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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2019-10-10, Page 5Other Views Digging up the truth isn’t cheap Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense When my wife and I first started talking about marriage with her family (and it was a pretty brief window) the question came up about what I see myself doing for the rest of my life. Long-time readers of The Citizen will know that I’ve been a journalist here longer than I’ve been married. As a matter of fact, this coming February will mark my first 10 years at The Citizen while this coming May will mark my fifth wedding anniversary (five years already, how about that?) So when I was asked about my future plans, I went with the first thing that came to mind: I might follow in my great-grandfather’s footsteps and look to politics someday. After all, it is a common path for many journalists. You get tired of watching politicians screw things up royally and decide you can do a better job. Sometimes you can, sometimes you end up in the middle of a housing scandal. You win some, you lose some. If I had more time to think, I’d like to think I would’ve said the following: I’m where I’m supposed to be. Shawn and I actually discussed this awhile back, people keep suggesting that I must be on the lookout for something different. People suggest I follow in the footsteps of other journalists who have moved to larger centres or jumped ship and started working for education centres. That’s not my goal, and it never has been. Sure, there are times when I think of relocating, but I don’t ever dream of being anything except what I am proud to be: a small-town journalist. The reason for that is you, loyal readers of The Citizen. A long-time joke during events like National Newspaper Week or days like “Hug a Newsperson Day” is that we don’t need hugs or platitudes, we need people to buy into the notion that local news is the best news. We here at The Citizen are no different in that regard. We need everyone to know the importance of local news. Where we are different, however, is that we get that support. We’re told quite often that we’re doing a good job or that we’re your favourite newspaper in Huron County, and we appreciate that. Just like in any other fields, there are reporters who do the job because they love it and those who do it for the benefits, be that pay or some kind of sense of entitlement that follows it. The latter leave pretty quickly when they realize the amount of work (or screwups) needed to become a recognized local journalist and what’s left are the guys like Shawn and I who go to those 3 a.m. fire calls, sit through those hours-long council meetings and sift through page after page of documents to find the stories that matter most to our community. We don’t do it because of the gratitude or the recognition, we do it because it needs to be done and because The Citizen has a proven track record of doing the job well. That said, we appreciate the recognition and the gratitude because it lets us know that the work we are doing is as important to the people who read the paper as it is to us when we’re doing it. That’s why I think National Newspaper Week has it backwards. It should be National Communities That Support Their Newspapers Week or National Newspaper Readers Week. It’s a lot less pithy, but a lot more accurate. (Actually, that’s a good way to compare local news to other sources you might get your news from, like social media.) Shawn and I love what we do. Trust me, you’re not laying out a newspaper at 6 a.m. if your blood isn’t at leastly partly newsprint. We love it, and we couldn’t do it if it weren’t for the people who continually find value in what we do. You show that by telling us, by subscribing to the newspaper, by advertising in it and by telling other people to read The Citizen. The question that we ask ourselves all the time is how do we make the best product? Every time someone tells us we’re doing a good job, or says they particularly liked something we do, we internalize the specifics and try to continue to do those things, so your feedback, while welcome, also helps to shape what you see in the future. So in honour of the poorly-named National Newspaper Week, allow me to say thank you. Thank you for giving a local newspaper like The Citizen the environment it needs to shine. Thank you for your feedback, both good, critical and bad. Thank you for realizing the value in what we do and who we are. And mostly, thank you for reading. Thank you for taking what we produce weekly and making it a part of your life and your thought process. The world is in a dangerous place right now where politicians are demonizing the craft to which Shawn and I have dedicated huge chunks of our lives or flat-out killing journalists. Your continued patronage shows that there is still belief and pride in local news and that support means the world to us. Denny Scott Denny’s Den THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2019. PAGE 5. The Dark Knights When I went through the journalism program at Humber College, I studied alongside people who wanted to be just like famed journalists Hunter S. Thompson or Anna Wintour; taking over the world one piece at a time. We all had dreams of being hotshot writers who were our own stories. Writing a column (there were only three per issue, so there was competition to earn a spot) about yourself was the pinnacle of achievement at the Humber Et Cetera. The responsibility and importance of being a reporter, not to mention writing about people far more interesting than yourself, hadn’t really been drilled into us yet. It wasn’t until I began work at The Citizen, 14 years ago this month, that I understood the covenant between a community, especially a small one, and its news source. It’s National Newspaper Week and a great time to reflect. It’s not about telling your own story (which I’m obviously doing a very good job of right now), but about telling the stories of others. I learned a lot from everyone at The Citizen, especially founder and former Publisher Keith Roulston, and soon enough this young man born and raised in a Toronto suburb learned about the ins and outs of a rural community. I learned that we all can’t be Woodward and Bernstein breaking Watergate, The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team uncovering systematic abuse in the Catholic Church or The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey who opened the floodgates of the Me Too movement. These massive stories affect the lives of millions, holding power accountable. In journalism, these stories are so rare they’re unicorns. Unless