In this internet age, information is coming at us from all directions — computers, tablets, smartphones. TVs connected to the internet and TVs on the walls around waiting rooms, college lobbies, restaurants, planes, airport terminals, pumps at gas stations — really just about everywhere.
But, as you grimace against this blizzard, perhaps you haven’t noticed that a huge chuck of important material is no longer in our regular newsfeed.
That would be good, hard, detailed, consistent reports on issues closest to us, at least geographically: our schools, our towns, our village or city governments, our local high achievers, our local scoundrels, our community sports teams.
Nationwide and in our own backyards, “beat reporting” apparently has fallen victim to the new economic and social-network realities of news production.
Yes, there still are good ole weekly newspapers like the one my wife and I ran for close to 10 years here in Clinton, NY, back in the 1980s. But, sadly, they are read by a small percentage of residents, especially the younger ones. And their bare-bones staffs have to be geared toward just keeping up with basic news developments. They cannot put in the time needed to provide thorough, in-depth or investigative reports.
For the most part, such aggressive news coverage of small-town life had been left to quality small daily newspapers or, in exceptional cases, major metropolitan newspapers. Even rarer, some major TV stations have had beat reporters covering their communities.
“On the Media,” a weekly NPR program, reported a few months back (and in a December rebroadcast) that the overall financial decline of the news business, “the birthplace of the beat system,” has left these very basic areas of news coverage “poorly covered or not covered at all.”
Said program co-host Brook Gladstone, “These are journalism’s ground-level watchdogs, sitting at school board meetings, cultivating police contacts, sifting through courthouse filings.”
Co-host Bob Garfield then added: “But the spine of the business is degenerating. After talking to beat reporters over the past month, we heard again and again that their beats were being dangerously depopulated.”
To be honest, a lot of local news operations were not paragons of great journalism to begin with. As just one example, that’s true of those in my area, the Mohawk Valley of Central New York.
Even in its heyday, the area’s daily Utica Observer-Dispatch (known as the OD or, to detractors, the Oder or Observer-Disgrace) was hit-or-miss (mostly miss) with quality news efforts, overall, and only took a few stabs at consistent “beat” reporting in the dozens of small communities it claims for its “coverage area.”
As its one-time competitor at the weekly Clinton Courier, we often remarked editorially about the dangers of the OD’s scattershot approach — swooping in once in a while to cover a local governing board or issue, sometimes giving the selected item blaring headlines and breathless coverage, then moving on to some other newsy thing accidently found in another community.
The burst of coverage would give residents/readers the impression that the issue chosen for coverage by the area’s major daily paper was of vital, overriding importance in the town— something that the OD, having stayed abreast of all the happenings in the town, judged as a truly standout happening worthy of being singled out for attention.
In reality, it was not.
More likely, it was just being covered because: a) Someone at the paper happened to learn about it, whether from a friend or associate, by driving through town or by getting a phone call or news release; or b) It was a slow news period and an editor said, “Why don’t you check on what’s happening in Clinton? We haven’t been there in a while,” or c) a reporter had some free time and asked someone he or she knew in Clinton, “So, what’s going on?”
Disregarded in all this were the perspective in which the issue arose, the history behind it and the item’s importance in the overall scheme of things in the town, where numerous other interesting/newsworthy things were then taking place, or had happened over the years, without gaining OD attention.
Then, when the coverage stopped, it would seem to many that the issue stopped, when it fact there were many subsequent developments that shed light on or put a whole new spin on what had transpired.
One small example that immediately comes to mind was when our town government decided to close a short rural road during the winter due to its scarce usage. Basically, that just meant no snow plowing by the town. The lone resident of the road was upset by the action and came to complain to the Town Board.
The situation was interesting — this one resident now had to be responsible for keeping his road clear of snow — and worth a short news article. But because this was the meeting an OD reporter had randomly chosen to attend — and this complaint was the most easily understood and accessible business item for a visiting reporter — the road closing got covered big time, under a banner headline inside the next day’s paper.
And that was the end of it, as far as the daily paper was concerned. I call it drive-by coverage. How the matter was handled by town officials in coming weeks and months (and years) was not covered.
