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We can save the small-town newspaper

We can save the small-town newspaper

Every time a hometown paper dies, a little piece of me dies too.

Perhaps that sounds a little melodramatic, but I cut my journalistic teeth at small town papers where high school sports can hold up a Friday night deadline, and subscribers read about their family, friends and neighbors.

My first college internship was at the Jackson Citizen Patriot in Jackson, Mich. To the locals, the Cit Pat, a local family-owned paper back then, ended the day like the sunset. You could count on a Cit Pat reporter to be at every Jackson event, whether it be the Hot Air Balloon Jubilee or the Jackson County Fair. Of course we covered the state penitentiary, which sat just north of downtown, the city government and the hospitals, which at the time numbered two to serve what was then a town of more than 36,000 and a county of more than 158,000. The Cit Pat building was at the southwest end of downtown in a beautiful two-story stone building, with the newsroom on the second floor. I don’t know if it’s still there. What I do knows is that now the Cit Pat is owned by MLive, a conglomerate of local Michigan papers owned by Advance Local, which is owned by Advance (owner of Condé Nast and a major shareholder in Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery and Reddit).

My second internship was at the Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times. The H-T took on a shaved-headed college student reporter who had just left college with only a semester to go for a myriad of reasons but was certain she wanted to continue to pursue a career in journalism. That college student was me. In that semester-long features internship, I had the opportunity to join an all-hands-on-deck coverage of an Indiana University campus riot and do a piece that required me to make international calls to a local man who was recently detained in the West Bank for protesting Israeli settlement expansion. At the time, the newspaper was owned by the small communications company Schurz Communication, which started in the latter half of the 1800s with another Indiana paper, the South Bend Tribune. I’d love to tell you Schurz still owns both papers – or at least one of them – but it doesn’t. Somewhere along the way, as Gatehouse and Gannett swallowed up paper after paper, until they merged in 2020, both the H-T and the South Bend Tribune came under Gennett ownership.

In 2004, I landed at the Monroe (Mich.) Evening News as health editor and reporter. I pushed for the four-page health section to be filled by news written in-house instead of pulled from the wire and revamped the monthly section for children, Your Health for Kids. But after a year at the EEOC, the business side of the Monroe Publishing Company no longer saw the need for a health editor to oversee the section. I was offered the open role at the company’s weekly free paper that covered the community of Bedford Township, a growing suburb of Toledo, Ohio. I saw it as a way to step up to larger market media in the future. I unfortunately was running headlong into the Great Recession. Now, The Monroe News is owned by Gannett and runs on a skeleton staff, and Bedford Now is no longer published.

The recent round of layoffs at papers by Gannett, emptying out newsrooms, reignited an idea I’ve been mulling over for a long time: a nationwide network of individual newspapers in each community that works on donations. Think of it as your local public radio station but as a newspaper – or news site since most of us read our newspaper on a screen these days. I call it a “public newspaper.”

The first time I started to think about the concept of a “public newspaper,” I was sitting at a media professionals conference in Seattle.

It was 1998, I think. Maybe 1999. We were in a hotel downtown, maybe a 20-minute walk from the famed Public Market, discussing how the internet would change the future of journalism. Some said it would be the death of the newspaper industry while others said it would bring a resurgence of long-form journalism to newspapers both local and national.

I don’t think anyone had their eye on a nearly two decade-long slump that included venture capitalism firms buying up whatever small-town papers in the Midwest Gannett and Gatehouse Media didn’t buy first, followed by a merger that was used as an excuse for more newsroom cutbacks. No one discussed things like paywalls; declining readership and subscription rates; personals, sales and wanted ads moving to Craigslist; or ad buys dropping significantly and having a whole new rate model on the web.

As I listened to older, wiser editors and reporters conjure the future in their cracked crystal balls, I thought to myself, what if newspapers worked on the same model as public radio: a network of local news radio programing or stations that feed a national news organization, National Public Radio, that then provides national news programing in return – and the whole network works on donations?

Throughout my career as a reporter, as I’ve seen slight ups, big downs and what sometimes seems like the bottom falling out, the idea keeps coming back to me.

Local newspapers are the backbones of communities, and for too long we have seen them bought and sold, downsized then decimated. Every village and hamlet and town and small city should have a local newspaper with a newsroom of reporters who know the local business, the local principals, the local school board members, and the local city council members as well as the know the town elders who have regular seats at the diner and the parents at the playground. Every town has news, and every town needs someone to cover it, whether it’s the Friday night high school basketball game or the town parade.

Trust in our media comes from our local media. The better the local coverage and the more the reporters get to know the community, the more the community trusts the news.

Now imagine all these tiny towns, with their daily or semi-weekly papers, contribute to each other and national reporters contribute to the entire network of local papers. The best part? All the papers are free. You can choose to donate if you like, but you don’t have to pay.

