Celebrate National Newspaper Week – and the press

 

Bill Knight column for 10-8, 9 or 10, 2020

 Although this week is the 80^th annual National Newspaper Week, apologies for returning to the necessity of a free press so soon after promoting the Local Journalism Sustainability Act (less than two weeks ago). Plus, it’s obviously self-serving for any journalist to tout the importance of the press – and a bit narcissistic since I’ve been writing for newspapers since a week before I turned 16 years old.

However, “America Needs Journalists” – the theme for National Newspaper Week Oct. 4 through this Saturday.

Further, another proposal on Capitol Hill seeks to help.

Why bother?

First, it was no accident that our Founders wrote Freedom of the Press into the Constitution’s Bill of Rights – the First Amendment of them all.

“Government exists to serve the people, but America needs journalists to navigate the bureaucracy and dig out needed information,” said Carol Hunter, executive editor of the Des Moines Register.

Anticipating the democratic republic that they were creating, the Founders new government’s own checks and balances must be strengthened by “the consent of the governed,” an informed people.

So newspapers hold government accountable, but much more.

Next, the nation also needs journalists to show the common ground where we all live, our communities’ mutual interests and ideals, trials and triumphs, the tales of everyday folks who do remarkable things, the news that can be heartwarming or inspiring if sometimes shocking or enraging.

The unprecedented challenge 2020 has been for the world hasn’t spared newspapers, which already had lost ads to the internet, circulation to tight household budgets and busy schedules, and now stability to the uncertainty of the coronavirus’ effects on people’s lives and the economy – a pandemic forcing essential-worker reporters to risk their health and lives to make sure readers know what’s going on.

That has meant trying to make sense of COVID-19 and the dizzying data on its victims, treatments, spread and precautions, from the somehow controversial recommendation to wear face coverings and distance ourselves to controversial actions about reopening schools and businesses despite dangers.

Newspapers were struggling before. Since 2004, some 2,000 local newspapers have shut down, about one-fourth of the country’s papers. That’s resulted in “news deserts,” places many stories don’t get told because there’s no newspaper to do so. Newspaper employment has also plummeted, about 50%, meaning fewer reporters to do the work in newsrooms that are hanging on.

Without newspapers, people in news deserts may have distant dailies, regional broadcasters or national cable and satellite services who say they serve towns, “but their content is global, national, state or skimpy,” as I’ve written. “They miss many local celebrations and small-market government, births and deaths, stores’ or streets’ openings and closings, fundraisers and service clubs and churches and school boards and so on: events that make up Americans’ lives – and futures.”

That’s often dubbed “human interest” in newsrooms, where newsworthiness also hangs on material that’s local, timely, significant, affecting someone prominent, or unusual.

Reporters have a Code of Ethics to seek the truth and report it fully, act independently, be accountable and transparent, and minimize harm, according to the Society of Professional Journalists, one of many groups to endorse the Local News Commission Act (S4772). Other supporting organizations include the National Writers Union and NewsGuild labor union, press photographers, the Online News Association, the Pulitzer Center, associations of Native American and Hispanic journalists, and alternative news media.

The Local News Commission Act (S4772)  would set up a 13-member Future of Local News Commission to “examine and report on the role of local news gathering in sustaining democracy in the United States and the factors contributing to the demise of local journalism, and to propose policies and mechanisms that could reinvigorate local news to meet the critical information needs of the people of the United States in the 21st century.”

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), said, “Local news is foundational to our democracy, but a convergence of forces – from consolidation to social media to COVID-19 – has pushed newsrooms across America to the brink. My hope is that this commission will – in a nonpartisan, sober and thoughtful manner – come forward with recommendations to help reinvigorate local journalism across the country while preserving the independence vital to a free and robust press.”

Randy Evans, a newsman for 42 years who now leads the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, summed up the state of newspapers in this time – and this week.

“The immense challenges we all have dealt with this year clearly underscore the fact that America needs journalists,” he said.