This is a post about newspapers, transparency, communities, greed, death, emergence, dispelling rumors and how communities get information. The first opinion appeared in newspapers across the United States last week. The second is a personal expression.

Longing for the old days

by Donald Kaul. Donald Kaul worked some 30 years as a syndicated Washington columnist for the Des Moines Register before retiring at the dawn of the new century. When the nation responded by electing George W. Bush—as President!—he quickly saw the error of his ways and re-enlisted in the fray as an OtherWords columnist. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

It’s been a little more than 50 years since I first walked into the Des Moines Register newsroom to begin a career in journalism.

It was a beat-up scruffy place filled with beat-up scruffy people, almost all men. They worked in a big room lined with gray steel desks piled high with newspapers, stacks of books, notebooks and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs. They wrote on manual, black typewriters. The phones, also black, had rotary dials.

This scene right out of The Front Page was a case of love at first sight. “This is my kind of place,” I told myself. And, as it turned out, I was right.

But the most important thing about that room was something you couldn’t see: an invisible wall that protected its inhabitants from interference from the business department. It meant that, if you had the facts on your side, you could annoy the rich and powerful of the city. The wall would protect you from retaliation.

The best newspapers in those days tended to be owned by long-time newspaper families. These owners viewed their papers as profit machines, certainly, but also as a public trust. These families supported the principle that news was news and business was business and the two should not be confused.

It wasn’t a perfect arrangement. It would have been better, for example, to have had more women and people of color reporting and editing the news. But it worked pretty well for decades.

Things changed in newsrooms as they did everywhere else. Computers arrived on the scene, bringing with them increased efficiency but also competition for readers and advertising dollars. The ranks of the ruling families grew too numerous to be fed by dividends alone. They cashed out, selling at elevated prices to newspaper chains, which then resold the publications to business brigands who had neither understanding nor interest in newspapers as newspapers.

In city after city, papers were closed down, staffs cut to the bone and home delivery severely curtailed. The invisible wall? Can something invisible disappear? It did. Nowhere was that scenario played out more starkly than at the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times companies, home to a half dozen of the nation’s finest papers.

A friend of mine, James O’Shea, a top editor at both the Tribune and the Times, had a ringside seat at the disaster. He’s written a book giving a blow-by-blow account: “The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers.” It’s not a pretty story.

The Chicago Tribune papers and the Los Angeles Times group merged in 2000, a move that made L.A.’s powerful Chandler clan significantly richer and journalism considerably poorer in California’s largest city.

Increasingly the bulwark between the business and news departments was ignored. The business types couldn’t understand the need for it. News should be put at the service of profits and the quicker the better, they thought.

Soon the answer to every problem was to water down the product with brutal staff cuts, domestic and foreign bureau closures and the pursuit of trivial, celebrity-oriented stories. Give the people what they want was the new mantra.

What was no-brainer logic to business people was anathema to old-fashioned journalists like O’Shea who held the quaint belief that the job of a newspaper is to inform readers. O’Shea and others fought for that creed but couldn’t overcome, in his words, “the greed, incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy of people who put their interests ahead of the public’s.”

The sad story ends with the sale of the giant corporation to a Chicago real estate tycoon, Sam Zell, a bizarre foul-mouthed figure who makes Donald Trump look couth.

Eventually Zell led the company into bankruptcy, leaving his papers limping along with insupportable debt and ever-shrinking staffs.

I hate to be one of those old crocks who talks about how things were better in the old days. But you know what?

Some things really were better in the old days, including newspapers.

What’s the story of Columbia news, views & reviews?

by Brian L. Long

[NOTE: The first part of this column was written over a year ago, but was not posted.]

I started a school newspaper when I was in fourth grade.

It’s true; it really was a school newspaper because I went to a one-room school in a then rural part of northeastern Lancaster County. There were eight grades in the same school and our teacher was someone who really cared enough to challenge us.

“Miss Fry,” I asked, “Do you think we should have a school newspaper?”

She agreed and offered her counsel as I went about producing the mimeographed 14 page first (and only) issue. But it was a start.

My grandfather was not a highly educated person; his formal education consisted of four years of school. Then he began his employment career as a “barn boy.” When he became a young adult, he went on to work for decades in an unforgiving metal foundry. He worked there for more than 47 years until he retired. Six years later he died.

I spent a lot of time at my grandparent’s house. And I watched Grandpa as he came home from work each day. First he showered and changed clothes while my Grandma made dinner. After dinner, he sat in his chair at the table and read his afternoon paper, the “Reading Times.” Remember this was northeast Lancaster County and that was the paper to which he subscribed. I watched him as he read virtually every word in that paper every day.

So my grandfather provided the spark of newspapers for me. My fourth grade teacher added some kindling. My high school journalism teacher, Miss Witman, added more fuel. I became the editor of my high school newspaper and the fire began to burn.

After a short stint studying journalism at Penn State, a couple of tours in Viet Nam and a factory job, I landed my dream job with Lancaster Newspapers. In all, my love-affair and career with newspapers in Lancaster and other places has lasted for decades.

