Real
reporters who do real news
By
Will Collette
To
me, the main role of the journalist is to find not just the facts, but the
truth.
A good journalist needs either the memory or the capacity to find the
background and context of the stories he or she is presenting to the public.
The
ranks of professional journalists, here in Rhode Island and across the country,
have been decimated. As more of American media get swallowed up by corporate
giants, profits take preference over content – as if content had no
relationship to subscriber rates and advertising.
In
Beth’s piece below, she focuses mostly on Providence-based statewide media. But
South County’s media shrinkage is, in my opinion, even more pronounced.
Our
one daily newspaper, the Westerly Sun, was bought by the Record-Journal, a small chain based in Meriden, Connecticut. Shortly after the purchase, we saw significant shrinkage at the Sun. Significantly,
it moved across the river into Pawcatuck.
These
days, the Sun uses as much borrowed content taken off the internet as we do here at
Progressive Charlestown. Little of the Sun's original content can be accessed on-line without
either a paid newspaper subscription or a stiff web-only fee.
The
South County Independent and the Northeast Independent (tied financially to the
Newport Daily News) merged into The
Independent. They also cut coverage and staff. Their website is still free.
And they still do hard news.
The
array of smaller newspapers under the Southern Rhode Island Newspapers (e.g.
the Chariho Times, Narragansett Times) have also gone through major consolidation and
retrenchment. Their web content has
been very limited, often not updated for weeks and generally articles can only
be read in part.
Most
recently, the Block Island Times
was bought
by a media
company rife with controversies – ranging from ties to Republican gambling
tycoon and presidential king-maker Sheldon Adelman to admitted plagiarism. Since
the change in ownership, the main difference I’ve seen on their website is a
lot less content.
It’s
certainly true that the reading public’s tastes have changed and their
preferred way of getting the news has shifted from hard copy (newspapers and
magazines) to the internet, Twitter, Facebook and so on. Newspapers have
resisted the switch, not so much of creating their own lively electronic
versions, but with more retrenchment – cut staff and charge more.
But
even in the electronic realm, being on-line is no guarantee of success. Take
the lively experiment by Ariana Huffington (of Huffington Post fame) of creating an array of hometown Patch websites,
advertised as a return to intensively local news coverage available to you for
free over the internet.
Patch
started out well-funded and staffed, but failed to provide a quick return on
investment, causing an even more radical retrenchment where nearly all the paid
journalists were fired.
That
experiment has largely failed – Patch is now pretty much a statewide and
regional corporate product where you’re likely to see every Patch in a state
carry the same content, whether it’s the Narragansett-South Kingstown
Patch or the Cranston
Patch. There is very little actual journalism taking place at the Patch
And
the problem of drastic cuts in the reporters’ ranks is made even worse by the
corporate bean-counters. Job losses have been
even greater among editing, art/photography, and production-type jobs.
That means that what few
journalists who are left are being expected to do a ton of stuff that isn't
actual journalism, like shooting their own photos/video when they cover events,
editing and posting their own stories online, etc.
There are also far fewer
editors, so there's no one to ask journalists those pesky questions that expose
biases or fill in the holes in their stories or add balance.
When readers post post
comments complaining about what "the proofreader" missed in a story,
they miss the point that actual proofreaders were the first to go the way of
the passenger pigeon. So it’s now common that the proofreader and the writer
are one and the same.
I
love the news and really appreciate good journalists. More than once, I’ve
singled out the great investigative work done by Dale Faulkner at the Westerly
Sun and Judy
Benson’s great writing on nuclear issues at the New London Day.
Journalism
has to become an occupation with a future as it once was to lure in new talent.
The corporate bean-counters have to be put in their place. You don’t revitalize
dying media outlets by cutting the content – that only accelerates the loss of
subscribers.
While
bloggers and their blogs play some role in the mix, we’re often not equipped to
do the job of real, regular coverage of the news. Frankly, we much prefer to
just do commentary. Further, some of us – like Tom Ferrio and me here at
Progressive Charlestown – aren’t doing this as a profession.
Those that do try
to make a living at it, like our friends at Rhode
Island’s Future and ecoRI, have to
struggle to make ends meet.
In
my opinion, people still really do want the news. They also want analysis and
context for the news. In other words, they want more than just a regurgitated
version of the official positions taken by, for example, groups like the
Charlestown Citizens Alliance or politicians like state Rep. Blake Filippi.
By
all means, report what they say, but also look BEHIND what they see to whether
it is true.
Now,
you could go the route of some media – Fox is the best example – where the spin
on the news to pander to a particular audience comes at the expense of the
truth.
Or
you can use innovation and expanded
quality news staff to bring readers back. It’s how such respected news giants
like the New York Times and Boston Globe are finding their way back.
That’s
my perspective. Now, in its entirety is Beth Comery’s essay in
the Providence
Daily Dose that led me to write this piece:
We Need
Journalists by Beth Comery
The democracy depends on it.
Unfortunately it is the field of public relations that is exploding, and just
as newspapers continue cuts into their reporting staffs. Edward Fitzpatrick
illuminates the seriousness of this imbalance in the ProJo with “R.I. needs less spin,
more transparency.”
Look at these figures for Rhode
Island.
And The Journal’s Katherine Gregg
has chronicled how much Rhode Island taxpayers are injecting into state government’s public
relations machine: The state is spending $4.3 million
this year for some 53 press secretaries, communications directors and public
information officers who make anywhere from $41,995 to $133,900 per year.
Taxpayers are shelling out another $6.2 million to private companies that do
“communications and marketing” for state government. And
quasi-public agencies spent about $1.5 million on PR staff and consultants.
That’s over $10 million of your
money being spent to tell you what a great job your elected officials are
doing. Meanwhile the Providence Journal staff is a shadow of its former self.
The reporters that remain are excellent; there’s just not enough of them to
keep an eye on this corruption-prone state.
Even those new to Rhode Island have
observed firsthand the level of vigilance required here. Gordon Fox and the
costly 38 Studios debacle are still in the news, and as of last month, the
portrait of a convicted criminal holds pride of place in the Aldermen’s
Chambers of Providence City Hall.
Fitzpatrick asked the New
England First Amendment Coalition to weigh in.
“We are outnumbered,” said Justin
Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition.
“The rise of PR and the decline of watchdog journalism should be a serious
concern for the public. The goals of the news media and the PR industry are
often at odds. Rather than trying to put the best face on things for the
government, the news media are obligated to act as a watchdog.”
This is serious.