Journalism

Newspapers are bleeding

Fran Gardner photo

Check in

Take time, breathe a beat, feel gratitude.

Forgive. It is a gift to you.

Remember what matters: Spirit, authenticity, justice, words.

Let the work come. Don’t force it.

Light your lamp: Inspiration will come sooner than you think.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

~Pause, reflect, remember~

“MLK is in my heart, right there with Jesus” 
—Maggie Gardner, age 9 or 10, when she was attending Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary in Portland, Ore.

New York Public Library via Unsplash

A thought on freedom

Freedom is a scary thing
Not many people really want it
—Laurie Anderson

The newspaper biz

Sometimes readers have mentioned that the Oregonian, where I worked for 34 years, isn’t the same newspaper as it was before I left in 2008.

Well, no, it’s not. I left in a buyout that reduced the newsroom staff by about a third and was followed by more buyouts and layoffs in following years.

The sea change in communication generated by  the Internet, the World Wide Web, Google and social media started as a trickle in the early 90s and became a gusher by 1995. Almost overnight, The Oregonian’s biggest moneymaker, classified advertising, was wiped out by Craig’s List.

Dancing on a volcano

The old model didn’t work anymore, and in trying to find a new one, The Oregonian’s owners made some mistakes. One was assuming everyone would be happy to get their news online from a site that suffered from a lot of glitches in the early years.

Another was ending daily delivery. The paper publishes daily but only offers home delivery four days a week. Cutting deliver days was a knuckleheaded move that incensed the paper’s most loyal readers, the tens of thousands who had a daily ritual of reading the newspaper along with their cornflakes every morning.

But, but, still

Despite all that, no other paper—certainly no TV station or online venue—covers Portland and the rest of Oregon the way The Oregonian does.

People are proud to say they don’t subscribe to The Oregonian anymore. But that’s nuts.

Two things:

1. The Oregonian is still a darned good newspaper.

2. Everyone, including YOU, should be supporting journalism. Everywhere. Whenever possible.

The Oregonian, newspaper of quality

Every day, Oregon’s paper of record has stories that matter. Old hands like Jeff Manning (long overdue for a Pulitzer, by the way), Tom Hallman, Jr. (already won a Pulitzer), Max Bernstein, Noelle Crombie, Margaret Haberman, Betsy Hammond, Aaron Fentress—well, I’d like to list everyone, but I haven’t got all day—are joined by talented newcomers like Catalina Gaitán, Kristine de Leon and Gosia Wozniacka.

Here’s the whole crew.

The paper recently published a heart-wrenching series of articles on the racist past of the newspaper, something I was aware of but never expected to see laid out in such detail. It was accompanied by a strongly worded apology on behalf of the paper by Executive Editor Therese Bottomly.

Opinion and lifestyle features, plus two pages of comics—a leftover from the 1982 merger of The Oregonian with The Oregon Journal—fill many pages. Much of it is canned content from other providers, but at least it is good journalism—based on solid research and reporting.

“I think The Oregonian’s a very good paper,” was a recent comment from David Lippoff, a career television executive who was once the general manager of KOIN (6) in Portland. He credits Bottomly’s leadership.

Cue the grammar police?

The stories generated by The Oregonian’s greatly reduced staff are well-written, tightly written, on point—models of succinctness and good sense in the universe of overwrought, overwritten efforts by amateurs that clutter the blogosphere.

Even grammar glitches are rare. Old-time editors like me who expected worse are pleased not to have to be the grammar police. Few cliches, even, just straightforward writing.

The hardest and most important thing editors do is make sure stories are complete. In articles I’ve read recently, all the pieces are there; it’s seldom that a story raises unanswered questions.

Circulation is now an online issue

Therese Bottomly, the executive editor, says The Oregonian takes seriously its commitment to informing the community:

We put only about 10% of our news behind our digital Subscriber Exclusive wall, so a paid subscription to OregonLive is a gesture of support rather than necessity. I suspect if we locked up 90% of our news, the number of subscribers would go up accordingly. We have to balance serving the community, too.

Of course, The Oregonian has to make money somehow, and readers have to put up with display ads with images that can be, frankly, disgusting. Worse are the animations, pulling your attention away from the accompanying story.

Newspapers die

Bottomly notes that the trend of reducing print continues, especially for smaller papers. The Medford Mail-Tribune ended its print edition at the end of September to go entirely online. Then, last week, it abruptly closed altogether, ending publication on Friday the Thirteenth of January, 2023.

The paper was the first in Oregon to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1934. It had published since at least 1907.

The Tidings in Ashland, where I once worked, shut down in 2021.

This leaves Jackson County, with a population approaching 230,000, without a newspaper of record. The Roseburg News-Review, in Douglas County, might try to increase its coverage in Jackson County. The nonprofit Ashland.news is making a valiant effort to cover the county.

Newspapers matter

Journalism is bleeding everywhere from the unkind cuts of the Internet. Yet never has it been more important for countering the vast torrents of really fake news—unsubstantiated rumors and opinions that gain traction because they are so shocking. Q Anon comes to mind, as does the migration of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine rhetoric to platforms like Substack.

