A chapter closes

This past weekend saw the publication of my final opinion column with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

It's a bittersweet ending, to be sure. I'm ready to move on to new and different kinds of writing (having an Opinion on a weekly schedule can get to be a little exhausting), but I also recognize that their decision to end the section entirely is sadly indicative of larger problems and challenges facing newsrooms across the country.

The MJS was locally owned for decades before Gannett (which owns USA Today and 14 other papers in Wisconsin) bought it out in 2016. There have been several rounds of layoffs and budget cuts over time, as old school attitudes toward the news business have become increasingly obsolete - but the people with power over them continue to make poor and/or desperate decisions that see deep cuts being made to substantive local reporting and dedicated, knowledgeable reporting staffs.

Fewer people are being made to do more with less. More wire stories run, creating duplication between newspapers and gutting any real local connection (or reason for people to subscribe to/read something that's ostensibly locally printed because all they see in it are national wire stories and, too often, forcibly syndicated op-eds and editorials that reflect the corporate and political interests of the owners, not the actual staff).

I've had the privilege and pleasure of working with truly supportive and hardworking editors during my time with the MJS. They never once tried to influence my choice of topic or opinion, only offering light copy editing and fact-checking as needed. They and many other reporters at the MJS do truly great work with very little support. I honestly hope the pivot toward "solutions-based journalism" reaps rewards both in terms of community engagement and financial sustainability - but I also recognize that it's an increasingly uphill battle for the latter in particular.

I don't have the answer yet for how to make quality news reporting a sustainable endeavor again. I've been part of a start-up non-profit media outlet that attempted a grassroots approach to the problem, and we managed for about 8 years before throwing in the towel. It was an eye-opening experience. Lots of well-meaning liberal/progressive people and organizations assured us that by becoming a non-profit we would reap financial support from sympathetic sources, but we quickly learned that 1) most of the money is on the other side, and 2) the money that is ostensibly on the side of progressive causes is tightly held and often narrowly applied to groups/people working on issues near and dear to the already well-off. Surprise!

Anyway, before this becomes an even more unwieldy post, I mostly just wanted to say that, despite all of the examples of really nasty feedback I received during my time writing for the MJS, I got at least as much in the way of positive and supportive emails and personal comments from folks all across Wisconsin.

I learned about folks living in far-flung rural communities and other medium and large cities about their experiences and frustrations trying to do the right thing for the greater good in the midst of such a divided and often vitriolic public discourse.

We remain a very purple state, in point of fact.

As far as I could tell, however, the vast majority of the feedback I got came from folks in their middle age and up. I think that's telling about the struggle news outlets like the MJS have to remain relevant to younger people - who, despite what some pearl-clutching pundits might have you believe, are by and large incredibly engaged in their communities and driven to do good work to build a better world. They are, in my experience, light years ahead of us in several key areas. I have hope.

Part of that hope includes eventually figuring out newer and better ways of sharing information and ideas, and collaborating on work that lifts us all. That will mean some things many of us have always known or grown used to will have to come to an end, and that can be scary/painful. But we have to learn how to let go of certain things in order to make space for new life to grow and flourish. Let Millenials kill Hooters and diamonds and even consumerism. Let new generations cast off old institutions that reinforce gatekeeping by one narrow demographic, and embrace a messier, more diverse, more inclusive public sphere. Let's use our big ol' brains to figure out new and different ways to support one another.

Some things must burn, so that greener shoots may grow in their place. We just have to make sure the outgoing regime doesn't fully poison the ground behind it.

The newspaper is dead, long live the newspaper

Anyone paying an iota of attention to the current media situation knows that things are looking dire. We're talking Fall of the Roman Empire dire. The rebels at the end of "The Empire Strikes Back" dire. Y'know, bad. Major news organizations across the nation are folding, shuttering their offices, laying off workers, slimming down, cutting back, and desperately trying to find ways to keep afloat.

Charge for online content. Employ fewer journalists. Combine operations when a city has more than one newspaper. Shrink the actual size of the paper. And the list goes on.

What few of the major media conglomerates who run many of these operations seem to realize, however, is that the old, profit-driven, mega-consolidated way of doing things is coming to an end. And, I'd say, it's about damn time.

I'm a writer who sometimes moonlights as an actual journalist, so I certainly have a vested interest in finding ways for folks like me to get paid for their work. I think it's important to have a healthy balance (operative word being "healthy" here) between the so-called "citizen journalism" of blogs, etc., and the professional, comprehensive news gathering of honest-to-goodness trained journalists.

Things are fast becoming unbalanced, though, and we need to act very quickly to see that our country, our world, does not lose one of the most vital elements of any democracy: The free press.

Madison's Mayor Dave Cieslewicz yesterday penned a post wherein he called for newspapers to begin charging for online content:

Charge me. Please charge me. Why is it that I should expect to pay for news delivered on paper, but not expect to pay for the same story I read online? It costs something to hire reporters and editors and why shouldn't I, as a consumer of the news, pay for some of that cost?

So first and foremost, charge me. Second, charge me twice. Competition is a good thing. The blending of our two daily newspapers into one is not a healthy thing. When I see a Cap Times byline in the State Journal I wonder what that means. I know who wrote it, but who edited it? And what does it mean for competition between the papers? Are reporters tripping over one another to break a story or are they sleepily cooperating?

His concerns are not misplaced, but his solution, I believe, is. Jesse Russell, writing at Dane101, makes a counter offer and points out Maryland Senator Benjamin Cardin's current proposal to allow newspapers to reorganize under non-profit status. They would then enjoy benefits typically only previously given to educational entities. They could claim circulation revenue and advertising as tax exempt. The caveat, however, would be that those newspapers could not "make political endorsements."

That's where you lose me. John Nichols and Robert McChesney of The Nation have another idea (and it's a fantastic article, so please do give the whole thing a read): Government intervention.

My hackles raised almost immediately upon reading that. Letting the government have any say over how a newspaper runs its operations is a recipe for disaster, 1984 style. But wait! they say, that's not what we mean:

Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism. We understand that this is a controversial position. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently engineered a $765 million bailout of French newspapers, free marketeers rushed to the barricades to declare, "No, no, not in the land of the free press." Conventional wisdom says that the founders intended the press to be entirely independent of the state, to preserve the integrity of the press...

...We are sympathetic to that position. As writers, we have been routinely critical of government--Democratic and Republican--over the past three decades and antagonistic to those in power. Policies that would allow politicians to exercise even the slightest control over the news are, in our view, not only frightening but unacceptable. Fortunately, the rude calculus that says government intervention equals government control is inaccurate and does not reflect our past or present, or what enlightened policies and subsidies could entail.

Our founders never thought that freedom of the press would belong only to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the notion that journalism should be regarded as the private preserve of the Rupert Murdochs and John Malones. The founders would not have entertained, let alone accepted, the current equation that seems to say that if rich people determine there is no good money to be made in the news, then society cannot have news.

They go on to explain that, during the early decades of the country, the Founders worked with government to create and implement "extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers."

The trick in this scenario, of course, is making sure that the policies and regulation remain "enlightened" - that is, the government provides money and subsidies, with pretty much the only thing it gets in return being a vibrant, independent press. So beyond funding, they lay off--no editorial control, not even a tiny bit of leaning.

Honestly, that may well be what it takes. Or maybe a combination of the non-profit and government subsidy models. Because newspapers should be freely able to editorialize and endorse. That's part of being a free press, after all. But they should also be recognized as a vital part of our society, one worth funding so that they're not run according to what might bring the most profit to their owners.

Newspapers, indeed all news organizations, should be run according to news. And it should be readily available to everyone, regardless of the size of their pocketbook. That's the great thing about the internet, and the sooner everyone recognizes this major, fundamental shift in how things are done, the better off everyone will be. Including our dying newspapers.


(photo by jamesjyu on Flickr)

Censorship or Tactical Maneuvering?

In advance of spring break, Pro-Life Wisconsin recently submitted an ad to several college newspapers in the state, and is now crying foul because 3 of them have not yet printed said ad. It's an interesting case where one has to wonder whether Pro-Life Wisconsin cared as much about getting out its message about making healthy choices as it did about being able to scream about being censored.

The Badger Herald lays out the claims in the ad itself:

“Be good to yourself over spring break,” the ad reads. “Make smart choices the night before … that way you won’t have any emergencies to deal with the morning after!”

It also says emergency contraception is a powerful, high dose of steroids that “tricks a woman’s body into thinking it is pregnant” and can cause “chemical abortions and deadly blood clots.”

Newspapers at the Marquette University Tribune, the UW-Stout Stoutonia and the UW-La Crosse Racquet were the only three of many to not print the ads in their most recent editions. Contrary to PLW's claims that the ads were outright rejected, however, it seems that at least Marquette and La Crosse Racuet are still considering the ads, concerned over the claims made about whether EC really causes "chemical abortions and deadly blood clots."

I suspect that most people would agree, leaving out any talk of a specific controversial subject, that taking proper time to investigate potentially inflammatory and misleading claims in an advertisement before running it is doing journalistic due diligence. I wish more TV stations would do the same thing before running blatantly false political ads, for instance.

However, wedge abortion into the mix and people tend to fly off the handle without considering all of the facts.

Instead of this being a case of due diligence, it's censorship! Take a look at the comments section under the Badger Herald article for a few good examples of this kind of thinking. One bold anonymous poster says "There is no excuse for the UW System newspapers to reject the Pro-Life Wisconsin ads. The public universities shouldn't be able to discriminate against more conservative views." But this isn't a case of discriminating against conservative views. It's a case of discriminating, in the positive sense of the word, against potentially false and/or harmful views.

According to the National Institutes of Health, "Emergency contraception medicine is not the same as the "abortion pill." A woman who knows she is pregnant takes the abortion pill with the intent to end an early pregnancy (usually 4 to 7 weeks after conception). Emergency contraception pills are taken after unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy from occurring." (emphasis mine)

The risk of "deadly blood clots" is extremely low, and the same as what's associated with taking regular birth control pills.

I don't pretend that the issue of abortion isn't an extreme gray area. All the arguing in the world will never convince some people that it's right or wrong, and that's fine. I take issue when other people start telling me what I should or should not be allowed to do with my own body, and I apply that to both sides of the debate.

The problem here, though, is that we are not talking about abortion. EC, otherwise known as Plan-B, doesn't cause an abortion, it prevents fertilization of the egg in the first place. If you believe that an unfertilized egg constitutes a life the deserves protection, then you might as well forbid women to menstruate. That's as good as telling us that we should be pregnant at all times from puberty through menopause, and you'll forgive me if I take extreme offense to that (not to mention think that you're very silly).

You might think that view is far-fetched, but judging by another comment left under the Badger Herald article, I'm led to believe that there are those out there whose views aren't too far removed:

It's not at all surprising. This is why so many people want to come to America to party--our women are wordly known as promiscuous and preferencing "successful" occupations over motherly duties. Our women have the sexual undiscipline to say "yes" to consensual sex, especially since most of them are chemically induced agreements, then the ungodly nerve to say "no" to the outcome. Abortion is not just murder, it's idolatry--the females are preferring a career without a child, befroe a career with a child.

Apparently there are still folks out there who think of women as nothing much more than baby machines, and that's really fucking sad.

In the end, I applaud the editorial boards of those three papers for taking the time to consider the claims made in those ads. I would urge them to do the same for any ad making potentially unsubstantiated and harmful claims, no matter what end of the political spectrum they fell on. Ad copy is a different beast from news (which may contain unsubstantiated claims in the form of direct quotes, which is fair game), and should be treated accordingly.

A farewell to paper and ink

Last Thursday, Madison-based newspaper the Capital Times announced that, after 90 years as an afternoon daily, it would be switching to a predominantly online presence, with a twice weekly tabloid sized paper going out with its sister publication, the Wisconsin State Journal.

Everyone and their uncle has since commented on the change, and I've been reluctant to add my voice to the cacophony both because I was never a subscriber to the paper and because the issue of news moving away from print and toward the internet is anything but black and white.

I have a few reasons, some superficial, for preferring to get my news online. I enjoy the wide variety of sources and perspectives that are so easily available via the internet. Also, though, in the past few years I've developed a mild allergy to newsprint that makes reading the paper a less-than pleasant process. I blame all the time I spent working as co-editor of my college paper and the huge quantities of ink I likely inhaled during that time, but whatever the real cause, it's hard to read when you're so busy sneezing.

Still, there's something fundamentally necessary about the local newspaper. In some cases, they're a community's only source for local news. And yes, even in this day and age, there are still many people who don't have or can't afford regular internet access. In their case, the local newspaper may be their only source of written news.

In their heyday, there were around 1,500 afternoon/evening papers in print. That number has since fallen dramatically, to just around 700. The average number of households that subscribe to one or more papers has also fallen, with readership numbers failing to keep pace with the growth in population (source).

Internet news is great for its sheer scope and variety, but when a publication switches from predominantly print to predominantly electronic, the move is typically coupled with a dramatic cut in staffing. That's the main worry I have when it comes to the Capital Times' changes.

First off, the support staff loses their jobs: the people who work and maintain the printing presses and those who deliver the papers. Lower level copy editors, often individuals trying to break into regular reporting, are likely to be cut as well. Even some seasoned vets will lose their jobs. All told, the cuts in staff lead to fewer eyes and ears on the ground, less thorough coverage of the various newsworthy events around town, and thus, less variety.

I can't be alone in the fact that I read local and regional news sources for local and regional news, and not so much for national or international items. It's the same reason why I try to keep my pontificating on this here blog away from too much national or international issues and stick with more local stories. There are plenty of better qualified people covering the world (and with the internet, we have far greater access to those sources, many of which are more local to the events). People turn to local news sources, and yes even bloggers, for local content, stuff that likely won't be covered anywhere else.

All this isn't to say that I suspect The Capital Times will stray away from covering local and regional content. But their ability to cover as much of it will certainly be hampered by the cuts in staffing that become necessary when your sole source of revenue are online ads. And that, I think, is what concerns me the most.

In the end, I will reserve judgment until their new incarnation has had time to prove itself one way or another. I sincerely hope that they're able to maintain high quality and diverse coverage. And I thank everyone at The Capital Times for 90 years of progressive news delivery.