Today, most people read their newspapers on an app or on the web site rather on the newsprint. The Washington Post has an app. The New York Times has an app. The Wall Street Journal has an app. Many newspapers have an app. Even NPR and many local public radio stations have an app for listening, reading, merchandise and more. This would be the way to deliver not only a newspaper in 2022, but also a nationwide network of newspapers – and additionally could be a great way to ask for donations a couple times a year.

Of course, I say all of this with the realization that I know very little about how a donation-driven news service such as public radio actually works as a business. My degrees are in the areas of health and science, not finance, business or management. I can manage a health section and a handful of reporters, but I certainly know (to use a colloquialism) bunk all about running a national network of news sites that run on donations, or about collecting  donations to run those news sites for that matter. Heck, I don’t even know how to build a news site.

What I do know is that of all the papers I interned or worked for full-time, only two are not currently owned by Gannett and even those are running on a skeleton staff at barely the quality of reporting they once did.

Journalism won’t be saved by “citizen journalists,” by venture capitalists buying out small papers and destroying them, or by less news from fewer reporters. Journalism and trust in journalism will only be saved by more professional, well done, strong local news in every town.

Every reporter needs an editor

Every reporter needs an editor

I am teh matter of tyos.

Oof. Let me try that again.

I am the master of typos.

That’s not to say that I don’t proofread my own work. Quite the opposite. I poofread. Make that proofread. And I use spellcheck. And I read it allowed. Correction: that should be aloud.

The problem is that I have a block when it comes to my own writing. I know what I meant to type. My brain is often able to substitute the correction for the mistake in my own writing. And I’m not the only writer who has this problem. This is actually quote — nope, quite — a common phenomenon. As our fingers work quickly on the keyboard, we make typos, but our brains substitute what we meant to write in for the mistake. Even when we go back to edit ourselves, we still see what we intended rather than what we actually typed.

Despite this, I’ve worked as an editor several times, and I’m fantastic at finding the errors in the writing of others. Why? Because it’s not my writing. I don’t know the words they intended to write; I only see what is in front of me on the page, so I can look at it without my brain substituting in the completed or corrected picture.

There’s actually a lot of brain science behind this, and was a much discussed topic in the media in 2014 when psychology researcher Dr. Tom Stafford of The University of Sheffield performed a typing experiment using 19 subjects who could see neither the keyboard nor the screen. He found the subjects slowed down just before they made typos.  In interview after interview — from Wired to Insider, he said over and over again that we can’t see our own typos because we type from a routine, and we know what we intended to say.

It’s essentially based upon the same principles of how we learn to read. First we learn letters; then we learn words. Eventually, we’re told to read a whole sentence for meaning, content and context. So we take a whole sentence at a time, not each individual word. In fact, often times, our brains skip over a word here or there and fill in the “blanks.”

When I took on a self-funded reporting project in 2011, the first thing I did was find an editor. I knew that if I was going to be writing the articles for “The Night Shift Project,” I couldn’t be my own editor. I hired author, journalist and editor Jeff Fleischer to edit the project because I knew that I was going to miss my own typos and my tense disagreements. I wanted a professional to get out the red pen and take a critical eye to my reporting, catch the errant comma and put it in its proper place.

The best newspapers actually have a wool — correction: whole — department within the newsroom set up just to make sure reporters are putting out clean copy. It’s called the copy desk, and it’s made of a special group of people called copy editors who know language, spelling and style guides better than anyone else in the newsroom. These gurus of grammar are the human dictionaries and thesauruses. And they wield a (often digital) red pen with no mercy.

So what does it really take to put out clean copy in a newspaper? It’s a team approach, of course. It’s the reporters who report and write the stories and self-edit; the copy editors who go through the articles letter by letter, word by word; and the editors who go through articles for readability, factuality, etc.

On that note, where’s my red pen? I think I sea a few mitakes in hear.

Leave them kids alone!

Leave them kids alone!

I’m not the voice of my generation, and I’ve never claimed to be.

I’m an anxious 40-something GenXer, and I certainly have no right to speak for anyone but myself. So I only speak for myself – not any other feminists, not my LGBQ+ friends and especially not my trans friends – when I bring up this little news nugget from the salty desert state of Utah: “Utah officials secretly investigated female athlete’s gender.”

Excuse me for a moment while I flash back to several really bad pre-pubescent “pixie” cuts that weren’t so pixie and more just a typical easy walk-in $8 boy’s cuts.

Give me another minute.

Nope, another minute please. I’m thinking about eight grade, where I tried to do an undercut with long asymmetrical bangs in “reverse bob” at the same time that I also tried to go natural with my hair but also maybe sometimes straighten it with a hot comb and it ended up something like a mushroom and a bowl cut had a baby.

