Scott Swanson
It’s kind of an unwritten rule for print journalists to stay out of the news.
We cover news. We try not to make it.
So we sometimes find ourselves in awkward positions when we become part of a news story, even sometimes when we actually experience on a personal level what we expect to be covering. It’s not always enjoyable.
Of course, living in a smaller community like Sweet Home reduces the anonymity and aloofness that might be possible when doing journalism in a more urban area. I’ve personally been involved in situations where I’m either participating in something the newspaper might cover or at least am very close to people who are involved, whether it be a committee of some sort or maybe a sport.
As publisher and editor of your paper, I’ve developed a policy that I follow when I’m in meetings of, say, the Sweet Home Active Revitalization Effort, better known by most of us as SHARE.
If I hear something in a meeting that I think might need to be news, it will only become a story after we have a separate conversation outside the meeting. That way, people can talk freely and everybody knows where the line is between news scoops and working together to better the community.
Generally, the above are the kinds of issues we deal with as local journalists, doing our thing in the realm of daily life.
In recent weeks, though, some more intense examples of journalists becoming news have occurred.
One, of course, is the slaughter of the innocent staffers in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Md. two weeks ago.
To be honest, it wasn’t a total shock. It’s not that we run around, furtively looking over our shoulders all the time, but there have been a few instances where I’ve been involved in journalistic situations where I have felt motivated to watch my back.
People don’t always appreciate what journalists do, even if they do it well, and although “kill the messenger” is fortunately not generally reality, journalists aren’t always on the top of the popularity charts.
But that comes with the territory. We tell people what’s happening, and sometimes the news isn’t what they want to hear. But if we’re going to be credible and do our jobs as fully as possible, that means telling you about the bad as well as the good.
Of course, the perpetrator in the Annapolis shootings was extreme in his hate for the local newspaper staff, but we certainly appreciate that journalists in America aren’t subject to the violence that is common in some other countries.
All this, of course, comes on the heels of a rough stretch for newspapers: declining advertising revenues and subscriptions, cuts in staff and the resulting loss of ability to serve readers, all those accusations of “fake news.”
A more recent threat is one that might not immediately come to mind: tariffs.
Yep, except we’re not talking about “protection” for American iron and aluminum industries, solar panels, washing machines, etc. These are tariffs on paper – newsprint, which is what you’re holding in your hand if you’re not reading this online.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Commerce Department, following an investigation by the U.S. International Trade Commission, imposed preliminary tariffs of up to 32 percent on Canadian uncoated groundwood paper, which includes the newsprint used by many American newspapers. In imposing the tariffs, officials cited the likelihood that Canada subsidized paper exports and that those products were sold in the United States at less than fair market value.
But all this reportedly came at the instigation of one company: North Pacific Paper Company, or NORPAC, a mill in Washington that employs about 300 people and is owned by a New York hedge fund. No other paper producers have lined up behind this.
Anybody who pays the least bit of attention to national news has likely been hearing a lot about tariffs and trade war threats – cars, cherries and soybeans, steel, beef and pork, etc.
But this one kind of came out of nowhere.
Since there are no paper manufacturers in Oregon at all, we are forced to look elsewhere for newsprint, and a lot of the paper you’ve read your news on in recent years has come from Canada because there simply are no mills (other than NORPAC) that produce newsprint in the Northwest. Mills that used to are now producing packaging and linerboard.
All this means that prices are up about 25 percent over what they were nine months ago.
I don’t appreciate trade imbalances, but a lot of ours here in America have been our own fault – due to greed, opting for maximum profit now at the expense of loss of trade secrets and leverage in the future.
But I’m not a big fan of tariffs and although President Trump’s strong-arm tactics might work, this one in particular seems misguided or downright punitive. If there were multiple mills, even here in the Northwest, that were victimized by what NORPAC characterizes as Canadian dumping, there might be some sense to slapping a 30 percent increase on the costs of doing business for book publishers, newspapers and others who use vast quantities of paper.
So yeah, it’s strange to find ourselves in the middle of this and I don’t consider myself to be paranoid, but I have to wonder what’s going on.
My fear is that a lot of newspaper publishers, like me, are probably too busy trying to stay on top of things in their hometown to really do what needs to be done to fight this thing.
This is a threat to every newspaper in the nation. Nobody else is going to show up regularly to that city or county government meeting to figure out what’s going on and tell everybody about it.
That’s what we do. We try not to become the news.
And like I said, when we do it’s not always fun.