I’m guessing the same approach is (or was) common at many daily papers across the country, especially those at large chains like Gannett or Gatehouse, known for claiming vast coverage areas (for the purpose of reaching a broad swath of potential advertisers) and employing bare-bones news staffs to cover them.
Another example of this happened just this week. The OD carried a story (on an inside page) about criticisms of Village of Clinton financial operations in a report from the state comptroller’s office.
Okay, now, let’ see. I read the OD’s daily e-edition and I haven’t seen any story on the governments in our town in many, many months. Such coverage had gone from scattershot to no shot. From my experience, I’m fairly certain the paper simply received the comptroller’s report as part of that office’s routine distribution of its annual audits of municipal governments to all news outlets that include them in their coverage areas.
So, once again, the appearance is given (intended or not) that the OD has found out something in its ever-vigilant coverage of Clinton government (or local governments in general) that warrants a significant article.
Truth is, if the paper did in fact cover that village, it would have known about the state’s findings months ago along with responses to them by village leaders. Regular coverage of the village would have probably shown the accounting problems long before the state comptroller arrived while also putting in perspective the reasons why they occurred.
But village residents who only get their news on their government from the OD are left with the impression that some major investigation of the municipality’s finances was undertaken by the state and found some bad things going on.
While this “drive-by coverage” has been going on for decades, it has gotten worse as the papers have shrunk their staffs, gone almost exclusively to regional reports and filled their pages with more and more non-local (formerly called wire service) reports.
Most glaringly, we now have professional sports teams hundreds of miles away — in New York City, Boston and Buffalo — treated as local teams (results and developments, as covered by the Associated Press, given front-page promotions and then leading off or dominating the sports page front). Meanwhile, the contests of truly local teams — those not covered by the Associated Press — largely have been reduced to tiny-type (once known as agate) box scores. Only the biggest local sports events get anything even approaching regular coverage.
For all its faults, the OD had once provided close, thorough coverage of the high school sports scene through the intrepid efforts of one reporter (Ron Moshier) but in recent years we’ve just gotten occasional articles and the aforementioned agate-type basics, often a day late due to earlier deadlines forced by jobbing out its printing operation.
So, the “beats” that once got occasional attention now have been almost entirely abandoned.
The only way local dailies like the OD look good is in comparison to local TV stations.
These small-market television news operations provide beat coverage or in-depth reports about as often as Fox News praises liberal Democratic officeholders. The small stations have all they can handle with weather and chasing fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. In their spare time, they cheerlead for their communities.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” is the industry standard. For our local station, WKTV, it’s more, “If it blares, it airs.” Just about any emergency vehicle that hurriedly leaves its assigned parking spot, siren blaring, seems to get airtime. Particularly on weekends or Mondays, the evening news may lead with an arrest or crime that, in the next day’s paper, will get be deemed worthy of just a tiny spot on the bottom of an inside page.
Those weekend broadcasts, always a local news wasteland due to minimum staffing, have been reduced to non-local items, many of which will be included in the network news that immediately follows.
But outside these traditionally weak local TV stations and daily newspapers that have gone from bad to worse in the current economic environment, the loss of the beat system is most keenly felt at the many quality small dailies like the one I worked on in Kingsport, Tenn., (circulation 44,000).
These had put money into in-depth, investigative reporting. They treasured beat reporting — the day-in, day-out immersion in an area of coverage (city hall, education, police, courts, county government, etc.) by one or two reporters each.
At the same time, major metropolitan newspapers practiced a similar approach on a grander scale. Reporters learned their beats, developed reliable sources of information, paid attention to each and every piece of minutia that took place in and around their assigned areas.
Only from that close monitoring can many major stories unfold.
But it can be costly to put a reporter out there to track down possible leads, check daily court filings, read through daily police reports, sit through zoning board meetings, stay with one sports team through a season or undertake similar often-tedious jobs — all with the real potential of not producing immediate results for the next day’s paper (or broadcast).
I’ll leave it to others to explain in detail the multitude of factors that have changed the business model for news operations in the last 10 years or so. It seems the industry has been altered mostly by development of easy internet access along with the economic near-depression of the 1990s.
As noted above, the news-gathering operations that survived are downsized and many are trying to cope by either coming out less often (like the Syracuse, NY, papers, which now publish daily in central coverage areas downtown), consolidating coverage (like the OD) or diversifying with a broader online presence.
