Bill Berry: Staff cuts sad for papers -- and America

Bill Berry  —  7/08/2008 8:46 am

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week ran a remarkable if disturbing series of articles about the health of Lake Michigan. Reporter Dan Egan has been bird-dogging the story of the out-of-whack Great Lakes ecosystem for months in a yearlong series called "Great Lakes, Great Peril."

Later in the week, the Journal Sentinel ran another disturbing story: It plans to cut its work force by 10 percent.

Recently there have also been cuts announced at the Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post, Hartford Courant, Baltimore Sun, Boston Herald and other papers.

The ills of the daily newspaper business are well documented and sometimes gleefully reported by other sources. The daily Capital Times met its own demise earlier this year, and the reaction of many bloggers was "good riddance, you liberal bastards." Of course, they had no clue that the Cap Times had quietly and doggedly spent thousands of hours over the years protecting the rights of all Wisconsin citizens to know what's going on inside the halls of government, from the State Capitol in Madison to the distant town halls on county trunk roads.

Other media are in flux too, but newspaper cuts get most of the attention. We hear that people now get their news from lots of other sources, that citizen journalists will replace the foot soldiers taken off their beats, that the Web or some other entity will fill the vacuum. Maybe, but don't count on it.

As longtime Wisconsin media observer Bill Kraus has noted, America is undergoing a fundamental change in how it receives information, and most people have no clue that it matters. Fact is, you can't take thousands of reporters off the streets of this nation and not be the worse for it. There is simply nothing to replace this vital link to informing the public about what's going on in their towns.

When I was in the daily news business, I used to tell young reporters that sometimes the stories that never made it to print were the most important ones. Many times, the mere act of paying attention was enough to keep politicians, bureaucrats and even powerful corporate interests on the straight and narrow. Hot stories got squelched because they never happened, thanks to the watchdogs.

Times really have changed. An editor friend recently told me that many of those in power ignore the media these days like it doesn't exist. How comfortable for them.

Personally, I shudder at the thought of further weakening the major state newspaper. It's hard to imagine what source, if not the Journal Sentinel, will bring us important state stories like those Egan produced last week.

Last year, the Journal Sentinel dug deep into the tangled tale of how a dangerous chemical commonly shows up in consumer plastic products as government regulators look the other way. You know what? Congress suddenly launched an investigation, and some manufacturers removed the chemical from their products.

There's a rich tradition of that kind of work in the old Journal building. Stories like that take weeks and months to develop. It's hard work, often thankless drudgery. Only daily newspapers in modern history were willing to devote the resources and time to get to the bottom of complex stories. A whole team of lawyers couldn't match the work of a couple of relentless reporters turned loose to get to the bottom of something.

What happened? Generational change, TV, the Web, demands on the public's time and a myriad of other factors. Yes, newspapers themselves focused more on profits and less on journalism, and in the process, many lost their souls and their personal relationships with readers. When I was at the Stevens Point Journal in the 1990s, the now-defunct Thomson Newspapers swooped down one day and acquired the locally owned institution. The first day the Canadian corporation took control, each employee got a handbook. The cover proclaimed that Thomson was a "Marketing and Communications Company." The alphabet I'd learned placed C before M. I figured it was time to hitch up my horse and ride.

That's what reporters are being told to do across the country these days. About all I can think of saying is good luck, America.

Bill Berry of Stevens Point writes a semimonthly column for The Capital Times.

Bill Berry  —  7/08/2008 8:46 am