Back to the homefront
Fixing democracy means reviving local news
Forget the presidential nominating conventions and inaugurations, the Supreme Court confirmations and landmark decisions, the exotic foreign destinations and the conflict zones. Of all the jobs I’ve had as a journalist, the one that now looms as the most important — the one where, I have come to believe, I had the most impact — was the four years I spent as a general assignment reporter for my hometown paper.
Thanks to its cheapskate owners, The Pittsburgh Press, when I got there, looked like lovingly well-preserved set of “The Front Page”: scuffed linoleum floors, desks thoroughly battered by the three shifts of reporters who shared them, old fashioned phones on stems and, yes, a switchboard with a switchboard operator.
The assignments were not calculated to win you the Pulitzer Prize: I wrote obits and golden wedding anniversaries, made up the obligatory (and egregious) puns with which we always concluded the daily weather report. Once, I climbed up a ladder to interview roofers about what it was like to work in a heat wave. I got to cover events like the Great Tomato Festival.
But I also spent a night with a bunch of kids in a county-run dormitory to find out what it was like to be a ward of the state. I nosed through neglected ledger books to uncover how officials in our region’s small, under-covered municipalities had been ripping off taxpayers while no one was looking. I spent months covering a state legislative race and unearthed records that helped keep a crooked candidate from winning the seat.
My colleagues were a motley bunch of misfits right out of Damon Runyon. The leading poet of the rewrite desk was an amiable alcoholic who had to be retired to the newspaper morgue after every lunch hour to do “historical research.” The cop shop reporter kept a revolver in his desk. Our political editor had a nervous habit of scratching his back with a pen — uncapped. I sat behind him and got to study the results on his shirts, intricate, Miro-like scribbles. The artist also had an itchy style of interviewing.
“What in the hell, I mean WHAT IN THE HELL do you think you are doing?” he would bellow at hapless souls who tried to justify their candidacies for various local and statewide offices at a gunmetal grey metal table we kept right in the middle of the newsroom for not-so-intimate tête-à-têtes with such dignitaries.
I … spent a night with a bunch of kids in a county-run dormitory to find out what it was like to be a ward of the state. I nosed through neglected ledger books to uncover the ways officials in our region’s small, under-covered municipalities had ripping off the taxpayers or misusing their money. I spent months covering a state legislative race and unearthed records that helped keep a crooked candidate from winning the seat.
Such was my support group. Once, after getting off the phone with a woman who, despite having given me a lengthy interview the day before had now decided it should all be off the record, I got a visit from an assistant city editor. He had noticed my look of consternation and wanted to know what was up.
When I explained, he didn’t hesitate: “Did you tell her to go f — k herself?”
“We can do that?” I brightened.
OK. Before I give the well-meaning folks in HR or the community outreach office an aneurysm or scare off post-millennial prospects in search of nap rooms and avocado toast, I should quickly say I’m not recommending a return to the squalor and arrogance of the newsrooms of yesteryear. But I do think they are worth contemplating with more than sentimental nostalgia.
What gave the political editor the standing to publicly humiliate officeholders and would-be officeholders? What gave the assistant city editor the swagger to tell a source — and reader — to, um, buzz off?
It was the confidence that comes from being part of a community.
You know what I’m talking about: When you’re part of a family, you’re entitled to dish out and you can expect to receive tough love. You can say and hear things from other family members that neither they nor you would tolerate from outsiders.
The reporters at The Pittsburgh Press called the place we covered home. We understood our readers because we commuted to work on the same roads, sent our kids to the same schools, shopped in the same stores, played in the same parks and attended the same places of worship. My years working at my hometown paper, followed by years I spent in Washington walking a local beat for papers in Pittsburgh, Houston and Little Rock, taught me a lot. It’s why, though I was shocked by Donald Trump’s election, I wasn’t particularly surprised. I had spent decades getting to know the resentments that animated his voters.
A lot of journalists missed it because they never got to do what I did. It’s hard to imagine an editor today assigning a reporter to cover a state legislative race from beginning to end. Or a Washington correspondent spending day after day visiting the offices of local members of Congress to find out what’s on the minds of the representatives, and their constituents.
Too often now stories about fly-over country are told by people with parachutes. They read as if written by an anthropologist observing a strange tribe. An anthropologist can be arch and supercilious but she speaks to an audience of outsiders. She can’t deliver a well-aimed, well-timed “F — k you” or a “What IN THE HELL do you think you are doing?” when people in power need it.
Our communities are the poorer for that.
Being immersed in a place changes the way you operate as a journalist. You think twice about taking somebody down if you know her husband and her children. Conversely, it’s harder for a politician to dismiss as purveyors of “fake news” reporters whom their colleagues and constituents know as familiar faces.
That’s why four decades after starting my career at a local newspaper, I’ve come full circle. My time in Washington taught me that the nationalization of news and politics has not been good for either. I saw it turn the people I covered — and some I worked with — from intelligent actors capable of seeing past political differences to ideological automatons, from caring members of a community to click-baiting carnival barkers, more interested in selling tickets to the freak show than in building something that will last beyond the next news cycle.
Being immersed in a place changes the way you operate as a journalist. You think twice about taking somebody down if you know her husband and her children.
I have come to believe that the problems we are facing as a society and as an industry will best be solved at a local level, where it’s easier to see the humanity in each other and to appreciate the importance of separating facts from propaganda.
As a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, I will be working with the university-owned local newspaper, local radio station and local television station to teach community reporting to our students.
Maybe someday one of them will remember me as one of the outspoken eccentrics in a newsroom where she learned to give voice to the voiceless, to challenge those who usurp power, to deliver a well-timed “What the hell?” when somebody important needs to hear it.
I can’t think of a finer legacy than the one I hope to earn by bringing my career full circle: Back to local news.
Kathy Kiely is the Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism. She spent more than three decades in Washington as a reporter and editor for regional and national news organizations.
