Archive for March 10th, 2016
Telling Other People’s Stories: Is this what a journalist should be mainly doing?
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 10, 2016
These Journalists Dedicated Their Lives to Telling Other People’s Stories.
What Happens When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?
As newsrooms disappear, veteran reporters are being forced from the profession. That’s bad for journalism—and democracy.
By Dale Maharidge. March 2, 2016
Arthur Miller’s classic 1949 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Death of a Salesman opens with musical direction: “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises.”
The play follows Willy Loman, past 60, as his grasp on life crumbles amid job troubles.
When, at the end of Act II, he reaches his beaten-down end, the melody soars again, this time a requiem. “Only the music of the flute,” writes Miller, “is left on the darkening stage….”
I heard this flute’s dirge throughout last summer and fall, as I made the rounds talking with downsized journalists—men and women who had gotten hooked on the profession as young, ink-stained idealists, only to find themselves cast out in mid- or later life.
These veterans spoke of forced buyouts and failed job searches—of lost purpose, lost confidence, even lost homes.
I had known of the decimation of my profession: I’d read the statistics, seen the news articles, watched old friends pushed from jobs as bureau chiefs, editors, senior reporters, into the free fall of freelance.
But the texture of their Lomanesque despair surprised me. There were some grim moments.
Summer 2015, the West Coast:
I’m chatting with a longtime friend, a great investigative reporter who was pushed out of a big-city daily. She’s managed to land a new, well-paying job—but it’s not in journalism.
A mutual colleague told me that “it’s the most hated job she never wanted to do.” I insist that my friend needs to find a way back someday, because she has stunning reportorial talent. “I don’t remember that person,” she interrupts sharply.
Early fall 2015, a bar on the East Coast:
An unemployed middle-aged writer whose work I’ve admired for decades agrees to meet for a drink. I buy the first round, he gets the second.
In between we talk about editors and writers we know in common, about stories nailed and those that got away. Typical journo stuff.
“So what do you want?” he asks finally. I explain that I’m seeking the human angle behind the news of thousands of downsized journalists. “Am I the lead to your story?” he asks, sizing me up, tensing. I feel that I’m losing him. Thus a Hail Mary: “Are you depressed?” His fast retort: “Are you trying to piss me off?” He walks out, leaving a full beer on the table.
2009 to present, somewhere in the United States:
An e-mail arrives with the subject “Journalist, with inquiry about homelessness.” The sender thanks me for my 1985 book on the traveling homeless—because he’s now one of them after losing a journalism job.
“I’m riding my mt. bike west, temporarily camped out in Kingman [Arizona], and I have lived under many a bush and in a few hostels along the way. I am a homeless transient without any money. Three college degrees to boot…. So here I sit, at the public library computer, typing out my stories and thinking about what to do.” We keep in touch for a while. Recent attempts to contact him end in failure.
The term “seismic shift” is overused, but it applies to what’s happened to American newspapers.
In 2007, there were 55,000 full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily papers;
in 2015, there were 32,900, according to a census by the American Society of News Editors and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Florida International University. That doesn’t include the buyouts and layoffs last fall, like those at the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the New York Daily News, among others, and weeklies and magazines like National Geographic
For most of the past century, journalists could rely on career stability.
Newspapers were an intermediary between advertisers and the public; it was as if their presses printed money. The benefit of this near-monopoly was that newsrooms were heavily stocked with reporters and editors, most of them passionate about creating journalism that made a difference in their communities.
It often meant union protection, lifetime employment, and pensions. Papers like the Sacramento Bee bragged to new hires in the 1980s that even during the Great Depression, the paper had never laid off journalists.
All of that is now yesterday’s birdcage lining.
The sprawling lattice of local newsrooms is shrinking—105 newspapers closed in 2009 alone—whittled away by the rise of the Internet and decline of display ads, with the migration of classified advertising to Craigslist hitting particularly hard.
Between 2000 and 2007, a thousand newspapers lost $5 billion to the free site, according to a 2013 study by Robert Seamans of New York University’s Stern School of Business and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School. Falling circulation numbers have also taken their toll
And things may get a lot worse, according to former Los Angeles Times executive Nicco Mele.
“If the next three years look like the last three years, I think we’re going to look at the 50 largest metropolitan papers in the country and expect somewhere between a third to a half of them to go out of business,” said Mele, now a professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism, in an interview a few weeks ago with the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.
