48. Pressure

But milkmen weren't holding up democracy

Remnants of fire on Mt. Hood, photo taken 2018.

I grew up in newsrooms. My dad was a breaking news reporter when I was a baby. By the time I was a toddler, he was the guy who both read the news and did the weather. From there he had a string of weather jobs that took us all around New York state before I was 6-years-old. Then, finally, when I was 8, a station all the way out in Portland, Oregon liked what they saw on his tape, he got a job at KGW and the rest was history.

Being the child of a news man meant our refrigerator magnets were clouds and lightning — relics of when the weather board was actually a real map. My godfather was a camera man my dad tackled difficult stories with. My big achievements in school or on the soccer field were announced on the air as “awww” moments for the viewers at home. We didn’t put political signs in our yard.

It also meant that on the occasional Friday or Saturday night, I got to go hang out in the newsroom with my dad. For most of my childhood, he did the 5 pm, 6 pm and 11 pm shows, and going to work with him meant I got to drink Pepsi late and eat snacks out of the vending machines, then fall asleep in the car by the time we hit the Vista Ridge tunnel.

Being the kid of a news guy meant when it came time for him to check the rainfall for the night, we’d go up onto the roof of the TV station in downtown Portland and peer into the instruments he had set up, the city lights all around us. And when the news went on the air, I’d sit quietly in a chair in the back of the dark studio and watch it all come together. I had a panoramic view no other kid had: the giant cameras with snarls of thick cables, the green screen where my dad would enthusiastically gesture at a storm moving across Oregon, even though the clouds were all animations. The reporters and anchors would wave to me back there on commercial breaks.

It is no surprise to me that I would aspire to a career in journalism one day. The newsroom was a buzz of ringing phones, people yelling across the sea of desks. Everyone seemed so smart, and what was happening always felt so vital. Reporting the news seemed like the best job in the world, but it also seemed very hard. My dad seemed to work constantly in order to boil down what he was saying into 4 minute soundbites, then do it all again the next day.

When I started to express my desire to get into journalism, too, my dad warned me: getting into media was a risky business — cutthroat, mean. Remember all the times we’d had to move? Uproot our lives? I didn’t listen of course. I figured newspapers would be different.

Print journalism wasn’t exactly an easy career to get into— even when I graduated from college in 2003. I had been editor of the paper and even started my own newspaper. My grades were fine, but my GRE scores were terrible. Grad school was out for me.

I knew people who were moving to New York after graduation to try their hand at getting a media job, but that was out of the question for me — I had no money, a lot of student loans and the number of rejections I’d gotten for internships and fellowships did not make me think I’d have much more luck on the ground. I wanted to make journalism, even felt a little like I was helping carry a family legacy forward.

My first reporting job would be at The Cheney Free-Press, a small weekly rural paper in the same town that houses Eastern Washington University. I covered city council, a lot of high school sports, and if a new business opened, I was there for the ribbon-cutting. It wasn’t a dream reporting job, but it was a job and I’ll never forget how proud I was to have it.

I’ve done plenty of rehashing of my early days in journalism in this newsletter; they were not glorious or exciting, more like an awkward fumbling-around period. But my point here is that there were places for people like me — a person with no money, subpar grades and a hell of a lot of gumption — to learn. When my dad was coming up in television journalism, there were places for him too: someone from a working-class family who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, but had a nose for news and could talk to just about anyone.

These days I’m not so sure it would be possible for either of us to get into media. Especially not in the Northwest. This was one thing I was thinking about when news broke on June 1.

The first news was out of EO Media. The company said it was laying off staff at outlets across the state of Oregon, dropping print editions of papers in Bend, Pendleton and Medford — some of the largest cities in the state — down to one or two a week, and that “The La Grande Observer, Blue Mountain Eagle, Hermiston Herald, Wallowa County Chieftain and the Baker City Herald” would all stop printing papers by July 1.

An excerpt from the Blue Mountain Eagle:

A third of Oregon’s newspapers have shuttered in the past 20 years, leading to news deserts in two counties and leaving 16 counties with a single news publication covering hundreds of square miles, according to Jody Lawrence-Turner, executive director of the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism. Additionally, 68% of Oregon’s incorporated cities lack a local news source.

“Democracy is at risk and communities suffer when community-based reporting disappears,” she said.

Even with publications that remain open, thousands of newsroom jobs have been lost, Dean Ridings [of America’s Newspaper Foundation] said.

