What an Odd Way to Start the Summer

I don't have anyplace to schlep my camera on Monday and I don't like it.

Obviously, I don't like not having an assignment. Or two. Sometimes I have two Memorial Day assignments because some towns have early services and some later. 

For that reason, I have become something of an expert on Memorial Day services.

The best is always the service by Musconetcong Post 278 at the park in Netcong.  I'm not sure why that is. A combination of things, I guess. 

There is something in the air around that service. 

Carl Beale from the legion post has been running it for years with his small band of dedicated veterans. It a lot of ways it is a typical small town Memorial Day service. There's a parade with fire trucks and ambulances and scout troops and Little League teams. A couple of schools have marching bands playing the songs of the military service branches and patriotic songs. The towns' mayors ride in a truck and other officials walk through the streets of  Stanhope and Netcong.

A trailer is set up in the park as a stage, right next to Lake Musconetcong. Dignitaries make their  speeches. The Presbyterian minister reads off the list of names of the people from Netcong and Stanhope and Budd Lake who gave their lives in all the wars. He reads them alphabetically by war and when he gets to Vietnam, I start to get weepy and when he gets to Henry Pierce, who was a medic who dated a high school friend of mine, I get more weepy. 

So, maybe that's why I think that is the best of all service. Of course, all of the names are personal to somebody. 

Part of the ceremony involves laying a wreath in Lake Musconetcong with a couple of people in a row boat to fish it out.

And of course, there is a mandatory playing of Taps. That hasn't always gone smoothly. Apparently, not every high school thinks they can require a trumpet player to attend the ceremony. One year, in Jefferson Township, the bugler said that school district most certainly does. They even have two buglers at some ceremonies. 

A friend of mine does the sound for the ceremony. He's a Vietnam vet, too. It's good to get together.

Memorial Day is important and I'm glad to see various places having virtual ceremonies or drive-by or whatever in this highly weird year. We need to remember the fallen from all these wars. 

We also need to stop saying "Happy Memorial Day," or treating it as if is is just another Monday Holiday. It's not. It's a day of remembrance. It's also a day to pray there are no more wars. No more war dead.

Yes, because of our climate here in New Jersey, it is the unofficial beginning of the summer season, but that doesn't change the solemnity of the occasion.  

Local News in the Age of Lies

     Somewhere in the Bible it says, "the love of money is the root of all evil."
     
      A lot of people think it money itself that is the root of all evil, but it's not. Money, after all, is just a thing. The love of money is what is in people's hearts. Or what passes for their hearts. When people put the accumulation of wealth above all else, things get very bad very fast. 
      
       We can sure see that these days. 
      
       "Media companies" used to be individuals and families who cared about their hometowns. Oh sure, there were robber barons in the newspaper biz. There was yellow journalism and were newspaper wars. William Randolph Hearst was hardly a benevolent dictator and the repercussions of that linger in today's difficulty in getting marijuana legalized. But they fought their battles in the big cities, New York, San Francsico, Philadelphia.  The average town or small city had a family-owed newspaper. It maybe was good, maybe just ok. It might have won awards. It might have made money. H. Alan Painter's Hackettstown Gazette in New Jersey did both, which was a tribute to both Alan and the people of Hackettstown.
      
      But the purpose was to inform the people who lived in the town and its surrounds.

        Now we have hedge funds and slicing and dicing the staffs of newspapers for the good only of the bottom line. Add to that the development of for-profit internet entities that steal advertising and you have a perfect storm (I really hate that phrase, but it fits) of disaster for news.
   
        Especially local news.
      
        Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University and Ellen Clegg, formerly of the Boston Globe, are working on a book tentatively titled What Works: Case Studies from the Front Lines of Local News.  They presented a Facebook chat, one in a series sponsored by the New England Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists

        
      Kennedy and Clegg are looking at start ups in the world of local news to determine what model might work to bring the most comprehensive coverage to people no longer properly served by traditional media. Which is to say most of us. 

       They worked on two case studies before being effectively shut down by the pandemic.

       MinnPost, a non-profit news site covering the area surrounding Minneapolis, and Mendocino Voice in California,which is converting to cooperative ownership, are both doing well. The point of Kennedy and Clegg's research is to see what models can be duplicated and where each model works best. 

       Kennedy pointed out even in the greater Boston area where The Globe made changes to serve the suburbs and other products opened there has been a "cratering of local news."

        People live in communities, he noted. Even though there has been a nationalization of culture, they need to know what's happening closer to home. The public is not helped when local news sources act too much like national news outlets.

       "If local news organizations could capture eyeballs there would be a decrease in partisanship," Kennedy said. "It would be good for journalism and for society as a whole." 

