Support Your Local Police … and Fire Reporters

The explosion of interest in, and clicks of, online media reflected last year’s lively and stimulating Presidential election campaign, enabling dissemination of the work and words of a vast army of both journalists and journalist-esque writers. Writers in the latter category are mostly-well-intentioned scribes or personalities, but they often rely on facts gathered by someone else, from which they formulate or support their opinions on any number of issues of significant or secondary public concern. From Politico to RealClearMarkets to The Onion to talk radio hosts to television’s public affairs personalities to YouTube, lots of people with journalistic skills or aspirations are having their say.

And while that diversity of news-related commentary is clearly a very good thing, it is also having some bad effects. One of the most important of these is the corresponding and related decline in the readership and viability of the traditional news-gathering organizations and hard-copy publications that largely depend on advertising and circulation revenues. And as content moves irreversibly toward dominance by online media, the economics of gathering the news are less and less able to keep up.

Online’s Impact Foreseen                      In 1981, San Francisco’s KRON-TV           reported we might one day read the           paper on a computer. The story also           said there was no expectation of           making any money from the online           service. Mission accomplished!           Click for video.

The recent bankruptcy filing by the Chicago Tribune company is but one example of the problem, reflecting what we all know – printed news media circulation figures are continuing to decline, and more and more qualified journalists are joining the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed. And as they involuntarily give up their steady paychecks and often their beats as well, we are left with fewer and fewer paid, full-time users of the phone, the tip, the Internet and — not withstanding A-Rod's "sold-out" mid-February press conference in Tampa — actually going to the news to get the story.

The availability of unnoticed or unanalyzed information on the Internet may well fill this “what’s actually happening” vacuum, but even the most cautious entrepreneurial free-lance journalist can either not get it at all or, at least, get it wrong, if he or she is uncoupled from a regular beat and a seasoned editor’s raised eyebrow. The late John Chancellor liked to characterize such skepticism as emanating from the so-called Chicago school of journalism: “You say your mother loves you? Check it out!”

And while most established and some new publications and electronic media are funding and applying their regular newsroom skills, virtually all of them must do so with smaller staffs, fewer bureaus and dwindling budgets, as advertising revenues evaporate in synch with the shrinking number of people actually paying for the paper. Like the apocryphal farmer who decided his mules could work with an ever-larger proportion of hay to go with an ever-smaller ration of actual feed, less and less productive work gets done, and the mules eventually die of malnutrition.

Put simply and realistically, somebody has to pay journalists regularly to regularly gather the news – be it the local police-and-fire reporter who looks at law enforcement activity or monitors alarms to get a story, or investigative teammates who uncover the hard truths that help real democracy to thrive. If the most watched, or read or listened-to media devolve into too many opinion-spouters and too few real reporters, the who, what, why, when, where and how of it all can become hard to find, or hard to know and trust – conditions usually not healthy for democratic institutions.

So here’s a reasonable suggestion, and it involves both money and time. Make it a point to buy and read your local and national newspapers regularly, especially rewarding those papers delivering honest reporting and other valuable content. The daily cost is probably less than a couple of cups of coffee. Doing so helps set your paper free from depending solely on smaller, much-less-profitable online advertising revenues, enabling newspapers to better afford the expensive but mostly necessary infrastructure needed to provide the “nutrition” that feeds both our minds and our free institutions.

But please don’t think of buying a paper as an act of charity. Reading it – especially in hard copy – probably enables you and me to learn about situations, ideas, events and issues we didn’t even know we’d find interesting, until we came across them as we browsed … in the non-Web sense of that word.

As you think about signing up to this worthy cause, please also take a look at the list below of selected Pulitzer Prize winners during the past ten years. Then consider how much worse off we will be if more and more of our hard-working, beat-pounding journalistic “mules” and their fact-checking, fact-nurturing editorial “farmers” are allowed to continue to disappear.

SELECTED PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS
Year	Category	Publication	Journalist	Story
2008	Local Reporting	Milwaukee Journal Sentinel	David Umhoefer	Skirting of tax laws to pad pensions of county employees, prompting change and possible prosecution of key figures.
2008	Investigate Reporting	Chicago Tribune	Entire Staff	Faulty governmental regulation of toys, car seats and cribs, resulting in the extensive recall of hazardous products and congressional action to tighten supervision.
2007	Local Reporting	The Miami Herald	Debbie Cenziper	Waste, favoritism and lack of oversight at the Miami housing agency that resulted in dismissals, investigations and prosecutions.
2007	Investigative Reporting	The Birmingham (AL) News	Brett Blackledge	Cronyism and corruption in the state's two-year college system, resulting in the dismissal of the chancellor and other corrective action.
2006	Feature Writing	Rocky Mountain News, Denver	Jim Sheeler	Marine major who helps the families of comrades killed in Iraq cope with their loss and honor their sacrifice.
2006	National Reporting	San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service	Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer	Bribe-taking that sent former Rep. Randy Cunningham to prison in disgrace
2005	Beat Reporting	The Wall Street Journal	Amy Dockser Marcus	Patients, families and physicians illuminated the often unseen world of cancer survivors
2005	Feature Writing	Chicago Tribune	Julia Keller	Reconstructed account of a deadly 10-second tornado that ripped through Utica, Illinois.
2004	Investigative Reporting	The Blade, Toledo, OH	Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss and Joe Mah	Series on atrocities by Tiger Force, an elite U.S. Army platoon, during the Vietnam War.
2003	National Reporting	Los Angeles Times	Alan Miller and Kevin Sack	Examination of a military aircraft, nicknamed "The Widow Maker," that was linked to the deaths of 45 pilots.
2003	Beat Reporting	The Baltimore Sun	Diana K. Sugg	Illuminated complex medical issues through the lives of people.
2002	National Reporting	The Washington Post	Entire Staff	Comprehensive coverage of America's war on terrorism, which regularly brought forth new information together with skilled analysis of unfolding developments.
2001	Feature Writing	The Oregonian, Portland	Tom Hallman Jr.	Profile of a disfigured 14-year old boy who elects to have life-threatening surgery in an effort to improve his appearance.
2000	Beat Reporting	St. Paul Pioneer Press	George Dohrmann	Academic fraud in the men’s basketball program at the University of Minnesota.
1999	National Reporting	New York Times	Entire Staff, and notably Jeff Gerth	Articles on corporate sale of American technology to China, with U.S. government approval despite national security risks, prompting investigations and significant changes in policy.
1998	National Reporting	Dayton Daily News	Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith	Dangerous flaws and mismanagement in the military health care system, disclosure of which prompted reforms.

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February 18, 2009