In any event, the result in sports and elsewhere in papers like the OD is less attention on the nuts and bolts of our daily lives. At its worst, that means lots of small-town shenanigans can proceed, unchecked.
Of course, that’s not to say the governments of our towns, villages, cities or counties are hotbeds of corruption. But they are normal operations, which means from time to time they have criminal types or otherwise not-so-honest or not-so-nice people involved.
(Book plug: That potential for criminal mischief was a taking-off point for my latest novel, “What You Don’t Know.”)
In the past, close coverage by beat reporters could keep government and business leaders honest or root out those that were not.
With local governments now being given a virtual free ride in their operations, I think it’s a safe bet there’s some financial, administrative, personnel or other operational hanky-panky at more than a few.
Some of it may be unintentional (not filing reports, not following hiring, firing or bidding procedures) and of little consequence (a little budget shifting that, while technically not permitted, may help a department that had come up a little short).
But darker motives are likely in at least some instances, given the frequency with which beat reporters in the past uncovered such transgressions.
And I’m equally certain that transparency (to use the word for public openness that has become annoyingly popular these days) would curtail such actions, innocent or not, and make for a more efficient, cleaner use of tax money.
The enforcers of transparency are the country’s newshounds, and not many are sniffing around those government bushes any more, ready to beat shake them to get those tough stories.
What should be done?
I’m afraid this blog rant has a lot in common with my last, on pain-killer medication. I have no solution, just a recognition of the problem.
A while back, my big idea was that large news operations could find major sources of revenue by hiring/creating nationwide webs of home-based operations like I had with Kirkland NewsLine for eight years.
These one-person (generally) news crews would cover all the community news, as usual, while providing the parent operation with sources of valuable information for nationwide trends stories and intimate audiences for national advertising.
They could be augmented by their own advertising staffs or left just be outlets for the parent company’s ads.
I wanted to pitch this idea to the New York Times but then I learned (through “On the Media”) that it had indeed tried a version of such home-based, localized news outlets in New Jersey and found them unprofitable. So they were abandoned.
Our best hope, then, would appear to be that the transformation to digital news platforms will soon begin to show a high enough profit that beat reporting can be restored.
But, as you grimace against this blizzard, perhaps you haven’t noticed that a huge chuck of important material is no longer in our regular newsfeed.
That would be good, hard, detailed, consistent reports on issues closest to us, at least geographically: our schools, our towns, our village or city governments, our local high achievers, our local scoundrels, our community sports teams.
Nationwide and in our own backyards, “beat reporting” apparently has fallen victim to the new economic and social-network realities of news production.
Yes, there still are good ole weekly newspapers like the one my wife and I ran for close to 10 years here in Clinton, NY, back in the 1980s. But, sadly, they are read by a small percentage of residents, especially the younger ones. And their bare-bones staffs have to be geared toward just keeping up with basic news developments. They cannot put in the time needed to provide thorough, in-depth or investigative reports.
For the most part, such aggressive news coverage of small-town life had been left to quality small daily newspapers or, in exceptional cases, major metropolitan newspapers. Even rarer, some major TV stations have had beat reporters covering their communities.
“On the Media,” a weekly NPR program, reported a few months back (and in a December rebroadcast) that the overall financial decline of the news business, “the birthplace of the beat system,” has left these very basic areas of news coverage “poorly covered or not covered at all.”
Said program co-host Brook Gladstone, “These are journalism’s ground-level watchdogs, sitting at school board meetings, cultivating police contacts, sifting through courthouse filings.”
Co-host Bob Garfield then added: “But the spine of the business is degenerating. After talking to beat reporters over the past month, we heard again and again that their beats were being dangerously depopulated.”
To be honest, a lot of local news operations were not paragons of great journalism to begin with. As just one example, that’s true of those in my area, the Mohawk Valley of Central New York.
Even in its heyday, the area’s daily Utica Observer-Dispatch (known as the OD or, to detractors, the Oder or Observer-Disgrace) was hit-or-miss (mostly miss) with quality news efforts, overall, and only took a few stabs at consistent “beat” reporting in the dozens of small communities it claims for its “coverage area.”
