Midnight at the Oasis
One of the costs of the demise of local journalism can easily be overlooked.
The extinction of local news outlets, its cost to the country and the many laudatory efforts to rescue, resuscitate or preserve small, regional and even large metropolitan news outlets have been well documented. One cost, however, sometimes has been overlooked: The growing number of news deserts has eliminated many of the best places for young reporters to start learning the trade.
There is much to recommend undergraduate and graduate journalism programs and schools, but a classroom or lecture hall at Columbia, Northwestern or any other august institution is nothing like a low-paying starting job — not an internship — in a gritty newsroom in Haverhill, Houma or Hickory.
For one thing, getting a D on a story in Deadline Writing is a far cry from botching one about someone you’re likely to see on the street or in a store the next day. That’s especially true of organized crime figures.
For another, local newsrooms teach young reporters to cultivate and respect the folks who do the work and cast the votes rather than those who take the credit or dodge the blame. If you’re reporting on crime and public safety, the people you want to interview last are the mayor and the police chief. Start with the people on the street and the cops on the beat.
The Washington Post’s T.R. Reid and I, then at Newsweek, put that lesson to work one evening when we were covering the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s 1980 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The bus tour that January day ended in Ottumwa, Iowa, and Tom and I rented a car and drove back to Oskaloosa, the last place Kennedy had appeared.
Using the analytical skills we had acquired at Princeton University and Williams College, we drove around until we found the bar with the largest number of cars in the parking lot, went in and sat down. Tom said to the man next to him that he’d heard Ted Kennedy was in town.
“He was,” the man replied genially. “He gave a speech at the Y. He was going to take a swim, too, but he couldn’t get his car in the pool.”
That offhand joke in a bar told Tom and me more about the biggest danger to Kennedy’s campaign against incumbent Jimmy Carter — its spirit captured in his concession speech at the Democratic convention in New York — than all the polls, pollsters and pundits ever did.
Many — not all — military veterans learned to listen to folks like that Iowa man on battlefields and in their ships and aircraft, where Harvard and Yale graduates’ lives often depended on the high school graduates who turned the wrenches, loaded the ammunition or walked point. Some of today’s corporate bigwigs, including some at least nominally in the news business, might do well to ask themselves if they’re treating their employees with similar respect.
Local newsrooms also can be good places to cultivate what David Ignatius, a friend and great reporter who’s now a celebrated columnist at the Washington Post, calls “healthy skepticism”. That can be lost in today’s mad scramble for sensational stories, celebrity, scoops and Xs, some of which are wrong, insignificant or have half-lives measured in nanoseconds, as we’ve seen in Gaza.
I got one early lesson in that 50-odd years ago at 150 River St. in Hackensack, NJ, then the home of the Bergen Record, Sunday circulation 230,000 or so. I got a tip about a high school girl in one of the suburban New York towns I was helping cover who was telling her friends that one of her male teachers was sexually harassing her. A more experienced reporter, the late Harcourt Tynes, must have gotten wind of my heavy breathing and walked over and said something along the lines of: “Slow down, John. She might be making this up for attention, or there might be some backstory like he gave her bad grades.” I found and talked to the girl, but I never was able to find anything to confirm her allegation. The story went unwritten.
Still another piece of the Street Journalism 101 syllabus is obvious the first time you encounter it: If you’re covering a fatal car crash, a murder, a five-alarm fire or some other catastrophe and you interview three eyewitnesses, you’re likely to get six different accounts of what happened.
Local papers also were — and still can be — good places to learn the value of collaboration in an era that rewards stardom. Good newspapers, radio stations and other outlets back then hired an occasional young person with a different geographic, racial, social or economic background, although straight white men almost universally were in charge. We used to call The Record “the Ellis Island of journalism” because many people who landed there went on to bigger things.
Although yesterday’s newsrooms were far from today’s social, diversity, equity and inclusion standards, good reporters, no matter where they went to college, learned quickly that everyone around them knew more than they did about something, someone, someplace or all four.