“Newspapers are often the very fabric of the communities they serve. When a newspaper reduces its capacity, everyone feels it,” he said.

Ridings said that during the pandemic, newspapers saw an encouraging uptick of subscribers.

“Unfortunately, it does not seem there’s been a willingness to continue that level of support,” he added.

The industry still battles the perception that information should be free online.

“There’s a continued lack of understanding of the need to pay for good journalism,” Ridings said.

The same day, Pamplin Media — which owns more than two-dozen news outlets in Oregon — announced it was selling to the Mississippi-based Carpenter Media.

Up in Washington state in late June, Carpenter announced that it was laying off half the staff at The Everett Herald. The chair of the company said such deep cuts were necessary to “invest in and organize our team to move forward to produce a product that continues to improve and serve.”

As workers went on strike, The Seattle Times reported that The Herald’s publisher “said after the layoffs that ‘operations are not going to change much’ and ‘readers won’t notice.’”

“Journalism is not an ordinary business. It has nothing to do with widgets. It is the weft in the fabric of democracy, and to unravel it is to do this nation a disservice.” — Eric Nadler

This was, of course, ridiculous to anyone who has actually made journalism.

Journalist Eric Nadler wrote in an email to leadership there, which was posted to Twitter:¹

“Everyone knows the business has fallen on hard times. When you talk to these journalists, photographers, designers and producers about doing more with less, it should be in the context of congratulating them on the daily miracle of their passion, not in the context of turning out the light on their work. Journalism is not an ordinary business. It has nothing to do with widgets. It is the weft in the fabric of democracy, and to unravel it is to do this nation a disservice.”

I think at the heart of his argument is something just about everyone misunderstands about journalism: it is not-sexy, often-maddening work that is often difficult, frequently boring, and sporadically fascinating. It’s an industry that, for the most part, requires an embrace of a one-step-forward, two-steps-back mentality. You are Sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill. You need to be fine with that.

But people don’t seem to understand what it means to really be a journalist; seems like the publisher of The Everett Herald doesn’t either.

Movies and TV shows don’t do journalists much good. She Said is a rare good movie² about the journalists who reported the Harvey Weinstein story, and I think it pretty accurately portrays how far reporters will go to get the job is done³. But for the most part, journalism is usually portrayed pretty much the opposite of how it actually is.⁴

But even the journalists in She Said are one extremely specific kind of journalist; not everyone is trying to break a high-profile story every week. Not everyone can break a high-profile story. In fact, most journalists should not be thinking about high-profile stories all the time because journalism, as a project, is meant to present information, create a record of history. Document, inform, analyze. We chew your food for you so you can digest easier.

I was thinking about this lack of understanding of journalism recently when I was strolling through the aisles of a farmer’s market with a few journalist friends, and a signature gatherer approached us about putting our names on a petition. No, we can’t, we’re journalists, I told him. The guy was puzzled: “journalists can’t sign petitions?” I told him, no — you know, the whole not-having-a-bias thing, and he shrugged and walked away.

Over the course of the next hour, we were approached by two more signature gatherers. Neither knew journalists can’t sign petitions. One even seemed to disbelieve that we were actual journalists, as if to say “is anyone actually a real journalist?”

This was all very amusing for my friends and I, who later relayed this story at a party. We told people what happened: we were approached by all these signature gatherers, and none knew journalists can’t sign petitions or express bias. And — to our surprise — none of the people at the party knew this either! FOLKS: Friends of journalists don’t even know what journalists do.

How can an industry that expects to be seen as critical to democracy survive if we have done such a piss-poor job of telling the world what we do? But how do we start telling you now?

I can only speak from my experience: here is what I do.

Journalism, for me, often means reading hundreds of pages of documents for a single story. If it’s a bigger project, it can mean reading thousands of pages of documents, books upon books upon books of information. Then I call people about what I’ve read — dozens and dozens of calls. I take what I learn from one person, and bounce that off another person. The process continues for weeks, months.

You participate in the eye-bleeding exercise that is public records requests. There is no standard procedure for getting public records — it is a roiling chaos that varies from department to department, from state to state. Each time you make a request, you get to run through a new obstacle course set up by bureaucrats just to get a single police report. Sometimes they tell you that you can’t have that report, and then you say, yes, I can have that report. Then you play a game of Chicken over email. Other times you deal with public employees who are happy to help you. Both types of employees will charge you money for a public report, and then you have to ask your editor for money, or apply for a grant, or beg people to subscribe to your Substack, or just pay for it with your own cash. And when you can’t get money, you think about all the good stories that die because it costs money to get information.