As its one-time competitor at the weekly Clinton Courier, we often remarked editorially about the dangers of the OD’s scattershot approach — swooping in once in a while to cover a local governing board or issue, sometimes giving the selected item blaring headlines and breathless coverage, then moving on to some other newsy thing accidently found in another community.
The burst of coverage would give residents/readers the impression that the issue chosen for coverage by the area’s major daily paper was of vital, overriding importance in the town— something that the OD, having stayed abreast of all the happenings in the town, judged as a truly standout happening worthy of being singled out for attention.
In reality, it was not.
More likely, it was just being covered because: a) Someone at the paper happened to learn about it, whether from a friend or associate, by driving through town or by getting a phone call or news release; or b) It was a slow news period and an editor said, “Why don’t you check on what’s happening in Clinton? We haven’t been there in a while,” or c) a reporter had some free time and asked someone he or she knew in Clinton, “So, what’s going on?”
Disregarded in all this were the perspective in which the issue arose, the history behind it and the item’s importance in the overall scheme of things in the town, where numerous other interesting/newsworthy things were then taking place, or had happened over the years, without gaining OD attention.
Then, when the coverage stopped, it would seem to many that the issue stopped, when it fact there were many subsequent developments that shed light on or put a whole new spin on what had transpired.
One small example that immediately comes to mind was when our town government decided to close a short rural road during the winter due to its scarce usage. Basically, that just meant no snow plowing by the town. The lone resident of the road was upset by the action and came to complain to the Town Board.
The situation was interesting — this one resident now had to be responsible for keeping his road clear of snow — and worth a short news article. But because this was the meeting an OD reporter had randomly chosen to attend — and this complaint was the most easily understood and accessible business item for a visiting reporter — the road closing got covered big time, under a banner headline inside the next day’s paper.
And that was the end of it, as far as the daily paper was concerned. I call it drive-by coverage. How the matter was handled by town officials in coming weeks and months (and years) was not covered.
I’m guessing the same approach is (or was) common at many daily papers across the country, especially those at large chains like Gannett or Gatehouse, known for claiming vast coverage areas (for the purpose of reaching a broad swath of potential advertisers) and employing bare-bones news staffs to cover them.
Another example of this happened just this week. The OD carried a story (on an inside page) about criticisms of Village of Clinton financial operations in a report from the state comptroller’s office.
Okay, now, let’ see. I read the OD’s daily e-edition and I haven’t seen any story on the governments in our town in many, many months. Such coverage had gone from scattershot to no shot. From my experience, I’m fairly certain the paper simply received the comptroller’s report as part of that office’s routine distribution of its annual audits of municipal governments to all news outlets that include them in their coverage areas.
So, once again, the appearance is given (intended or not) that the OD has found out something in its ever-vigilant coverage of Clinton government (or local governments in general) that warrants a significant article.
Truth is, if the paper did in fact cover that village, it would have known about the state’s findings months ago along with responses to them by village leaders. Regular coverage of the village would have probably shown the accounting problems long before the state comptroller arrived while also putting in perspective the reasons why they occurred.
But village residents who only get their news on their government from the OD are left with the impression that some major investigation of the municipality’s finances was undertaken by the state and found some bad things going on.
While this “drive-by coverage” has been going on for decades, it has gotten worse as the papers have shrunk their staffs, gone almost exclusively to regional reports and filled their pages with more and more non-local (formerly called wire service) reports.
Most glaringly, we now have professional sports teams hundreds of miles away — in New York City, Boston and Buffalo — treated as local teams (results and developments, as covered by the Associated Press, given front-page promotions and then leading off or dominating the sports page front). Meanwhile, the contests of truly local teams — those not covered by the Associated Press — largely have been reduced to tiny-type (once known as agate) box scores. Only the biggest local sports events get anything even approaching regular coverage.
For all its faults, the OD had once provided close, thorough coverage of the high school sports scene through the intrepid efforts of one reporter (Ron Moshier) but in recent years we’ve just gotten occasional articles and the aforementioned agate-type basics, often a day late due to earlier deadlines forced by jobbing out its printing operation.
So, the “beats” that once got occasional attention now have been almost entirely abandoned.
The only way local dailies like the OD look good is in comparison to local TV stations.