       Clegg pointed out the definition of local can vary. Some news is town-focused, some more regional or state-oriented. "The hollowing out of statehouse bureaus and city hall bureaus" has left many levels of government without coverage, she said. 

        No matter how dedicated the editors and reporters are, something must be in place to fund the publications.

       "How many ads is a gourmet cheese shop going to buy?" Kennedy asked rhetorically. 

       Paywalls are one answer, Report for America is helping, he noted.

       The book is not planned to "drown in detail," he said. Once they are up and running again, the authors plan to profile 10 or 12 local outlets, for-profit, non-profit, cooperative and whatever model works allowing an organization to "keep its head above water if it can avoid corporate greed stomping on its neck," in Kennedy's words.

      If there is a model that works, it's bound to be better than the alternative now on social media.
    
      Erica Noonan, in the audience of the Zoom chat, pointed out Facebook and Slack seemed to have filled the void with "most of the reporting done by the loudest and least busy community members." She noted these "reporters" tend to write about specific narrow issues and their readers may not see their biases. 

      The journalists in the Zoom audience of course are concerned for their jobs, but they are primarily concerned about their neighbors. Any democracy requires an informed electorate and people who get their "news" from social media are not informed. They often don't even perform simple checks on where the information came from. They often repost even when there is no evidence of primary sources.

    Kennedy suggested a paywall focused on bundling might be the best idea to bring news back to communities. In the past, most families subscribed to a regional and a local newspaper and true news junkies also got the New York Times. Today's families may be willing to subscribe to a similar online bundle.
  
     He hopes that providing adequate local news could re-educate the community about the importance of honest news sources. People have more trust in their local news sources because they are familiar with the reporters and photographers. Kennedy and Clegg would like to see the trust return to all professional news outlets.

       They don't have all the answers, but they have faith there are answers.        
        

Then We Can Talk

 

It's not too late to learn to love the smell of newsprint in the morning.

Being in quarantine leaves people way too much time on their hands.
     Unfortunately, some of them spend that time on social media.
     That is a very bad idea. Do jigsaw puzzles (You can get Wysocki puzzles with 2,000 pieces. That should take your mind off Facebook.), take up the bassoon, clean out your closets, write letters to your relatives (even the ones you hate). Anything but social media.
      Of course you want to know what's going on. Here's a suggestion, get a subscription to a newspaper. That way, you'll find out the FACTS about what is happening.
      This bizarre attitude some people have that those of us who have devoted our lives to ferreting out the truth about how government works (or doesn't) and about all of the important things that have an impact on people's lives are somehow not doing that is just incomprehensible. Some people even seem to believe there is a concerted effort by the press to undermine good people who are running the government. Trust me, we aren't. As a rule, reporters are not that organized. And we wouldn't want to.
      The editorial pages of newspapers hold opinions that my run counter to yours. So, ignore them. They have nothing to do with the news pages.
      The press is dedicated to truth and ethics. Sometimes it doesn't look that way, especially on television where it seems the electronic media is always fixated on a single story. But, the working press, the few newspaper reporters who are left, the radio reporters, the public media producers are dedicated to digging for the truth.
      Yes, there are fewer of us. Gone are the days when the tabloids of  New York City flew reporters to Belgrade to interview the parents of a college athlete or sent 40 reporters to tail Eliot Spitzer as his governorship imploded. But those of us who are left care about nothing more than providing our readers and listeners with the facts.
      There was a time when the Fourth Estate was well-respected. Remember, we were instrumental in ending a foolish war based on "A Bright and Shining Lie." We were instrumental in ending a Presidency after a two-bit break-in proved to be an overarching criminal enterprise.
     We had enemies then. Spiro Agnew (ok, William Safire wrote it for him) called us "nattering nabobs of negativism." But we were respected by most of the powers that be.  Often disliked, but respected.
      We haven't changed. The industry has. And not for the better. But the practitioners have not. We still care about what we always cared about.
      I'm not looking for accolades. I'm not looking for people to like me. But I do hope people return to respecting the professional press. Not for us. For them.
       The moment we were tagged by a Stalinist line, "enemy of the people," you would have thought any intelligent person would have said, "That's a scary, Stalinist accusation and we can't listen to that kind of thing." Only someone who traffics in lies uses rhetoric like that. It has always been thus.
       Democracy requires an informed public. It's never been a spectator sport. Citizens of a democracy have an obligation to educate themselves. Not to read every random social media post that falls in their Facebook feed, but to search for the media that is produced by professionals, people who have spent their working lives digging for the facts.
       As the sainted Daniel Patrick Moynahan said, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but your are not entitled to your own facts." I can't even imagine what that brilliant, erudite man would make of the world today when people who work for the administration of the country he loved so much use obscene terms like "alternative facts."
     There are no "alternative facts." Thore are called lies. There are people who traffic in disinformation. The press is the front line against liars.

