Dallas Morning news two or three times a week. And the Fort Worth Star-Telegram occasionally. Also the Los Angeles Times and, the Austin American-Statesman. Online.
Why should we pay for the physical papers when their online versions are free?
Thus it has evolved that, thanks to the Internet, issues of international and national import, and to a lesser extent issues of statewide importance, are brought into fairly sharp focus for ordinary people such as me, thanks to numerous news sources dissecting them and providing the results free on their web sites.
I feel like I have a very good handle on the strategy behind the behavior of my elected officials in Washington, such as President Bush and my congressman, Tom DeLay. It’s murkier, but I also feel as though I can keep abreast of some of what the state legislature is up to (or not up to, like fixing public school funding), because several major news organizations are watching. As a result of the World Wide Web, I think I’m better informed than ever before when it comes to national and regional news.
However, the Internet hasn’t delivered in terms of local knowledge. In a county with a half-million people, I’m at the mercy of staffing decisions made by the owners of two weekly papers and the aforementioned Herald-Coaster. There’s no Fort Bend County TV station and, as far as I can tell, no Fort Bend County news radio reporters. Consequently, I’m not finding out what I’d like to know.
I think this is pretty much the same situation in which most Americans from small towns or semi-rural or rural areas find themselves. And I’m starting to come to the conclusion that it’s not the fault of young reporters or unagressive assignment editors so much as it is an outdated news delivery model.
Who says a community has to rely on a 24-year-old with a journalism degree to act as the eyes and ears of the community? Each community has lots of eyes and ears, many of them attached to pretty sharp brains.
Is it possible there’s a better way to approach the news-making business?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, and I think the answer is yes, yes there is a better approach.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 15, 2005, 08 15 am