These small-market television news operations provide beat coverage or in-depth reports about as often as Fox News praises liberal Democratic officeholders. The small stations have all they can handle with weather and chasing fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. In their spare time, they cheerlead for their communities.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” is the industry standard. For our local station, WKTV, it’s more, “If it blares, it airs.” Just about any emergency vehicle that hurriedly leaves its assigned parking spot, siren blaring, seems to get airtime. Particularly on weekends or Mondays, the evening news may lead with an arrest or crime that, in the next day’s paper, will get be deemed worthy of just a tiny spot on the bottom of an inside page.
Those weekend broadcasts, always a local news wasteland due to minimum staffing, have been reduced to non-local items, many of which will be included in the network news that immediately follows.
But outside these traditionally weak local TV stations and daily newspapers that have gone from bad to worse in the current economic environment, the loss of the beat system is most keenly felt at the many quality small dailies like the one I worked on in Kingsport, Tenn., (circulation 44,000).
These had put money into in-depth, investigative reporting. They treasured beat reporting — the day-in, day-out immersion in an area of coverage (city hall, education, police, courts, county government, etc.) by one or two reporters each.
At the same time, major metropolitan newspapers practiced a similar approach on a grander scale. Reporters learned their beats, developed reliable sources of information, paid attention to each and every piece of minutia that took place in and around their assigned areas.
Only from that close monitoring can many major stories unfold.
But it can be costly to put a reporter out there to track down possible leads, check daily court filings, read through daily police reports, sit through zoning board meetings, stay with one sports team through a season or undertake similar often-tedious jobs — all with the real potential of not producing immediate results for the next day’s paper (or broadcast).
I’ll leave it to others to explain in detail the multitude of factors that have changed the business model for news operations in the last 10 years or so. It seems the industry has been altered mostly by development of easy internet access along with the economic near-depression of the 1990s.
As noted above, the news-gathering operations that survived are downsized and many are trying to cope by either coming out less often (like the Syracuse, NY, papers, which now publish daily in central coverage areas downtown), consolidating coverage (like the OD) or diversifying with a broader online presence.
In any event, the result in sports and elsewhere in papers like the OD is less attention on the nuts and bolts of our daily lives. At its worst, that means lots of small-town shenanigans can proceed, unchecked.
Of course, that’s not to say the governments of our towns, villages, cities or counties are hotbeds of corruption. But they are normal operations, which means from time to time they have criminal types or otherwise not-so-honest or not-so-nice people involved.
(Book plug: That potential for criminal mischief was a taking-off point for my latest novel, “What You Don’t Know.”)
In the past, close coverage by beat reporters could keep government and business leaders honest or root out those that were not.
With local governments now being given a virtual free ride in their operations, I think it’s a safe bet there’s some financial, administrative, personnel or other operational hanky-panky at more than a few.
Some of it may be unintentional (not filing reports, not following hiring, firing or bidding procedures) and of little consequence (a little budget shifting that, while technically not permitted, may help a department that had come up a little short).
But darker motives are likely in at least some instances, given the frequency with which beat reporters in the past uncovered such transgressions.
And I’m equally certain that transparency (to use the word for public openness that has become annoyingly popular these days) would curtail such actions, innocent or not, and make for a more efficient, cleaner use of tax money.
The enforcers of transparency are the country’s newshounds, and not many are sniffing around those government bushes any more, ready to beat shake them to get those tough stories.
What should be done?
I’m afraid this blog rant has a lot in common with my last, on pain-killer medication. I have no solution, just a recognition of the problem.
A while back, my big idea was that large news operations could find major sources of revenue by hiring/creating nationwide webs of home-based operations like I had with Kirkland NewsLine for eight years.
These one-person (generally) news crews would cover all the community news, as usual, while providing the parent operation with sources of valuable information for nationwide trends stories and intimate audiences for national advertising.
They could be augmented by their own advertising staffs or left just be outlets for the parent company’s ads.
I wanted to pitch this idea to the New York Times but then I learned (through “On the Media”) that it had indeed tried a version of such home-based, localized news outlets in New Jersey and found them unprofitable. So they were abandoned.
Our best hope, then, would appear to be that the transformation to digital news platforms will soon begin to show a high enough profit that beat reporting can be restored.