Columbia news, views & reviews is the next step.

There is a goal and a plan. The goal is not to get rich, but it does not include losing money either. Columbia news, views & reviews is going to begin modestly. Our plan is to grow slowly as we serve the readers and shareholders of the Columbia area.

In time, we are going to try to attract advertising Customers. We are going to try to attract readers to support the advertising Customers. We are going to try to capture the spirit of Columbia and encourage news and information contributions from you … our shareholders.

We do not set this course with a doomed attitude, but we thought this column from another community newspaper launched in 2002 said it really well.

The writer, Lorraine Ostrove, wrote, “What This Town Needs Is A Really (Crappy) Community Newspaper … Who knows what fate will hold for the Beacon? Perhaps we will last just a few months. Perhaps we will last a full year. Either way, we will have made our mark. By the time we fold, hundreds of community members will have absentmindedly skimmed our unprofessional, visually unappealing rag while waiting in line for the ATM. Some may even go so far as to carry an issue back to their car, only to find it crumpled and wet under the floor mat a few months later. But when our (crappy) newspaper inevitably goes under, it will have been worth it, for The Park Hills Beacon will have made a tiny difference in the lives of some of the people who worked on one of the issues.” [NOTE: An Internet search on October 22, 2011 could not locate a Website for the Park Hills Beacon; it may no longer exist.]

The aim of Columbia news, views & reviews is to do that too … make a difference in Columbia. Hopefully, we will!

“corporatizing and decline”

As Kaul observed in his column, the “corporatizing” of newspapers degraded into a frenzy-feeding for profits at many newspapers.

Once-proud – but unprofitable – newspapers, as the Columbia News, died off or were killed off. Profiteering newspaper chains began “local newspapers” that were staff-thin hollow shells designed to mollify and pacify by printing only “good news” articles while pillaging advertising dollars from the communities they said they represented.

These profiteers were operated by organizations masquerading as newspaper publishing companies. They were nothing more than pirates – not newspapers publishers concerned about the community – focused on eviscerating the vitality from the publication and the community by escaping with the money. The profiteer that operated the first iteration of the Columbia Ledger epitomized the gutting of a community publication; just one of the scores of newspapers in communities across the United States looted and victimized by this organization.

Axiomatic in any business is: “The business must be profitable.”

Ultimately, the lack of balancing revenue against costs has resulted in the loss of local “hold-it-in-your-hands” newspapers in Columbia.

People in Lancaster County are very fortunate to have a responsible, true “hold-it-in-your-hands” local daily newspaper (Intelligencer Journal/New Era) and three local weekly newspapers (Ephrata Review, Lititz Record, The Elizabethtown Advocate). Additionally, folks in Elizabethtown have the luxury of having access to several other information resources: an excellent college newspaper, Elizabethtown College’s Etownian, and two citizen-journalism sites, the Elizabethtown Journal and WeTown.

“WEtown.org is a citizen journalism website for the Elizabethtown, PA community. The site is maintained within the Elizabethtown College Department of Communications, but all members of the community are welcome to post events, news, images, and other content of interest to the community.

“The Etownian, Elizabethtown College’s student newspaper, is published weekly during the academic year. The paper is one of the oldest news publications in Lancaster County, beginning production in 1904. Since then, the Etownian has grown to be named one of the top college newspapers in the country, earning the award First Place with Special Merit in 2010 from the American Scholastic Press Association for overall newspaper quality.”

“The Elizabethtown Journal has been designed to be a comprehensive site for citizen journalism organized around a core of regular news and features about local government, civic, economic, and social life.  A citizen journalism site seeks input from all members of the community and attempts to make contributions a simple task.  As part of the mission, forums and conversations about anything posted on the site are encouraged.”

Millersville University’s student publication, The Snapper, and Franklin & Marshall College’s, The Diplomat, also provide information about news on and off campus for their communities.

Until we win the lottery (which will give us the revenue resources to produce a “hold-it-in-your-hands” newspaper) the goal of Columbia news, views & reviews will continue to be produce an on-line citizen-journalism contributory information source. As stated at the Website,

“A locally operated alternative news and information source, Columbia news, views & reviews will try to remember that nothing contributes to the well-being of a community more than a balanced, objective and consistent local news and information source.

“Columbia news, views & reviews will try to be a community bulletin board containing accurate, fair news reporting, thoughtful insights and useful information that every reader in the community will find valuable.

“Our goal is to celebrate what’s good about Columbia and its shareholders — including the idiosyncrasies that make them uniquely attractive — while calling attention, thoughtfully and fearlessly, with humor and without pomposity, to what can and should be improved.”

“Columbia news, views & reviews  will be open to contributions from the community (including quality writing and photography submissions) and seeks to provide a big picture view of important issues. One of our goals is to update this site each day.

“The contributors of articles, stories, columns, photographs and observations presented here are people who are passionate about government transparency, rule of law, equal treatment, human dignity, history and community development and opportunity. We encourage and welcome comments, suggestions and discussion.”

We intend to continue to follow along that path!