you’re taking down the president or uncovering unspeakable abuses, how are you changing lives? While many simply aim to climb and join the unicorn hunt, on a pole that gets greasier every year, Denny, Keith and I and the whole Citizen team have learned that you can change lives anywhere without the use of unicorns. Sure, we’ve had our fair share of big stories and we’ve won awards, including national gold, but our work, like the work of most other reporters in the world, is defined by the day-to- day grind of giving voice to a community. It’s more council meetings than parking garage meetings and more chats over coffee than chats over encrypted e-mail servers, but it’s that work that feeds into the old saying that journalism is the first rough draft of history. Week by week and year by year, newspapers like The Citizen all over the world build a history for their people. At The Citizen, we celebrate with our community, we mourn with our community and we seek the truth the community deserves, all while treating everyone with the respect they also deserve. In a world where education levels are lacking and people are doubting universal scientists far smarter than themselves on vaccinations, climate change and the roundness of the planet, many are eating what dangerous people are spoonfeeding to them, whether it’s Ontario News Now or Donald Trump’s Tweets. They need educated, researched news, but they also need to listen. We live in a strange time when journalists are becoming the “Dark Knights” of the world, working to uncover things for people almost in spite of those same people. The world needs news more than ever at the same time people insist they’ve never needed it less, meeting journalists with criticism and hostility. On National Newspaper Week, it’s crucial to look at this venture of ours and why the world needs it now more than ever. Talk of impeaching U.S. President Donald Trump will have some of us of a certain age thinking “haven’t we been through all this before?” The seldom-used procedure to remove a president who has engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors, has been used twice before in the past 50 years. The House of Assembly impeached Bill Clinton in 1998 for lying under oath, but he wasn’t convicted in the Senate. The case that sticks out most, however, was the impeachment against Richard Nixon in 1974 which saw him resign rather than being forced from office. Nixon was brought down only because of dogged work by reporters for the New York Times and, more famously, the Washington Post whose investigative team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were made famous by the movie All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. What’s striking, watching the movie today, is how long it took from the original burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate Hotel by men hired by the Republican Committee to Re-elect the President until Nixon was finally cornered and resigned in August 1974. He was even re- elected for a second term in November, 1972 before the evidence dug up by journalists, drip by drip, day by day, eroded his credibility and led even Republicans to abandon him. What’s less evident is how much it cost for the Post to assign those two reporters for two whole years to this one story, not to mention the money the Times was expending for its own investigative team. It gives a different meaning to “Follow the money”, the words of advice from Mark Felt, the secret FBI informant who kept Woodward on track and became famously known as Deep Throat. Newspapers have played an essential role in the success of our western democracies, doing the hard slogging to keep governments from improprieties. The Globe and Mail triggered the scandal over SNC-Lavalin while the Toronto Star’s investigative team ferreted out the sordid details of the drug dealers with whom former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford associated. None of this makes the press popular with politicians. Trump’s charge of “fake news” against any media outlet that reports on his rule-bending escapades is a new version of the accusations Republicans made about the Post’s revelations. Doug Ford, now Ontario’s Premier, was scathing in his criticism of the Star when he was defending his brother in 2013. The revelations of those newspapers caused controversy and divided the population between those who believed what they were reading and those who wanted it to be nothing more than a partisan attack on the man (to this point it’s almost always been a man) they supported. Yet ironically, traditional print media may be an important tool in preventing the type of polarization that’s infecting the U.S., Britain and other western democracies, according to a lengthy article in the current issue of The Walrus that examines whether this sort of populist wave has invaded Canada. The article points to research done by Columbia University’s Difficult Conversations Lab at its Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. “When participants were given a thoughtful, multifaceted article to read before they spoke, they had a more productive conversation, and when they read an oversimplified piece, highlighting polarized views, the conversation was more heated.” The problem, The Walrus’s article points out, is that reported news, the sort of fact-based (and fact-checked) coverage that newspapers offer their readers, is expensive. It’s much easier and less expensive for someone to sound off on social media, whether they have any real knowledge to back up their opinions or not. An increasing proportion of the population these days, however, wants information to be free. They are unwilling to pay the price required (a newspaper subscription) for professionals to go out and gather the news, let alone to dig up the misdeeds governments want to keep buried. The New York Times and the Washington Post both still have the resources to conduct the investigations that have Trump denouncing them on Twitter. But the trend of online news consumers is to get national news from major outlets and think they have all the news. Local newspapers have been weakened to the point they can’t afford reporters to give comprehensive coverage of local affairs, let alone dig into local governments’ misdeeds. There’s even concern within the industry that the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, won’t survive. From Nixon to Trump to Rob Ford, newspapers have played an essential role in bringing citizens the truth. Who will replace them if the public isn’t willing to support their efforts? Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk National Newspaper Readers Week