The legacy of reporters
Never do you need newspapers the way you need us now
When I learned Tuesday that this is National Newspaper Week across North America, my first thought was well, why not?
Never, it could be argued, have newspapers on this continent been under assault like they are today.
And here is the irony: never do you need us the way you need us now.
I speak here of how anger and division is fomenting across the land, in the United States, but also in Canada, and even here in Nova Scotia, as emphasized by the spike in hate-motivated incidents in Halifax.
And how political parties, governments, and special interest groups increasingly see benefit in taking their message directly to the people, thereby side-stepping those who raise a hand in a news conference and say, I have a question, and who can still be found in newspaper newsrooms even as they shrink in size and number.
I mean people like Nancy King, the general assignment reporter and web editor at the Cape Breton Post who died last week at 47.
I never met the woman, but she leaves behind a journalistic legacy that leaves newsroom habitues like me humbled to practise the same craft as she did.
When she tackled the big stories — the Cape Breton murder for lobster trial, the closure of the Sydney steel plant and the Ben Eoin Marina controversy — she was “dogged in her determination to get the story,” Steve MacInnis, who sat a desk away from King for the 21 years she worked at the Post, told me Tuesday.
As proof, he offered her work on a sexual abuse case involving young boys which began in Port Hawkesbury, where they were both born. The story spanned two continents, which meant that King would get on the phone at home when off the job, and call police stations in Nepal, and abuse survivors, whereever they happened to be, to hear their stories.
“What drove her is the same thing that drives most of us: making sure that people had the right information on the stories that impact them,” said McInnis. “Some us just have a heightened sense of this.”
Invariably they are found in newsrooms. In mine, there is an ink-stained wretch who “heard the vuuu, vuuu, vuuu of the rounds spinning over our heads” after being shot during an armed standoff, another who once parked his car on an otherwise-deserted backwoods road, and walked in the direction of a masked Mohawk warrior, sitting on the hood of his truck, rifle cradled in his right arm, another who, searching for a killer stepped into an apartment building, alone, with no idea what awaited inside.
There are photographers and reporters who have stood beside burned-out homes and wrecked cars, people who have sat in a murderer’s prison cell, who have waited where planes have gone down and coal miles exploded, who have stood with strikers around a burn-barrel in the cold of winter, and in a cemetery on the edge of a knot of mourners in the summer heat.
We are there to tell stories that sell subscriptions, because the business we are in is a business. But we are also there for you because journalism, someone once said, “is the first draft of history,” and years from now, when someone wants to write the story of some part of this province, they will not take to Twitter or Instagram for the facts. They will turn the pages of a newspaper like this one to see what life was like.
That, of course, is the long view. What reporters like King understand is that the stories that make the front page are not all that matters.
They realize that if they do not sit there for you in the endless committee meetings, in the near-empty courtrooms, at the stupefying hearings, then something important, that you need to know, may slip through your grasp.
King was like that. She never ran away from a story, tackling the “big” ones that every journalist craves, but approaching the less-sexy, but important stuff that fills the back pages of newspapers with the same gusto.
“Especially if it had to do with public money,” MacInnis recalls. “It was almost like it was coming out of her own pocket; she demanded accountability.”
Often her best weapon was the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIPOP) application, the source of countless stories for patient, unrelenting reporters, which, if necessary, she would pay for herself.
Last weekend, after King’s death, MacInnis went into the newsroom to clean off her desk. He moved some stuff around. Under some papers he found a pair of FOIPOP applications, with cheques attached, like she was about to walk in the door and mail them.