Meanwhile, what remains of print journalism is shifting, morphing into a loose web of digital outfits populated by a corps of underpaid young freelancers and keyboard hustlers, Twitter fiends and social-media soothsayers. Gone are the packed newsrooms. And gone, in many cases, are the older journalists.
“Perhaps I’ve missed it, but has anyone done a story on how the newsroom layoffs of the past decade have been one of the greatest exercises in age discrimination in U.S. history?” asked R.G. Ratcliffe, who spent 33 years at papers ranging from the Houston Chronicle to The Florida Times-Union, in a 2012 comments thread on the media site JimRomenesko.com.
Some journalists have pursued age-discrimination lawsuits, but the cases are hard to make stick.
In 2012, Connecticut Post reporter Anne Amato, then 64, argued that the paper wanted to “rid itself of its older reporters.” She lost in court. Last fall, a jury awarded $7.1 million to former Los Angeles Times columnist T.J. Simers, 66. But early this year, the award was thrown out on appeal.
Part of the stated explanation for the exodus of veterans is cultural.
Old-school journalism was a trade, and legacy journalists find today’s brand of personality journalism, with its emphasis on churning out blog posts, aggregating the labor of others, and curating a constant social-media presence, to be simply foreign.
And the higher-ups share the new bias. One editor of a major national publication, who himself is well over 40, confided to me that he’s reluctant to hire older journalists, that “they’re stuck in the mentality of doing one story a week” and not willing to use social media.
Older journalists cost more as well, often making them the first to be let go or offered buyouts.
But the shift is also deeper and more systemic. Like the story of Willy Loman, cast aside in his creeping middle age, the tale of today’s discarded journalists is, at its core, a parable of the way our economy, our whole American way of being, sucks people dry and throws them away as their cultural and economic currency wanes.
Many older workers, not just journalists, are hurting. Amid the so-called recovery, some 45 percent of those seeking jobs over the age of 55 have been looking six months or longer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But there’s one major difference between other workers and journalists—when the latter are laid off, the commonweal suffers. “You know who loves this new day of the lack of journalism? Politicians. Businessmen. Nobody’s watching them anymore,” says Russ Kendall, a lifelong photojournalist and editor who is now self-employed as a pizza maker.
There are still print newspapers—and news websites—producing heroic local journalism. But it’s clear that the loss of a combined several hundred thousand years of experience from newsrooms across the country is hurting American democracy.
Less known is the impact on this lost generation of talent, people at the peak of their skills—in their 40s and beyond, ill equipped to navigate the changed landscape. Their lives are intertwined with the story of the public good.
Many have changed careers and are doing well enough—on paper. Talk to them, however, and many say they miss the newsroom. Others soldier on, freelancing in a market of falling rates. Some drive for Uber; others lurch into early retirement, wondering if they’ll make it.
Journalists often seek an emblematic person to illustrate a story. But sometimes there’s no single through-line character. Sometimes there are 22,000 of them. These are a few of their stories.
In 1977, a small Ohio daily hired me at a weekly net pay of $90.
In 1980, I drove to California seeking work. I lived out of my Datsun pickup, homeless, for three months, until The Sacramento Bee hired me. You could do that back then. In the newsroom, I was seated next to Hilary Abramson. She smoked little French cigars. Soon I was smoking cigars with her at our desks. You could also do that back then. I’d never met another reporter with so much energy: Abramson practically levitated.
Through the 1980s, I overheard Abramson as she reported on topics ranging from police abuse to a county poorhouse program that was declared unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court as a result of her exposé. She wrote the first major profile of Rush Limbaugh, then just a local radio personality.
After the 1980s, she went on to be managing editor at the Pacific News Service, later a reporter funded by foundations. Then the money ran out. No one would hire her. She blames ageism. Like most of the journalists I interviewed, she said this was never spelled out, but rather implied. “I was told that I was ‘overqualified’ for a few editing jobs,” Abramson said when we sat down and talked last summer. “I considered that ageism at work. I would demand a realistic salary that younger journalists wouldn’t expect.”
Abramson, now 70, has freelanced. A magazine gave her an investigative assignment. When the contract came after months of work, it included a clause that “said absolutely all the liability was on me.” The editor said the new policy was driven by lawyers.
“I was dealing with a controversial subject that could incur the wrath of an entity with very deep pockets. I had to let it go. I worked for free,” she said. And the story never got told.
“I always knew right from the start I’d never be good working for myself. I’m not a businessperson—just let me do my work. Very few reporters I worked with were good on the business end. One thing I never contemplated was the end of newspapers. It’s like burying someone you love. It paralyzes me, angers me. I just haven’t found a way to go gently into the dark.”