If you live in Oregon, supporting The Oregonian should be a no-brainer. But also, please consider supporting journalism elsewhere.

For example, I have online subscriptions to The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Guardian (London), The Washington Post and The Economist (which describes itself as a newspaper, not a magazine).

Also, the Rainy Lake Gazette in International Falls, Minn., my home town, which has a nice cozy column by the town librarian. Subscription is cheap, $1.50 a week or $52 a year. And you’ll get stories you never could anticipate.

Here is a photo from a recent front page

A moose kneels to lick salt from a highway southwest of International Falls Jan. 4 while her calf stands near. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources reports that for the 11th year in a row, Minnesota’s moose population of 3,440-6,780 animals remains stable. Ben Sunne photo for the Rainy Lake Gazette

Online, too

I also subscribe to several web-only news and/or investigative enterprises such as The Intercept, Bellingcat, Slate, HuffPost and Democracy Now!

Of course I can’t keep up with these publications, any more than I can the handful of magazines I get online or in the mail. The point is that I am giving a little to support the work. If everybody does that, journalism thrives and America is a better place.

Please step up

Remember that journalism does not happen in a vacuum. Supporting responsible reporting is a civic duty akin to voting.

Many of my fellow writers on Substack charge readers for the privilege of accessing their information. The cheapest subscription allowed by the platform is $5 a month, and while some of these newsletters are information-rich, they are typically generated by a single individual. Even the most hard-working blogger is going to be stretched.

For about that same amount—the cost of a minimally fancy coffee drink—you can support news organizations that actually have the resources to cover complex issues.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of The Washington Post. It’s up to us to try to keep the lights on.

A final note

Jonathan Brinckman, a colleague from The Oregonian and a member of my (sometime) MS yoga group, died on Dec. 29. He will be greatly missed.

Fran Gardner photo

Kidnap, kidnaped, kidnapping

~Spelling matters less and less~

I wrote recently that for a long time AP Style was not “kidnapped” but “kidnaped.”

If you Google “kidnaped,” the usual explanation is that it’s a misspelling. But for many decades in the last century, “kidnapped” was the misspelling.

My Instant Spelling Dictionary, third edition, 1981, the proofreaders’ bible, allows only one spelling, and that is “kidnaped.” This is the explanation:

Rule 4. In words of two or more syllables that are accented on the final syllable and end in a single consonant, preceded by a single vowel, double the final consonant before a suffix beginning with a vowel. If the accent is not on the last syllable, the final consonant is not doubled.

Thus:

Refer, referred, referring.
Cancel, canceled, canceling. But cancellation, because the stress changes. 
Benefit, benefited, benefiting. 
Regret, regretting, regrettable.
Dispel, dispelling, dispelled. 
Disbar, disbarred, disbarring. But disbarment, as the suffix does not start with a vowel.
Tranquil, tranquillity.
Travel, traveled, traveling.
Snivel, sniveled, sniveling.
Worship, worshiped, worshiping (like kidnapped, worshipped is now the common spelling).

“Kidnaped” has its own issues

One problem with “kidnaped” is that without the double pp, the “a” sound is lengthened, so that it seems to rhyme with “caped” instead of “capped.”

Also, the “kidnapped” spelling has been around a while. Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novel Kidnapped was serialized in Young Folks magazine in 1886.

Spellcheck doesn’t care

Spellcheck is not any help. On my Mac, it recognizes both kidnaped and kidnapping, benefiting and benefitting,  canceled and cancelled, tranquility and tranquillity, traveling and traveling—actually, all the alternatives of the spellings I’ve listed here.

The good news is that it really doesn’t matter how you spell these words, because there’s no misunderstanding their meaning. Tranquility and tranquillity describe the same property.

So just pick one.

Check out

~Take a break from the news~

Many of my newsroom colleagues are self-confessed “news junkies.” The need for a fix keeps them glued to media, even on vacation.

I’m not like that. It’s good to be informed, but I can take continual updates or leave them. I even stopped watching cable news once the Trump noise quieted down.

Try taking a break from constant coverage. You will be saner and happier. You may enjoy the mellow feeling.

It’s well known that turning off electronic media at least half an hour before you go to bed will improve your sleep. And checking the news the instant you wake up is, when you think of it, an abysmal way to start the day.

Sometimes you need to just walk away. Sit, lonely, in a quiet room—or with your beloved and the dog—and resolve not to do news, not at the present time. Sabbaths are good days to take a break from information. (It’s up to you to determine whether watching the game counts as news.)

Try listening to birdsong rather than talking heads. Read some calming (or challenging!) poetry instead of inflammatory op-eds.

Be at peace, beloved.

And please, please, write every day.

Last thoughts . . .

Remember that January is “buy nothing” month. Stay home from the mall and limit your online browsing. If you really want something, consider leaving it in the “shopping cart” until February. You might find then that you don’t really want it.

Take some Sabbath time to think about what you really do want.

Freedom is a scary thing
Not many people really want it

—30—