A pile of print material, mostly about farming.

            We have always been in the frontline against lying and dissembling. The difference now is the lies can be shared universally. And are.
             Posting and reposting information that is not properly sourced or is from a spurious source is not doing anybody any favors. My theory on Facebook is that it is for photos of grandchildren, cats, dogs, horses and wildlife. Cute things only. LinkedIn is for job hunting. Twitter is for professionals to share with each other. Is that so hard?
             Political discourse is great. Discourse. Discussion. Not yelling at each other. But it has to be based on facts, not the invention of bloviating AM radio ranters who are trying to sell snake oil to the masses. And not the hallucinations of conspiracy-theorists wearing tin-foil hats as they sit in their mothers' basements eating Cheetos on the davenport.
            Read the facts. Then we can talk.

Mothers Day

      Mother's Day 2020. A weird kind of day in a weird time of humankind.
      On my first Mother's Day as a mother, I had only been a mother for a week and a half, having had Emily on May 1, 1985. I was kinda overwhelmed to say the least.
      I can't say motherhood came naturally to me. Being a reporter came naturally. It fits right in with me being a typically snarky, pushy, sarcastic Jersey Girl. Being a mother was something I had to work at. All in all, I think I did a pretty good job. My kids all have masters degrees and none of them have tattoos, so there's that. 
      None of them have, however, made me a grandmother, a fact of which I remind them rather often. I do have my "value added" granddaughters, my oldest's step-daughters, whom I totally love, but, still. . .
      The thing is, mothers aren't necessarily biological mothers. Two of my kids' friends call me "Second Mom" and have for years. Because, let's face it, there are people young folks sometimes need to talk to when they really don't want to talk to their moms. That doesn't mean they have done anything wrong necessarily. It just means they want to talk to someone who isn't likely to be judgemental. 
       I'm pretty good at non-judgemental. 
       On Mother's Day, of course I miss my mom. I had her for a lot longer than most people, since she lived to 94. But, that doesn't mean I miss her any less. 
       I had my Aunt Vicky until she was 93 and I miss her too. She was my father's sister and I always felt she would have my back no matter what. Aunts can be very important.
        Apparently, they leave an indelible mark, too. A friend of my Emily's was brushing her hair in my kitchen and I told her that NOBODY brushes her hair in MY kitchen. Emily didn't miss a beat, she said: "Ok, it's official, you've become Aunt Vicky."
        And I am proud of that. 
        Of course, many aunts are honorary.
       This is my first Mother's Day without Aunt Marie, who was everybody's Aunt Marie. You never knew who or what was going to be in her kitchen. There was always action at the big round table in the house at the end of James Drive in Mount Arlington. Always wine in her refrigerator, also known as The Bermuda Triangle. Always laughter and good conversation. 
      Always chaos. It's probably  one of the main reasons I thrive on chaos, which has served me well having three kids close in age, living across the street from our town's elementary school, working as a journalist and, especially, being active in the Society of Professional Journalists. (No offense, SPJers, but you guys produce great quantities of chaos.)
       My kids have honorary aunts, too. For years, my youngest loved to do her back-to-school shopping with Aunt Donna in Vermont. Nothing like searching for jeans and t-shirts with dead rock stars on them in the thrift shops near Dartmouth College. 
        So to all the mothers, aunts, "second moms," honorary aunts, dog and cat and horse moms and women who are now mothering their own moms, Happy Mother's Day. This weird time won't last forever.

There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Just when I think I am immune to being shocked by anything anyone can say, it happens.

It happened with the Access Hollywood tape – or more precisely, when you-know-who won the nomination. It happened with disparaging a Gold Star family. 

But, it’s more egregious when someone I know well and consider a friend says something totally shocking.

I really believe now the nadir has been reached.

A friend told me she resents paying for news. She refuses to read anything online that is behind a paywall.

To my credit, I neither decked her nor puked. Although both were a strong possibility.

I mean, she pays for food, electricity, gas for her car, private school tuition for her son. But she resents being asked to pay for news.

News has always cost money. And it should. It must. Sure, in the days when print was king, our subscriptions paid basically to get it to our front door. Or into the rose bushes or on the roof. 

Advertising paid the big bills.

Then Craig’s list came along, defenestrating the classified section, the lifeblood of many papers.

Now, with much of news digitized, advertising became much more difficult to sell. Which makes sense. Selling a print ad in a legacy newspaper means selling SOMETHING. Something that can be touched, clipped in the case of a coupon.

Selling an ad on line is like selling vapor.

This means that even though many outlets are not paying for printing a product, the costs incurred I producing the news needs to be paid for by someone. The reader.

