As a newspaper editor, I was often startled in looking at coverage from the other side when something I was affiliated with was subject to a story. Or even more startling, when I was quoted and seeing how it looked it print.
It was like working in a restaurant kitchen and shipping dishes to the dining room and then, on a night off, going in for a celebratory dinner.
Seeing a report through the readers’ viewpoint really could be eye-opening. It’s not the “names-is-news” philosophy that many small-minded editors and publishers pursued, either. That approach could be even more boring than reading the phone book. Remember those?
The backbone of most of American newspapers has been the way they connect with their local communities. As one wise editor once told me, it should be news of local interest, rather than just happenings in the place itself. I spent much of my career trying to open parochial outlooks to an awareness of the wider world, both directions, and I do believe that can happen and even be exciting.
When I was calling on daily newspaper editors across the Northeast as a syndicate features field representative, I was surprised by how few of the papers gave a taste of a unique nature of each of the communities. Many of the editors thought of local news as city council and school board meetings plus high school sports scores. As I argue in my novel Hometown News, the real stories – the kind that come home – are found elsewhere and require more reportorial digging. That’s one reason I’ve long advocated local columnists (real writers, not dilettantes, though skilled amateurs are welcome). Few papers had even that much.
When former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously proclaimed “All politics is local,” he understood those roots.
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A decade after I’ve left the newsroom, I’m directly experiencing that again, or more accurately, its lack.
In the past 20 years, the number of people employed in newsrooms at American papers has dropped about 60 percent. That leaves far fewer people to write about what’s happening or even be aware of what’s going on at the grassroots level where they live. Much of the nuts-and-bolts editing is being done in clusters far from the paper itself, removing another layer of local nuance and understanding.
In my case, in my participation in events celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Dover, I’m seeing the local paper is doing far less coverage than I would have expected. Not after the family that owned it for generations finally sold out to a media conglomerate.
That disconnect isn’t just print media, either. New Hampshire Public Radio no longer originates any content in the Granite State, as far as I can see. Two decades ago, appearing on one of its shows would have been a natural for a local author like me.
Quite simply, it’s disappointing and a bit scary.
Jnana's Red Barn 