An exemplar of that at The Record was the late Susan Servis Scilla, whose resume included her familiarity with assorted North Jersey characters whose language she occasionally used when she chastised them after she saw a story she’d been chasing in the “friggin’ Hudson Dispatch”.
A good college education — one that like good journalism is more about questions than answers — is of enormous value, but I have no idea if Sue had one. I do know that the late, legendary war correspondent Joe Galloway, one of the finest reporters and writers I’ve ever known, lasted six weeks at Victoria College in Texas.
Yes, the rapid evolution of technology is complicating the collection, distribution and financial foundation of news, but reporters still don’t need degrees from MIT or CalTech.
Are today’s leaders more complex human beings than yesterday’s? If anything, many of today’s politicians are simpler, and some corporate tycoons are just throwbacks to the first Gilded Age.
It’s easy to romanticize the atmosphere in local newsrooms 50 years ago that Sue and Joe personified, and some of the behavior in them was closer to Animal House than to Spotlight.
Still, that atmosphere half a century ago also reflected the enthusiasm and optimism of young reporters stirred by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the Watergate reporting of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, young reporters at the Washington Post who were outsiders to the capital’s Establishment.
Today’s aspiring journalists want to hold a dysfunctional Congress accountable, confront the climate crisis, pursue the struggles for equality, and address the increasing gap between the wealthy and everyone else, among other things, but the demise of local newsrooms is depriving them of places to learn how to do that.
Doing that requires reporting from the bottom up, not the top down, as too many reporters do these days as they try to climb from the Fourth Estate to the First by befriending rather than bedeviling those in power, building personal brands on television and social media and getting spotted at A-list parties.
It also, however, requires editors, owners and backers who don’t flinch in the face of Trumpeted threats and other attempts at intimidation. That, in turn, requires a degree of economic security that the news business began losing more than two decades ago and has little hope of regaining without more outside support.
Even that, however, is no guarantee of success. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has an estimated net worth of $114 billion, and the Post is laying off 240 employees. The wealthy owners of The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe have helped keep those revered institutions alive, but driving past the Globe’s old headquarters on Morrissey Boulevard is a reminder of how much things have changed.
What hasn’t changed is the abundance of important stories, many of them for the surviving small outlets and their reporters. Long Island’s North Shore Leader led the way in exposing Rep. George Santos’ fabricated resume and multiple identities, writing in an editorial: “He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake”. The Observer-Reporter in Washington, PA was reporting on safety hazards on the Norfolk Southern railroad before the disastrous crash in neighboring Ohio. My alma mater, The Record, exposed the Bridgegate political scandal.
A 2017 study by academics at Harvard, Florida State and MIT published in Science magazine found that small papers still can have a significant impact on public discourse.
Young reporters such as Quinn Mitchell have the right instincts, but they still need leadership and basic training. He’s a New Hampshire teenager who was marked for expulsion from Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’s rallies after in June he asked the Florida governor if he supported Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2000 election. For the record, DeSantis’s answer was to ask Mitchell if he was a teenager.
It’s difficult but possible to keep local journalism alive, as a rural Kansas paper has demonstrated. In any case, it will be harder for a dithering democracy to regain its footing without it.
Thanks, Walt. I’d forgotten that you were at the ProJo. There were so many places like that, The Record, the Courier-Journal, the Merc, etc., etc.
Great piece, John, and spot on. All through college, I spent every summer and every vacation as a full-fledged suburban reporter for the Providence Journal (West Warwick bureau). That was where I learned to be a reporter. I would often stay for an hour after my shift ended at 1 am to talk to the gray-haired bureau chief about reporting and writing. I then went to the Columbia University School of Journalism, where I got a Master’s degree and a job offer from the Wall Street Journal. But it wasn’t Columbia that got me the WSJ job. And it wasn’t being a campus stringer for the NY Times. I later learned that It was my clips from the Providence Journal, a Pulitzer Prize winning local paper where I covered everything from town council meetings and local crime to fatal traffic accidents and the installation of officers at the Kiwanis club. It turned out covering a Senate hearing in DC wasn’t all that different from covering a town council meeting in West Warwick.