National news anchors notwithstanding, most journalists are pathetically underpaid. But they deserve to be paid. So do the coders, the photographers, the graphic artists, all the people who make the news available.

In these times when posers pretend to be journalists on the internet, writing nonsense and outright lies, professional journalists are more important than ever. The reader is obligated to look for primary sources, to check any unfamiliar site name, to run Snopes checks on anything that doesn’t ring true.

And the reader is obligated to pay for content.

The reader does not have the luxury of resenting the pay wall.

Whether it’s handing tuppence to a newsie in 19^th Century London or charging the New York Times to your PayPal account in 21^st Century New York, you have an obligation to pay.

An obligation to yourself because it’s the only way to be assured you are getting the facts. An obligation to your children to assure they will not be deluged with lies. An obligation to those of us who spend our lives churning out the news. And an obligation to the memories of Daniel Pearl and James Foley and all the other journalists who died bringing you the news.

Who died for you.

Don’t dishonor their sacrifice by complaining about the cost.

--30--

     Journalists tend to be a bit competitive. 

     We live for the scoop. We sometimes go to great lengths to beat another reporter to the story. 

     Meetings in the back booths of diners were not uncommon. Sit with your back to the wall, the old timers said.

     I remember interviewing a cop one evening in the bathroom of the police department with all the faucets running and a reporter from a rival paper listening at the door. 

     But those were the days when two dailies and two weeklies covered even the smallest towns. When every council, planning board, zoning board and board of education meeting found two or three young reporters in the front row with steno pads and Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencils. When county government was a coveted beat. When cop shop was a stepping stone and everybody lived with a police radio sputtering 24/7.

     We couldn't have imagined a time like today with papers using a machete to enact layoffs. With no coverage at all in even large municipalities. With no one bugging the cops or challenging the freeholders. 

      So maybe we need to suspend our need to catch the first worm and actually work together.

     I'm not talking against good old-fashioned competition, but for the big, investigative stories most newspapers don't have the staff to do the work they used to do. I can remember being sent to Trenton to camp out at office doors or dig through archives for hours. That doesn't happen any more. 

     ProPublica seems to be setting the gold standard for investigative journalism in collaboration with other outlets. Public radio has been doing it the longest. Now other news organizations are figuring out ways to work together.

     The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University held it's third cooperative journalism summit in Philadelphia last week. Presenters shared stories of cooperative reporting, mostly on the local level. Many of them worked to investigate problems in their communities.

    A Vancouver project explored why indigenous residents were over-represented in the juvenile protective services. A post-Parkland-shooting collaborative paired professional and student journalists. The Denver Uprising combined civic engagement and newsroom collaboration.  

    The CCM is studying different collaborations, measuring the success of various types, and assisting more news organizations in collaborations. 

     It's hard to shake off the old habits of competitiveness, but it helps to remember this isn't varsity sports. It's providing a vital service to the public. And, who knows, maybe a scoop will come your way anyway. 



 

The Illiterate Literati

     I can't believe how long it's been since I actually posted a blog. I used to be pretty regular with them, but, then, life. . .

     But now, it seems necessary.
     
     At the Garden State Scholastic Press Association Spring Advisors Conference, I led a table of teachers and librarians in a discussion of media literacy. Specifically, we talked about how to teach Middle School students the difference between fact and fiction in their daily lives.

     As I write that, it feels very odd. When I was in Middle School -- ok, Junior High in those days when the lava had just cooled -- we knew what was in the Newark Evening News and the Netcong-Stanhope  News and what was on Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley was what actually happened. Propaganda was what the sultry Korean voice talked about on M*A*S*H. There was no propaganda on the homefront. 

     Unless, you count advertising. The Marlboro Man was trying to convince us smoking was sexy. But that was paid for by the tobacco companies and was pretty obvious. 

     Today, adolescents have too much information coming at them from every direction. 

     There are curricula addressing media literacy, but schools don't have the time to do a full semester, so we were looking for solutions that could be incorporated into a standard curriculum. 

     Students need to learn the definition of a primary source and the importance of always seeking that primary source when confronted by any piece of information. They need to learn that social media is a dangerous playground.  

     It's not just kids who repost things without checking. It's more embarrassing when adults do it. 

     The bottom line is never post anything that doesn't indicate where it comes from. That seems to be a no-brainer, but, I'm finding it is. Never post anything from a source you don't recognize as a reputable news source. Never post anything from a blatantly partizan source. Especially when it's partizan leaning toward the way you lean, because you are less likely to hold any objectivity. 

     Reinforcing your own and others' prejudices is the most dangerous part of the this dangerous game. 

     I will periodically blog about other topics we addressed at GSSPA and during other media literacy conversations.