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On Feb. 10, the Post's Sunday Perspective section
offered a perceptive essay by David Leon Chandler, War
brings press flaws to light.
He correctly identified
two major causes for the flaws: careerism and hidden
agendas.
However, Chandler's analysis began with global media, and descended only to the metro level. My own knowledge is entirely at the other end of the media spectrum: Kremmling (circulation 1,400 in 1976), Breckenridge (5,000 in 1978) and Salida.
I don't know the circulation at the last job. The Mountain Mail's press run was about 2,200 (1978-83), but whenever somebody asked the circulation, we were under orders to include that of the company's Smart Shopper, a throwaway distributed from Leadville to Saguache, and proclaim 8,000 or some similarly impressive number.
That is only what small-town newspapers -- whose owners are now en route to the Brown Palace for their annual convention -- tell their advertisers. What do they tell their readers, and how is that influenced by careerism and hidden agendas?
The other financial interests of the newspaper's ownership can determine the hidden agenda. Does the owner have interests in real estate, which might cause some projects to be promoted and others to be ignored? Has the owner just borrowed money at favorable rates from a given bank, which results in favorable coverage of that bank? How well does a Gannett paper cover a billboard-law controversy when Gannett also owns a billboard company?
Gary Hart offered the best solution in 1975. He noted that the press expects candidates to file financial disclosures, and then scrutinizes those statements. Hart said newspaper owners and editors should also file such disclosure statements, which would be a matter of public record, with severe penalties for perjury.
Careerism is a big problem at small-town papers. Reporters are generally there for only one reason -- to build up their résumés with good clips, so that they can hire on at a bigger paper, one that pays more than $10,000 a year for 60-hour weeks.
Thus reporters tend to blow off the tedium of sewer-board meetings and 4-H news, and instead concentrate on stories that will impress metropolitan editors. In rural Colorado, you quickly learn that the metro press loves plane crashes, and if you handle one well, you might get some attention, and perhaps a job someday, in the city.
So in Salida, we did great work on plane wrecks. That came at the expense of intelligent, on-going coverage of issues that were much more important to people who lived here. But serving the people of Salida well was not going to get you a meaningful pay raise or a tolerable work week.
If the publishers of the Colorado Press Association are truly concerned about improving small-town journalism, they would recognize the careerist problem, which they could solve simply by paying a living wage and offering decent working conditions. But they're about as likely to do that as they are to file financial disclosures.
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