Until I grew my hair long for high school, I was often misgendered. Granted, I was never that “girly girl” who loved sparkly things or dolls or frilly dresses, but every time someone thought I was a boy as a child, it made me more certain that I was a girl. Sure I preferred Tinker Toys to Barbie, but when I grew up, I wanted to wear a classy skirt suit or feminine pant suit as I investigated the future Spiro Agnews and Richard Nixons, not the boring basic brown suit of my male colleagues! I was far more Nina Totenberg than Walter Cronkite! But I digress.

Ok, I’m better.

What scares me of stories like this is how horribly invasive this is to young girls at their most vulnerable time – and when I say girls, I mean all girls, whether they are assigned female or male at birth. Girls in junior and high school are just trying to figure themselves out, who they are, what they are into, how to deal with puberty and all the feelings that come along with it.

In fact, isn’t that what we’re all doing in junior high and high school? We’re dealing with crushes, and pimples, and hormones, and hairs in really weird places. We’re learning to like music that our parents really hate. And maybe if we could stop a minute and remember that feeling that we all went through, then no one would file complaints that would then land others’ minor children in investigations that are questionably legal.

Moreover, I worry about states that have proposed checking the genitals of minor girls to assure that transgender children aren’t playing sports. In states like Ohio, where this has actually been discussed – even as the largest university still pays out settlements because of a former team doctor sexually assaulted young athletes – I am appalled that people are taking things this far.

These are children! For the most part, these are games that are intended to teach them teamwork and cooperation and the meaning of competition! Only a handful will earn college scholarships, and only a tiny percentage of those children will go on to a higher level of competition such as the Olympics or professional athletics. Get over it.

Here’s my advice, and it’s unsolicited and free: Stop. Just stop. Stop putting so much pressure on your kids that they accuse their teammates or competitors of cheating. Stop invading the privacy of girls – cis or trans. And that goes for boys too.

Here’s more advice: Let’s start being supportive of children. Let’s start talking about how we can best support our preteens and teens. Let’s start talking to our teens. Let’s give them a welcoming environment, especially at a time when teen suicide rates are on the rise (according to the CDC and other experts).

Stop worrying about who wins the damn race, and let’s make sure all the kids finish and finish well.

But like I said, I’m not the voice of my generation, nor do I speak for anyone else.

My side hustle

My side hustle

If genetics is my business, virology is my side hustle.

I double majored in biology – with a focus on genetics – and journalism in undergraduate. I fell hard for genetics in those early days. The Human Genome Project was just wrapping up, and we were still learning so much. The fact that two decades later we finished decoding the last the human genome was but a fanciful dream back then. I sat in my genetics courses with only one other science journalism student sucking the marrow out of every lesson.

My second passion quickly became viruses by way of a bacteria I had fallen for years before: e. coli 0157:H7, a nasty little bug with a viral insertion that created an intestinally distressing toxin. Viruses are really nothing more than genetic material (RNA or DNA) inside a protein shell, and that fascinated me. While I only took a few microbiology courses in between my undergraduate and nursing degrees, I loved reading study after study, journal article after journal article and book after book on the tiny germs in my spare time. Once a person understands the genetics, it’s not hard to understand viruses and how they work.

When the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic struck in 2020, I was still sidelined by my own health. But I immediately found myself fascinated by the discussions between virologists versus immunologists versus public health experts versus others.

Now that I’m attempting to return to journalism, I’m bringing with me both my primary passion for genetics and my secondary love for virology. I hope to put it to good use.

Get a job

Get a job

Former journalist seeks return to the newsroom.

Current reporter returns to the newsroom after five-year hiatus.

Health reporter nearly lost career to health issues.

I keep writing and re-writing headlines to my own story in my head – no doubt because I’ve been writing a lot of cover letters lately.

Am I a “former reporter” returning to the news business? Am I a current reporter who has just had five years off because of my health and disability? Will anyone even hire someone who hasn’t had a single new clip to slip in the portfolio in five years? Does any editor want a health reporter whose body comes with its very own self-destruct button embedded in the genetic code?

Am I just a neurotic Gen-X reporter who worries endlessly and that’s why I always loved the distraction of a good deadline and a strong cup of coffee? Even I know the answer to this question: a resounding “Yes!”

I’ve been applying for remote jobs with an emphasis on being able to work in or around Boston, Mass., for about a month, while at the same time, looking for freelance work if I can’t find a fulltime remote newsroom health gig. It’s all a little terrifying to be starting over more than two decades after I started my career, but I’m doing it because health reporting is a calling. And I hear the clarion call to come back and cover all that is going on in the world – from pandemics and spreading diseases to new medical and biotech discoveries – loud and clear.