Why Newspapers Matter
“We can’t expect the world to get better by itself. We have to create something we can leave the next generation.” —Gwen Ifill
I have always loved newspapers. My parents received the New York Times and the Trenton Times every day. The New York Times came in the morning and the Trenton Times came in the afternoon. The Trenton Times had the funnies with my secret crush the Phantom and the obituaries which, as a future storyteller, held a magnetic pull for my need to know things. I watched as my mother and father devoured the daily paper and the Sunday New York Times and grew up with the sense that a newspaper was essential for a civilized life. However, my real, shameful passion was gossip and so I became a reader of the Daily News which chronicled the seamier side of living in New York City. In every city I lived in, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, London, Dallas, Chicago, I read the paper, preferably the tabloid. I also read the alternative press avidly and free neighborhood papers. I’m not sure this habit was consistently edifying but it felt important to stay informed even if I was learning what some movie star ate for breakfast or the fight over a parking space.
Recently, I attended the screening of a documentary called Storm Lake which chronicled the daily life of a small-town newspaper before and during Covid-19. Here is a quote pulled from the New York Times by its editor, Art Cullen.
“I am the editor of a twice-weekly newspaper in this lush green town of 15,000 or so — we don’t know our exact population because so many are immigrants — nestled among the row crops and hoghouses of Northwest Iowa. We make bacon and more: 2,200 workers cut up pigs and turkeys for Tyson; 300 others crack eggs for liquid shipment at Rembrandt Foods 15 miles north; hundreds more distill ethanol from corn.”
Cullen, winner of a 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for editorial writing for a series of commentaries on the role of giant agriculture companies that pollute Iowa’s water has a staff and publisher made up of his immediate family; Art’s wife, photographer and culture reporter Dolores; his son Tom, the lead reporter; and John’s wife Mary, the food columnist, while his brother John, founder of the Storm Lake Times, is the publisher. Their marketing manager walks downtown streets greeting the merchants by name. Their large, sweet dog lops through the film.
While this might sound like a Jimmy Stewart throwback story it most definitely isn’t. The town is struggling with big agriculture’s impact on family farms, the divisive 2016 presidential election, a shrinking population, climate change and as the documentary draws to a close, the struggle to remain viable while Covid-19 rages across the country. The work involved in providing a twice-weekly newspaper that covers local, state, and national news is enormous.
My son’s father was a full-time reporter for the Wall Street Journal when we met and married in 1993. Everything I learned about working journalism I learned during our marriage, the grind, deadlines, integrity, and danger. Daniel Pearl was executed during his tenure, and my husband covered the situation in Northern Ireland during a particularly violent period. While running the Dallas bureau, the Oklahoma bombing occurred and as parents of a young child we were deeply affected. He went to work. However, what Storm Lake brought back to me was watching my then husband taking vigorous notes during an interview on a small reporter’s notebook, the same sort of notes John Cullen, son of Art, takes while watching a local basketball game.
I’m not sure one can legitimately compare news deserts to food deserts. After all, hunger kills people while an uninformed public, a public that never learns what actually happened on January 6th at the Capital or about the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan or that cocaine is laced with fentanyl causing the death of numerous individuals, or that George Floyd’s murderer kept him from breathing for nine minutes, will probably survive. But at what price?
Journalism, local, state, national and international has changed the world, the course of history, and individual lives.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach