A letter to my Senator
by David Benjamin
The Honorable Tammy Baldwin
United States Senate
717 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-4906
Dear Sen. Baldwin:
Not too long ago, I went back to my childhood hometown of Tomah to drop off a copy of my latest published novel, A Sunday Kind of Love, at the offices of the Tomah Journal
— the newspaper I had read every week when I was growing up, in the
living room of my grandparents’ house on Pearl Street. It’s difficult to
express my surprise when I got to the Journal office and found that the
door was locked.
The Journal was operating. There were people inside. I could see them. But they were locked in. I was locked out.
Perhaps
I was more shocked than most people because — for more than seven years
— I was the editor of a weekly newspaper, in Massachusetts, the Mansfield News.
In that capacity, I couldn’t have imagined locking the door to my
office. A locked door — or even a door! — was antithetical to my purpose
as the editor of the News. I was the guy in town whom anybody, anytime,
could walk in on.
Once, Barney Frank walked in. Another time, a
member of a town board who also had business ties to the Patriarca
crime family, walked in and told me that he would kill me if I kept
reporting his run-ins with the Mansfield Police. I believed him. Three
different times, a high school freshman walked in and asked for a job as
a stringer for the News. Since I didn’t have a reporting staff
beyond myself, I hired each kid and proceeded to teach him the
techniques, style and ethics of journalism, as best I could. Each of
these exceptional boys thrived at the News. After graduation, they went on to college at Vanderbilt, Georgetown and the University of Chicago.
Today,
the opportunity Bill, Frank and Tim had — to learn the news hands-on
and close-up, with personal guidance from a “professional” (I use the
term loosely, because I never attended an actual journalism school) —
doesn’t exist in Mansfield. The News, once an independent newspaper and
job press, has been reduced to “penny press” status, after being bought
out by an out-of-town regional newspaper chain. The News no
longer sits in the Town Hall every night, taking notes on the meetings
of the Board of Selectmen, the Health Board, the School Committee, the
Zoning Board of Appeals. The News no longer pores trough the
police log every Wednesday afternoon, and it doesn’t exert a tireless
vigilance over the government and business of the community.
The News
has a “telephone editor” now, located in a distant city, transcribing
obituaries, wedding announcements and the school lunch menu. Its
“coverage” of local political affairs depends on the word of local
officeholders issuing press releases. The practice of journalism in
Mansfield is extinct.
Recently, I got a heart-warming note from a
Mansfield resident, formerly the assistant superintendent of schools
and one of my regular targets of scrutiny, who said, simply, “We need
you back.”
The same fate has befallen Tomah, where the Journal
is now the property of Lee Enterprises, an Iowa “media company” that
owns more than 350 weekly and daily publications in 23 states. It’s
traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So is the gigantic Gannett news
group, and the McClatchy group, the Tribune Company, Rupert Murdoch’s
News Corporation, every major television network and radio group. This
ownership model is a major reason for the decay of journalism. Most
Americans today get what little news they consume — whether online or in
print — from immense corporations whose fealty is neither to its
readers nor to democracy, but to a handful of wealthy shareholders and
to the caprice of the traders on the floor of the Stock Exchange.
This
is why I’m proposing to you a possible legislative solution to what has
been called “the death of print” and the precipitous decline of
professional news-gathering in America.
‘
Another example. My wife, Junko Yoshida, went to work more than 25 years ago for EE Times, a technology journal that simply had no peer in its field. The team Junko joined at EE Times is one of the best groups of newsmen and newswomen I’ve encountered in my career. EE Times,
which was privately owned by a husband and wife in Manhasset, New York,
had a worldwide staff whose credentials in both engineering and
reporting offered its demanding and erudite readers a level of breadth
and depth unmatched in its field.
Less than a decade later, after its owners retired, EE Times
was purchased by a publicly traded media company that proceeded — in
order to meet its quarterly projections — to reduce its scope, fire its
journalists, designers and photographers, to close its offices in Europe
and Asia, in the Midwest and Northeast. Today, EE Times, which
abandoned print several years ago, is sustained heroically by four
fulltime reporters, including my wife, and a handful of free-lancers
(some of whom, like myself, often pitch in without pay).
Clearly,
publicly held media companies — whatever their quarterly results — have
done far more harm than good to the practice of journalism in America.
And yet, more and more, only publicly held media companies practice
journalism in America.
The classic model of the news organization, typified by the old EE Times, but also by the New York Times, the Washington Post,
the old Hearst and McCormick empires, still exists. But the paternalism
of the grand old newspaper chains is an institution that can’t be
revived or replicated in these times. Nor should it be.
Nevertheless,
we need a new way. Today, millions of Americans get their news online,
often from “aggregators” who compile reports from other sources —
including all those dying newspapers — or from profoundly unreliable
sites that have a partisan, ideological or outright propaganda agenda.
Ironically, the popularity of aggregators poses a reverse-pyramid
dilemma. The more people use these typically free sites to consume news
originally reported by the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post or even USA Today,
the fewer people use — and pay for — that information from its real
source. As aggregators grow, they imperil the existence of the vital
sources from which they aggregate.
Which brings me to my
solution. We need more journalists. Not the self-appointed pundits and
single-issue bloggers who populate a million parasitic “news” sites on
the Web. We need trained, paid professionals who know AP style, who
grasp the differences between news, analysis and commentary, who
understand the absolute imperatives of attribution and corroboration. We
need legitimate news organizations where J-school grads can go for
hands-on experience writing the news. We need small newspapers — both
online and in print — weeklies, dailies, alternative tabloids that turn
young stringers into conscientious reporters and dogged investigators.
We need a citizens’ tribune who sits nearby the council table in every
community, taking notes, shooting pictures, asking questions, quoting
politicians and making them accountable for their words, their actions,
their promises and their mistakes.
My solution is inspired by an
idea that I first heard floated early in the Obama administration, for a
national development bank. Launched with a principal of some $30
billion, its purpose would be to give loans and grants for major
infrastructure projects, public, private and hybrid.
My
variation: A national journalism development bank. The amount of capital
would be much smaller than an infrastructure development bank. Its
annual outlay would be, in my estimation, somewhere between $500,000,000
and $1 billion.
The sole purpose of this money would be to pay
the salaries of reporters, mostly on the local and regional level,
mostly in print and online (rather than television). At an average
salary of $50,000 a year, an outlay of a half-billion dollars would
employ 10,000 professional reporters.
In fact, since some of this money would cover salaries for lower-paid interns in some big-city newsrooms like those at the Times or the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel,
a half-billion or so would stretch beyond that minimum pool of 10,000
newly compensated journalists — many of whom would be restored to the
community of ink-stained wretches after being laid off by Wall Street
bean-counters.
You ask, how would this National Journalism
Development Fund (NJDF) choose its beneficiaries. Easily. A local news
entrepreneur would send in an application form that demonstrates the
intent and the credentials to cover the news in, say, Tomah, in
competition with the non-doing ghost of the former Journal. Or the local Lee Enterprises stringer for the Journal could send in the same form, vowing to restore the paper’s integrity by staying in town and doing the local legwork the old Journal
used to do. Each application would seek enough funding to cover the
number of salaries needed to gather and produce the news. All other
expenses would be up to the applicant to cover, preferably by selling
ads and soliciting sponsors.
Administrators at the NJDF would be
tasked to judge applications indulgently. After all, an outlay of
$70,000, to cover the salaries of a local editor and reporter, is chump
change in the great Washington budget scheme. If, after a year, the
little newspaper office couldn’t renew its application because it
couldn’t rustle up enough advertising or build its circulation beyond
friends and family, the grant would be withdrawn and given to a new set
of news entrepreneurs.
Of course, there would to be some sort of
oversight. Ideally, the NJDF would hire teams of regional inspectors
with a journalism background to monitor the performance of all these
new-sprung or rejuvenated newsrooms. What a great job for a retired
newspaper editor. These inspectors would focus on each news
organization’s commitment to serving the community, providing as much
information as possible and doing the journalist’s most vital mission:
civic education. All other details, including prose quality, good
photography, appealing design, would be secondary.
In short, this
is money that should be easy to get and hard to lose. The thing that
makes a journalist professional and makes him or her want to be a better
journalist is getting paid for the job — not enough to get rich, but
enough to offer the assurance that this essential democratic vocation
has true and irrevocable value.
Newspeople are a lot like teachers. Firefighters. Cops.
Why do this?
Journalists
are a dying breed, literally. Their place is being usurped by amateurs,
opportunists and conspiracy theorists. At some point, when the number
of responsible, professional, ethical journalists sinks below some point
of critical mass, citizens will no longer see enough real news to
distinguish it from bullshit. If there’s any doubt that American
journalism is approaching that critical mass, I need only cite the
political success of Donald Trump, a man who conflates fact and fancy,
has no idea that he’s doing it, and has millions of followers who share
his seditious ignorance.
And how to pay for it? Where will the
billion come from? I suggest that we assess the very people and
organizations who right now cling parasitically to the last few bastions
of professional news-gathering. Every aggregator provides links to the
sources of its blurbs, headlines and news briefs. Every aggregator, in
order to collect advertising revenue, assiduously counts every “hit” on
its site and every click to every link. These hits and clicks number in
the billions. It would be a small matter to monitor all these online
visits to all the aggregrators and all their sources and charge each
aggregator a tiny fraction of a penny (or, preferably, a whole penny),
for each hit, click, link and visit — NOT payable by the consumer.
Yahoo, Google and Facebook would have to cough up the pennies.
And if there’s extra money? Give the reporters a raise.
Obviously,
all I’m proposing here is a rough sketch of what would be a complicated
and contentious law. Cynical old editor that I am, I expect this idea
not only to go anywhere, nor do I expect a response. But I urge you to
suggest the notion to a few of your colleagues in the Senate, and pass
it by a few reporters. The responses will be interesting. My wife, who
has seen the depopulation of her own newsroom, told me — at first blush —
that I was full of crap. But after reconsidering, she conceded that
maybe I’ve got something here. After all, if you take the personnel cost
out of the newsroom, everything else suddenly starts to look affordable
— especially if you can publish online and don’t have to buy ink, paper
and press time.
Sorry if I’m long-winded. But I needed to make
the case for the care and feeding of real journalists, and explain why a
system of no-strings support for the dissemination of the news,
objectively and universally — down to the grass roots — is not only
possible in a digital 21st-century America, but necessary.
Sincerely,
Thursday, July 28, 2016
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1 comment:
Not only possible but necessary...I love it! May the word spread.
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