Newspapers are key to democracy
The recent outbreak of tornados in Kentucky and other states took me back years ago to when I had graduated from college and was looking for a job.
With a graduate degree in philosophy, what does one do except wander the streets looking for an honest person? Wanting to eat, I took a different path, teaching at a community college in the evenings and working as an editor and reporter at a local newspaper.
I only got the job because the newspaper publisher was a graduate of the same college I attended. He told me he would give me a trial run on the copy desk, where they would “get the academic English out of my system” and teach me how to write simply and clearly.
It was like boot camp for writers. The senior editor was my drill sergeant who emptied me of fancy adjectives and lengthy sentences. It took me a few months to rid myself of footnotes and big words.
I worked at that local paper and another for over five years. I later took graduate courses in international journalism hoping to become a foreign correspondent in Spain. But General Franco, their authoritarian leader, had other ideas and didn’t wish to have independent journalists in his country, even if I would only be an intern. Would-be dictators never like the news they can’t control.
No matter, whatever I have been doing to pay the mortgage and eat, I have always been a writer at heart, continuing as a columnist for a number of newspapers and publishing a lot of magazine articles and fewer books.
As a new reporter, I was called out with another as one of the few people to arrive on the scene of a tornado that struck a small town outside of Oberlin, Ohio. It was one of 37 tornadoes that killed over 250 people in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana on Palm Sunday 1965.
When my partner and I got to the scene with first responders all I remember was the total silence, the wind still blowing paper across the town, some of which were drafts of poems by an English professor at the nearby college. I could hear the cries of a baby and mother buried under the rubble of their home as workers tried to free them. Every building in that town was leveled, including the two churches. Nine people died.
Obviously, I still write for local newspapers. I have great respect for those editors, reporters, and staff who continue to give us the daily news of our communities. But the sad news is local newspapers are hurting financially these days and those writing, editing and delivering the papers are dwindling.
According to the Washington Post, about 2,200 local print newspapers have closed since 2005 and the number of journalists fell by more than half between 2008 and 2020. This is not good news for the thousands of local communities where information about public and private events and issues is the lifeblood of the people.
Call me a dinosaur, but I believe that local newspapers are keys to our democracy. True, they do put out online editions, but I still contend there is something magical about collecting a newspaper from your front door and sitting down to read it.
Like many readers I often turn to the sports page first, a habit I learned growing up in Philadelphia, and then the obituaries. Ben Franklin’s words about this help me begin the day with a chuckle: “I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.”
I write columns to support local newspapers. My writing is put on the editorial pages because they express points of view, not necessarily objective news. I volunteer my time and energy because I believe in the vital importance of local newspapers to our democracy.
If all politics is local, so, too, is the news required for democracies to function.