Newsrooms tackle major change

The news business is going through a scary time and it’s unclear how that is going to end.

The problem seems essentially that online gabfest sources and changing public interests have caused a switch from local media sources with reliable reporting and editing to unfocused entertainment outlets with no overriding drive for accountability. That was perhaps inevitable when the Internet arrived and the nation’s communications systems began to change, especially the way it advertises. But those consequences could prove to be a destructive force in a democracy like America.

Alaska has so far escaped the worst consequences of the changing news business but the problem has already cost the nation thousands of newsroom jobs — and with those jobs we are losing the ability to generate public understanding of important issues and to hold government accountable.

Writer Margaret Sullivan noted in a Washington Post column last week that employment in newspaper newsrooms declined by 45 percent over the last 10 years. And when that tally started in 2008, newsroom numbers were already down drastically from their peak in the early 1990s.

I got my start in a newspaper newsroom in 1960 and came to Alaska in 1967 to work for The Anchorage Times, a newspaper that once dominated the Alaska news scene but these days is no more. In Anchorage and the Mat-Su area we still have a number of newspapers and broadcast outlets that are doing a fine job of covering the news. We need to keep and encourage them

The problem is scariest on the national scene where publishers are halving staffs at organizations like The New York Daily News. We can only hope the problem doesn’t reach into hinterlands like ours — and we can support the news organizations we have with the resources we have, either by placing advertising or buying their advertisers’ products and services.

This is not a small matter. In a nation like ours we are dependent on a well-informed electorate choosing leaders who will handle the public business thoughtfully and responsibly. And the electorate necessarily depends on reporters and editors to keep track of what public representatives are doing, and on their researching and explaining issues that can be difficult to understand without thoughtful digging, reporting and explaining by competent people with the resources to do the job.

On the local level we need to understand what role government is playing in problems like the current drug-fueled crime wave. Senate Bill 91 was intended to solve problems in that arena but seems to have fallen short and made the matter worse. It has established a catch-and-release system under which criminals are turned loose on the public time and time again. The intent was to reduce the load on law enforcement, the courts and our prison system and it has done that, but it has often done so by putting the public in jeopardy.

The good news in Alaska is that our regional and local news media have been making an unprecedented effort to use what resources they have to research issues and report on them in a way the public can use to make good decisions.

We can see positive signs of that trend both in their work and in the response Alaska’s news and community leaders gave to the recent visit to Anchorage and the Mat-Su by Walter Robinson, former leader of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative journalism team and now a journalism teacher in Boston and Phoenix. Robby, as he is known, was greeted by large crowds who listened raptly as he described how good reporters can and do handle their jobs — and the difference they can make in their communities.

Robinson’s Spotlight team won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the sexual abuse problem faced by the Catholic Church. The Spotlight team’s focus was on the problem in Massachusetts but its work has resulted in a worldwide response to a problem faced by the church in many countries, and in efforts to tackle the issue everywhere.

Good reporting and editing can make a huge difference in community life. It deserves support wherever it’s found. We have it here and we need to encourage the people and the organizations that are doing it.

Tom Brennan is an Anchorage columnist and author of five books. He was a reporter/columnist for The Anchorage Times and an editor and columnist at The Voice of The Times.