Local apathy
This weekend, I attended an event sponsored by the Cleveland chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, primarily aimed at those who are seeking to transition their careers from print journalism to other types of writing. I was invited by John Ettorre, the well-known Cleveland writer & blogger extraordinaire. It was a good experience, and the turnout was great, especially considering the terrible road conditions. There was plenty of great information shared, and was I’m sure especially helpful for those who weren’t already involved in new media, such as blogs or other forms of online communication. But I have to say, one of the saddest things about Saturday (besides the fact that so many people there were either hanging on by a thread to their jobs, or had already been laid off) was really understanding that print newspapers truly are going away. I mean, I’ve been reading the newspaper since I was 8 or 9, and once I discovered Mitch Albom’s articles in the Detroit Free Press, it was all over for me. I read it before school every day. I would eat breakfast at the counter in our kitchen, bowl of cereal in front of me, slurping up milk, and reading Mitch. His series of articles on the Secret World Series during the MLB strike of 1994 was a classic, whether or not you like him and his tear-jerky books aside.
Another disturbing issue brought to my attention during the workshop was raised by Mary Ann Sharkey, the famed Ohio journalist, wgucg was this: If print journalism goes away, or newspaper-style investigative journalism in general, then who’s going to cover the local issues? I mean, it’s not like the local television stations do a good job of this. If you want sensationalism, and dumb teaser commercials, that’s the place to go now. It’s all about ratings, which I suppose can’t be helped. But I cannot tell you the last time I watched the local news. For that type of information, I turn to either the Plain Dealer or Cleveland.com. I’m not going to pretend that I like the PD, because I don’t. Growing up with the Free Press, I’m sorry, it’s a poor relation. Part of the problem may have to do with the fact that it has no competition, and hasn’t for years. But I digress. If I want local, I still go to the PD. If that goes away, and is replaced by (mainly biased) “citizen journalists” and their blogs (and don’t get me wrong — there are some great ones, but the web is so cluttered and over-opinionated at this point, who has the time to find them?), with no training and no sense of what it means to be a journalist (which I decidedly AM NOT, but then again, I don’t profess to be), what happens? Worse, I feel like people my age, the Gen Xers & Gen Yers, are just not as cognizant of or interested in local news, anyway. We were brought up on the 24-hour news cycle of CNN & and MSNBC (and — UGH — Fox), and their online counterparts. Local news barely registers to a lot of the people in my age cohort. So then what? Does local news stop getting coverage if no one seems to care? And I don’t mean human interest, but City Hall. The school boards. The city councils. Corruption has always plagued the offices of big cities, but if no one’s covering it, it’s only going to get worse. Can you imagine? Growing up just outside of Detroit, I was more than aware of “King” Coleman Young and recently Kwame “Big Dumb” Kilpatrick’s reigns of corruption. And do you know what brought “Big Dumb” down, finally? Local journalism. The Detroit Free Press making a big, big stink until they got the documents they wanted.
Sorry for the rant. But a world without real news journalism, and without people who know enough to care about it, is a scary world, indeed.
