By Arthur H. Gunther III
I used to be a newspaper columnist, penning one and then two essays a week for 25 years in between plowing, planting and harvesting the second half of a 42-year, ink-stained gig in what is now said to be a “dying profession.” Only it ain’t dead yet.
It just needs the right blood transfusion. And the donors are readers, not publishers. Too many of the latter never worked in trenches where reporting means slime, greed, corruption and more official B.S. to wade through than is at the local waste treatment facility. If these corporate thinkers had been in the daily war, maybe they would understand public thirst for information and how to quench it.
While readers have remained thirsty, publishers have refused to fill the glass, instead offering surveys, think tanks and feel-good, chummy retreats that have not saved newspapers but instead have distracted the front office from what readers and reporters and good editors (not enough of those) have always known: Ever since one fella whispered to another, there’s been news. And gossip. And innuendo. And baloney. And facts closest to the truth as truth can be in this world. But you have to dig for them. And that’s news.
If all this sounds Damon Runyon, well, God bless the fact that “journalism,” a fancy word for newspapering that most scribes wouldn’t wear even on Sundays, is really old-fashioned, “Front Page” legwork –
Cultivating sources and jumping into an investigative dig worthy of Sherlock Holmes. If there is also the soul of a self-deprecating street bum, where all the goodness of humankind can reside, the reporter is the better for it. And so is the reader.
Digging and lots of new, not rehashed, reporting gives us news, and news, whether it’s what the first fella said to the second fella, or if it’s about the town or school board meeting, or the Yankees, or the president, well, it’s all information. And people crave information.
The transfusion that is ready for newspapers is the time, the mind, the heart, the soul readers are willing to give those who gather and report the news. People will spurt blood to find out what is happening. They want the dirt, the scandal. They also want the think piece that analyzes matters. They want the essayist who makes the highs and lows of life vibrate, resonating in hearts and minds and bones in ways the columnist can express but the reader cannot.
People – the readers – whether they are looking at a printed tabloid or broadsheet or the Internet or the TV news or Twitter or Facebook, want news. They want “quality, balanced, well-written pieces (that) refrain from blurring the lines between factual news reporting and opinion/agenda/promotion views,” as one Colorado reader puts it.
Want to save newspapers? Use the blood that readers will give willingly. Go back to digging out the news and then fully reporting that, written by guys and gals who feel newspapering from their toes up, left alone by the front office to do their thing.
If we had had real news from a full, leave-them-alone reporting staff in the past two decades instead of spending the bank balance on surveys and page redesign and trendy fluff pieces, maybe the current economic debacle would have been derailed by investigative stories. Or war. Or G.M.’s troubles. Or dysfunctional government that is bedded by lobbyists.
People want the news, and only those who give it to them, in whatever and every way they want it, will survive. They will thrive, actually.
Arthur H. Gunther III is retired as editorial page editor and columnist of The Journal-News, a daily in Nyack, N.Y. He writes regularly at columnrule.blogspot.com