You get hung up on. You get yelled at. You get trolled online. If you’re me, you get super lucky and people make entire podcasts and videos about why you personally suck. You become subhuman to them. In person, you get filmed while you’re asking questions. You get weird things in your mailbox.

You keep going.

You call someone’s siblings and next-door neighbors and guys who were quoted once in an article from ten years ago. You read maps and assessor’s reports. You comb through tax documents. You call someone back who you already had an uncomfortable conversation with to ask just one more question. You sift through tips from random people — there might be something at the bottom of your inbox that could be your next story. You become a spelunker of society.

You show up at public meetings where there are hundreds of people. You show up at public meetings where there are no people. You wake up in the night wondering if a sentence that is publishing in the morning needs to be tweaked one more time.

You write your story. You rewrite it six more times. You make spreadsheets. You ask your friends in journalism “why are we doing this if no one cares?” and when they don’t know you start to wonder if these are the kinds of conversations people have when their jobs become obsolete? Is this what milk men said? What switchboard operators said?

The New York Times employs some 1,700 journalists. I don’t have hard numbers, but even without data I would place a monetary bet 1,700 journalists is more than all of Oregon’s journalists.⁵ Maybe all of Washington’s, too. The Times has been brilliant at marketing itself: telling people why it matters, and what it can achieve if you, the reader, supports it. They have journalists all over the world, but I have to break it to you: it is unlikely The Times will show up at a public meeting in John Day, Oregon, or Cheney, Washington, or Fruitland, Idaho. Or, for that matter, a meeting in Beaverton, Oregon, or Everett, Washington.

In Spokane, those are the kinds of reporters who sniffed out Rep. Matt Shea years before anyone else. In Idaho, those kinds are the reporters are the ones who kept an eye on the Aryan Nations ages ago, and who continue to write about the ways far-right ideologues keep trying to turn North Idaho into their fantasy land. In East Idaho and in Phoenix, the Lori Vallow/Chad Daybell story was something local reporters dug into before anyone else came along.

The jobs of the reporters who show up to those meetings and do stories on the communities they live in are under threat. Journalists should not be the only ones panicking about that.

These are not ordinary times we’re living in. But, as Nadler says, journalism is not an ordinary business. This makes it perhaps the best possible remedy for our time. It will not save society on its own, but it will tell you society needs saving. And if it is gone, how will you know?

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If you’re looking for some outlets to subscribe to, I suggest supporting the public radio station or local newspaper in your area. If you’re not comfortable subscribing with your dollars to this newsletter, you can help support work I do by contributing to Oregon Public Broadcasting and High Country News, places where I am a regular contributor. Be sure to tell them I sent you.

In the meantime, here are a couple more announcements:

• If you missed the story I wrote last month for OPB on Twin Ray, you might want to listen to the latest episode of The Evergreen podcast to get the latest on what’s up with the maybe-cult group down in Ashland. Also: if you spot Akasha Sananda or Shekinah Ma in the wild, would you please drop me a line?

• If you listen to the very end of The Evergreen podcast about Twin Ray, you’ll catch a little announcement about A VERY BIG THING I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT: I have a brand-new podcast called Hush coming out in September. It’s an investigative podcast I’ve made with my longtime reporting partner, Ryan Haas (producer of Bundyville), where we look into stories hidden in some way from the public. You can get a preview of the first episode on August 26 if you subscribe to The Evergreen. Yes, we are very pleased to have one-half of the Bundyville band back together again.

• If you’re around Salt Lake City on August 1, come catch me giving the Smith-Pettit lecture about the Lori Vallow/Chad Daybell case (and journalism!) at the Sunstone Symposium.

1. I refuse to call it X.

2. I loved Spotlight, too.

3. My favorite journalism movie remains the 1994 Michael Keaton/Marisa Tomei/Randy Quaid joint, The Paper, because I pretty much like anything with Michael Keaton and/or Marisa Tomei.

4. In Bodkin, a Netflix show, a female journalist steals, lies and breaks the law to get ahead in her reporting. The female journalists in House of Cards and Sharp Objects sleep with their sources. Ethics are tossed at the first sign of opportunity, and while I’m sure this happens, it’s very annoying to watch.

5. I have no sense of how many of us feral freelancers there are.