No respect I tell ya...

It is a terrifically discouraging time to be a journalist, and many more posts here would include my thoughts on the subject but since nobody likes other peoples’ shop-talk, I try to keep it to myself. Though sometimes the conversations taking place way up in the stratosphere of Big League Journalism trickle down onto my head while mucking along down here on earth. I like Jack Shafer’s work very much, and usually agree with him. His work on the disheartening prevalence of anonymous sources in the national media is especially worthwhile. But the very idea of writing about media and journalism is weird and self-referential. And in Mr. Shafer’s case it seems that he has had too long to get comfy with a steady gig from a big family-owned news concern, and hasn’t talked to nearly enough people actually out in the hills trying to do this stuff. Lately he has been complaining about complaining about cuts at newspapers. He was talking about the big guys, whose steady stream of lay-offs has had ripple effects down to every level of the profession. He thinks it’s no big deal, and journalists should stop being so full of themselves. He feels so strongly about the subject that he even chose to refine his points in the face of criticism today. At first, I though all this was just the obnoxious, knee-jerk contrarianism that has been Slate’s bread-and-butter throughout (I always expect to see the headline, “Why not smoking and eating a healthy diet is bad for you”), but there is a little more here. I work at a newspaper that has already been cut away to nearly nothing. We had our big purge in 1995 when a certain big corporation bought the place from a well-regarded lcoal family and came in with sharpened pruning sheers. I know very well what it is like to have to do far too many things – cover too many towns, responsible for too many project stories, keep track of too many people. And what’s worse, the people you write for do little but complain about all the things you can’t do. But perhaps what gets me is Mr. Shafer’s rather sharp dismissal of journalism’s beloved self-positioning as watchdog and civil servant:

“Scratch a serious reporter, and he'll offer volumes about the "public service" his newspaper performs in the form of investigations: It watchdogs government. It keeps corporations honest. It uncovers the dastardly deeds of foreign dictators and prevents genocide. It exposes quacks and charlatans. (It turns the common man into a Socrates if he reads the editorials!)”

Well, har har har. Last night I covered a selectmen’s meeting in one of the seven towns I’m responsible for. There were the five board members, the town administrator and assistant, two reporters, and one concerned citizen. They were talking about the upcoming budget, but couldn’t help but spend several minutes at the end of the meeting in a red-faced rant-fest complaining about the media, disagreeable people who attend meetings, and all the other evildoers that have conspired to create a truly difficult situation for the town. I don’t know if our presence there just gave them something else to holler about, but if the interest of the majority of residents who pay taxes and can’t even be bothered to vote is any hint, we are doing something that Mr. Shafer has forgotten about. Now earlier in my career I spent awhile working in that stratospheric big-league journalism world and I saw a lot of things that made me shake my head at how callow and silly it all was. And I listened to many, many chest-thumping pep talks at J-school hitting all these notes Shafer mocks, and many of my colleagues there are now very successful and following along the agenda that he thinks is so funny. But when I moved out to a smalltown newspaper, making so little money I can barely make my student loan payments, with little hope of going anywhere because every place I’d like to work is firing people, it really gets you down to the brass tacks of what this is really all about. He writes: “My admiration for original investigative reporting knows no bounds. But the defenders of journalistic excellence will have to make a better case for the connection between big staffs and great journalism before I don my helmet and rush to man the Los Angeles Times barricades.” So how about a kind word for the connection between tiny staffs and alright journalism? Jesus, I have to stop reading Slate.