Last Tuesday, Sylvia Hamilton of San Martin, grass-roots
political activist and perchlorate watchdog extraordinaire, visited
the editorial board. She praised us for the coverage of the
perchlorate plume.
Last Tuesday, Sylvia Hamilton of San Martin, grass-roots political activist and perchlorate watchdog extraordinaire, visited the editorial board. She praised us for the coverage of the perchlorate plume. She praised Dispatch reporter Matt King for his attention to detail. She said San Martin would never have gotten the national coverage it did without The Dispatch. And she slapped our wrists, very gently, for a recent editorial.
On March 13th, the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its third annual report entitled “The State of the News Media 2006.” The entire report can be viewed at www.stateofthenewsmedia.com, which fact speaks volumes about the economic findings of the report.
The public is turning increasingly to Internet media, which are free, and away from print journalism, which costs money. Not that a newspaper has ever made a dime from a subscriber. A subscription pays for printing and delivery of a customer’s newspaper, if that, period.
But advertisers understandably want to spend their advertising dollars where a large number of people will see their ads. Therefore the advertising and classified revenue falls off sharply when circulation drops. The revenue from advertising and classified pays the reporters’ salaries.
When that revenue drops, staff cuts follow. With fewer reporters, the newspapers cover fewer stories, or cover them in less depth and with less rigor… which is exactly the pattern that we have been seeing at the major metropolitan dailies over the last few years.
A second trend is that Americans increasingly view the major national dailies and TV news as being biased. Seventy-two percent think the press favors one side or another, up from 66 percent two years ago.
However, local newspapers earned praise from the public. Three-quarters of those polled say that local newspapers publish facts, not opinion thinly disguised as news.
Let us reflect for a moment on the concept of news. Every day on this planet of 6 billion people, things happen, billions of events per day. In the city of Gilroy, population 47,000, at least 47,000 events occur every day. The Dispatch reports on about 20 of those things.
All over the country, small newspapers and TV stations do the same. The major metropolitan dailies perform similar actions on a larger scale.
The national newspapers and the monthly news magazines choose the “top” stories to repeat. TV news picks five or six stories to cover, out of all the billions of things that happen on the planet; they repeat them over and over for the day, with no depth, and drop them shortly thereafter.
Online news media do little to no original reporting. Instead they parasitically skim the top stories from the traditional news media.
My point is that watching TV news does not keep one well informed on anything except the few things that the heads of CBS, NBC, ABC, or Fox think are important.
My other point is that the whole pyramid of news media depends on the existence of the local and metropolitan reporters who investigate the events, verify the facts, and write the stories.
Let me tell you about Dispatch reporters. They are young, fresh out of journalism school. They are hopelessly idealistic; they believe in the free press as a cornerstone of democracy. They put in long, high-pressure hours. They work for absurdly low wages.
As soon as they get good at their jobs, they are snapped up by bigger newspapers… or they decide that being able to eat is a priority in their lives, and take a job for some low level government bureaucracy where they edit a newsletter once every three months, spend a substantial part of the work day surfing the ‘Net, and lose their starry-eyed idealism.
(Opinion columnists, on the other hand, are mostly old, hold real jobs elsewhere … and are hopelessly idealistic.)
My main point is that anyone who values liberty should subscribe to a local paper. (Gilroyans should subscribe to The Dispatch.) The local paper is the kindergarten where new reporters learn their trade. Without baby reporters, there will be no big reporters.
Without reporters, political scandal will never be uncovered. Corruption will flourish, evil will reign, the republic will fall. The fate of the free world depends on a free press.
