Hine gets a thumbs up and a thumbs down

Tom Hine’s August 29 column gets one thumb up and one thumb down from me. I read the column online with my subscription to the Journal, and absolutely agree that more people should invest in one themselves. Electronic news never gets eaten by your neighbor’s dog, and you do learn a lot about what’s going on here in town. But asking writers to provide reporting services for free is a hard no. The net effect is it devalues a service that is already underpaid, which makes journalism even harder to pursue as a career. I say this as someone who wrote a column for the paper for a year, on the theory that it would be “good exposure.’ It was!

Lots of people saw it and let me know they enjoyed my writing. But then people asked me to get their news and events into the paper as well, with no intent to pay me. OK cool, but I don’t want to hear your low opinion of the unhoused if you’re not helping me to pay rent with my labor. If the paper is a business, it needs to be able to pay its workers. I support pursuing grants for journalism, and believe our government should invest more into media and critical thinking education. If the paper wanted to have a subscription drive in the mold of public radio, I would personally slap on a mask and shake down farmers market patrons to help meet that goal. Let’s work to attract more readers so we can pay writers what they’re worth. And definitely do subscribe! Journalism matters.