The new year means the holidays are over and it’s time to get back to business.
For The New Era, that means starting what the folio on the front page says is our 91st year.
We celebrated our 90th anniversary last fall, which is when the paper really was founded – we have a facsimile of the front page of the first issue on our office wall with the date Sept. 27, 1929.
To be honest, the anniversary occurred right in the middle of a particularly busy series of news events, and although we hosted a Chamber of Commerce After Hours event that drew lots of folks, we never got a chance to really celebrate that milestone as fully as we could have.
We were too busy covering news.
I should have written this column closer to the big day, but, as we roll into a new year, I want to take this opportunity to do it now, to thank our faithful readers and advertisers, who are just as important as our staff in making your newspaper happen every week.
We appreciate the support and the feedback we get from readers, and the commitment of advertisers who use this vehicle to get their message out to the Sweet Home community is critical.
People frequently ask me how the newspaper is doing. We’re doing OK, and I mean that positively. We all know that the world isn’t as accommodating to newspapers these days, but The New Era is still here and we’re healthy. We have a veteran staff who contribute substantially to the paper you get every week, for whom we’re grateful. They’re very good at what they do.
Looking ahead, though, I’m sure the future will be challenging.
I say this reflecting back at how things have changed in our nation, even since I started in this business almost exactly 40 years ago.
America has always had strong differences of opinion but I don’t recall anything coming close to the level of rancor evident in public discourse in our nation today.
Social media have contributed exceedingly to this. It’s still a little shocking to me, how people who would probably never walk up to someone and tell them to their face what they think of them will unleash a nasty, straight-from-the-hip blasts via social media that they can never erase – entirely. It’s just a weird dynamic to me, how civility can go out the window so quickly, in a medium that’s pretty permanent (if you’re savvy with your computer).
Another challenge for journalists has been increased concerns and restrictions in tihe privacy area. With the rise of social media and the internet, there’s been a corresponding concern about “privacy rights” that has taken its toll on reporters’ ability to chronicle even seemingly mundane details.
Twenty years ago, I rarely experienced people refusing to give me their names after I’ve taken a photo of them at some public event. Now I experience it frequently. I’ve chucked a lot of good pictures as a result.
Another change that’s occurred during my years in this business is that today our ability, as reporters of the news of your community, to get details about accidents has been substantially curtailed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which many hospitals and public agencies cite in refusing to give us (you) details about injuries to victims.
When was the last time you saw “so-and-so was listed in satisfactory condition at the hospital,” which used to be routine in news stories? The reason is because hospitals have to have a patient’s approval to give out any health-related information. And they don’t go out of their way to get it.
And with shrinking staffing in newsrooms, journalists simply don’t have the resources to make those extra calls and wait for hospital public relations staffers to get permission to report how “so-and-so” is doing.
Another difficulty is the proliferation of cellphones. You’d think having a cell would be handy for a journalist, and it is. But when I started out in this business, when we used typewriters and land lines, unlisted numbers used to be an occasional hurdle for journalists,. Now, with cellphones, nearly everyone’s number is unlisted. Hence, we have to try to connect in other ways – social media, acquaintances of the person of interest, etc., sometimes simply to put a name on a photo. It’s time-consuming. Often, it’s fruitless.
A lot of this is understandable. Social media have opened doors into our lives that aren’t always easy to shut. That spur-of-the-moment blast might haunt us a bit, making us a little more concerned about our personal security.
Then there’s the “Big Brother” threat of drones hovering overhead, surveillance technology such as trackers and cameras, those cellphones that we wonder might be recording everything we do, those computer cameras – are “they” watching us? There’s the technology that allows your face to be placed anywhere some nefarious techie wants to, in a “deepfake” video, in a photo of some situation you were never in. It’s not hard to do.
All of this is putting stresses on our liberties.
Our nation is changing, not always for the better. I’m concerned about losing vital freedoms, which may not always be comfortable, but are vital to our country.
Our president, who likes to proclaim his own truths when convenient, makes no secret of his distain for anyone who questions anything he does or says, particularly the press. The media are certainly not without faults, but the constant bombardment of “fake news” from Donald Trump’s lips, particularly early in his presidency, have had effects on the public’s perceptions of people who try to tell them what’s happening.
This limited space is not the place to assess the veracity of Trump’s complaints against the media, but I am concerned about the eventual effect on press and individual liberties posed by what I see as the rise of pathos (emotion) over logos (facts and logic) in public debate and in weighing arguments. If we make up our minds solely based on what moves us emotionally, we’re not going to a good place as a nation.
It’s not always enjoyable to hear what comes from a free press, but if we don’t tell you what’s happening, who will?
Last week I noticed that the banner we had mounted on the fence next to our office, celebrating our 90th anniversary, had been stolen over the Christmas holiday.
Guess that’s an indication that the celebration is over, that it’s time to move on, into another decade for our nation and for The New Era!