Thirteen years bring many changes in news business

Scott Swanson

Amid the Easter holiday events and April Fools Day jokes last Sunday, another small milestone slipped by.

I actually barely realized it, because I was busy visiting relatives I hadn’t seen for quite a while and was preoccupied with catching up.

But amid all the hubbub, April 1 marked the completion of the 13th year of our time here at The New Era.

Kind of hard to believe, and it’s amazing how things have changed – or not, depending on what we’re talking about.

There have been a lot of changes. I can’t go into the details here, because it would require many pages.

We’ve seen new leaders arrive.

We now have BiMart and Dollar General Stores, and a greatly expanded Hoy’s Hardware, just to name some of the more evident changes in our business community.

Technology has changed. We’re talking seriously about driverless cars, for Pete’s sake.

There have been many changes in how we produce your newspaper. In our efforts to maintain and improve our ongoing commitment to giving readers as much information about our community as possible, which has always been our goal, we’ve made a lot of changes in our processes, particularly in our use of digital technology.

When we arrived in 2005, The New Era had a website and email and that was about it. The Internet was fun for web surfing and posting pictures on this cool new thing called Facebook, and maybe, if you were really on the forefront of consumer technology, for playing computer games with people who lived in other countries.

Now, at The New Era, we use the Internet – extensively – for just about every step of producing the newspaper stories you read, from tracking down people we need to contact for story information (because hardly anyone has a land line any more), to online research, to accessing photography and layout tools, to sending the paper to the press.

Twenty years ago, most of this was done by hand, with phones attached to walls and fax machines. We used cameras that shot film.

These days we also extensively use social media, which were just coming into existence in 2005, in all levels of reporting and disseminating news information.

The landscape has definitely changed for a lot of journalists in recent years as well, particularly on the national level.

I often tell people that, whatever else I can say about what I do, journalism is never boring.

That’s particularly true for a lot of media types since Donald Trump was elected president. Life for journalists who cover national news has become unpredictable, to say the least.

Trump’s war against the press, particularly those he’s labeled as “fake news” outlets, has introduced a new threat to the free press that is integral to the wellbeing of our nation.

Of course, that’s only one of a myriad of problems we face, which I won’t go into here for the same limitations on space and time noted above, but if the president is able to dictate what is truth and what isn’t, we’re all in trouble.

Frankly, I (and lots of others, I’m guessing) didn’t see this coming even a few years ago, when Trump started rising in the public consciousness, at least for those of us who didn’t habitually watch “The Apprentice” or read the New York tabloids.

Trump reminds me more of an emperor than a president in the way he handles not only himself but the media.

He accuses the media of bias, and there is bias – sometimes.

I’m as concerned as anyone by bias in the mainstream media. It would be nice to have full assurance that everything we hear is strictly facts, not someone’s spin on them.

But not all those news reports alleging governmental conflicts of interest, the apparently toxic work environment in the White House, Trump’s past dalliances, and a host of other topics that the president labels as false, really are.

FactCheck.org, a non-partisan, nonprofit that is about as close to the Consumer Reports of politics as could reasonably be hoped for, has listed 320 Trumpian claims of “fake news” in 2017, not a few of which were actual accusations that the news media were being dishonest. The organization lists dozens of these, along with pretty black-and-white, factual proof that what was reported was not false.

Trump is a complex individual. He’s assembled a remarkable list of positive accomplishments in just over a year in the White House – openly acknowledged as such earlier this year by at least one writer for one of those “Fake News” outlets he hates so much, the Washington Post. (That writer also produced a companion list of negative accomplishments as well, incidentally.)

Trump obviously craves total control, and news reporters who are doing their job will resist his control at every turn. No matter what you think of news reporters, do you want a government official dictating what they can say?

I see bumper stickers around Sweet Home proclaiming “I don’t believe the Mainstream Media!” and I get it.

The “press” are not faceless machines. They are people – often strong-minded and eager to right wrongs, but subject to the same foibles as everybody else. When they err, readers don’t forget.

Plus, the seemingly constant barrage of negative news doesn’t do anything to improve readers’ moods.

Sometimes though, like everybody else, journalists get full of themselves, thinking they’re smart because they know a lot, to the point that they think they need to tell others not just what’s going on but what they should be thinking about it.

Having worked in this business for nearly four decades, I have seen bias occasionally clearly influence newsroom decisions, but not as frequently as most media-haters I’ve met like to think.

Though I’ve never worked in a “top-flight” media organization full of Ivy League grads, I have worked for solid suburban and small-town papers whose sole goal is simply to tell readers what is going on.

I’ve seen many, many more situations in which it was impossible to tell what reporters or editors personally believed, or who their friends were, as they pursued a story for their readers. They were simply reporting what was there, where the trail of information was leading, which is what they should be doing.

I’ve seen reporters and editors visibly saddened by what they discovered, when a public official whom everybody liked turned out to be doing something wrong.

In this topsy-turvy world of Internet trolls and hackers and hostile political interests and declining protections for the free press, life likely isn’t going to get any easier for journalists – many of whom already shoulder very demanding job requirements compounded by increasingly questionable job security.

I certainly can’t predict where America is heading. I don’t know whether Trump will find a way to jail reporters he doesn’t like or otherwise manipulate what is reported out of our capital.

I do know that if such a sorry turn of events were ever to take place, the real losers would be the American people because truth – the actual facts – would be the victim.

Thus, after 13 years at your local newspaper, we’re still going to follow trails of information to find out what’s happening right here. That’s what we do.

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