The days, she said, could be very bleak. “We were not prepared—even us, who spent years listening to people pour their hearts out when bad things happened to them. We thought it would never happen to us. We had our bliss. What made us think it would go on forever?”
A plant’s-eye view
What if human consciousness isn’t the end-all and be-all of Darwinism?
What if we are all just pawns in corn’s clever strategy game to rule the Earth?
Author Michael Pollan asks us to see the world from a plant’s-eye view.
It’s a simple idea about nature. I want to say a word for nature because we haven’t talked that much about it the last couple days.
I want to say a word for the soil and the bees and the plants and the animals, and tell you about a tool, a very simple tool that I have found. Although it’s really nothing more than a literary conceit; it’s not a technology.
It’s very powerful for changing our relationship to the natural world and to the other species on whom we depend.
And that tool is very simply, as Chris suggested, looking at us and the world from the plants’ or the animals’ point of view. It’s not my idea, other people have hit on it, but I’ve tried to take it to some new places.
00:57 Let me tell you where I got it. Like a lot of my ideas, like a lot of the tools I use, I found it in the garden; I’m a very devoted gardener.
And there was a day about seven years ago: I was planting potatoes, it was the first week of May — this is New England, when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom; they’re just white clouds above. I was here, planting my chunks, cutting up potatoes and planting it, and the bees were working on this tree; bumblebees, just making this thing vibrate.
And one of the things I really like about gardening is that it doesn’t take all your concentration, you really can’t get hurt — it’s not like woodworking — and you have plenty of kind of mental space for speculation.
And the question I asked myself that afternoon in the garden, working alongside that bumblebee, was: what did I and that bumblebee have in common?
How was our role in this garden similar and different? And I realized we actually had quite a bit in common: both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another, and both of us — probably, if I can imagine the bee’s point of view — thought we were calling the shots.
I had decided what kind of potato I wanted to plant — I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn, or whatever it was — and I had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country, brought it, and I was planting it.
And that bee, no doubt, assumed that it had decided, “I’m going for that apple tree, I’m going for that blossom, I’m going to get the nectar and I’m going to leave.”
We have a grammar that suggests that’s who we are; that we are sovereign subjects in nature, the bee as well as me.
I plant the potatoes, I weed the garden, I domesticate the species.
But that day, it occurred to me: what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit? Because, of course, the bee thinks he’s in charge or she’s in charge, but we know better.
We know that what’s going on between the bee and that flower is that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower. And when I say manipulated, I’m talking about in a Darwinian sense, right? I mean it has evolved a very specific set of traits — color, scent, flavor, pattern — that has lured that bee in.
And the bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, and also picking up some powder on its leg, and going off to the next blossom. The bee is not calling the shots. And I realized then, I wasn’t either.
I had been seduced by that potato and not another into planting its — into spreading its genes, giving it a little bit more habitat. And that’s when I got the idea, which was, “Well, what would happen if we kind of looked at us from this point of view of these other species who are working on us?”
And agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention, not as a human technology, but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species, mostly edible grasses, had exploited us, figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world.
The competition of grasses, right? And suddenly everything looked different. And suddenly mowing the lawn that day was a completely different experience.
04:18 I had thought always — and in fact, had written this in my first book; this was a book about gardening — that lawns were nature under culture’s boot, that they were totalitarian landscapes, and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex.
And that’s what the lawn was. But then I realized, “No, this is exactly what the grasses want us to do. I’m a dupe. I’m a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees, who they compete with for sunlight.” And so by getting us to mow the lawn, we keep the trees from coming back, which in New England happens very, very quickly. (Not clear to me this connection. Would trees grow if the grass is left undisturbed?)
So I started looking at things this way and wrote a whole book about it called “The Botany of Desire.”
And I realized that in the same way you can look at a flower and deduce all sorts of interesting things about the taste and the desires of bees — that they like sweetness, that they like this color and not that color, that they like symmetry — what could we find out about ourselves by doing the same thing?
That a certain kind of potato, a certain kind of drug, a sativa-indica Cannabis cross has something to say about us. And that, wouldn’t this be kind of an interesting way to look at the world?
Now, the test of any idea — I said it was a literary conceit — is what does it get us?
And when you’re talking about nature, which is really my subject as a writer, how does it meet the Aldo Leopold test? Which is, does it make us better citizens of the biotic community? Get us to do things that leads to the support and perpetuation of the biota, rather than its destruction?
And I would submit that this idea does this. So, let me go through what you gain when you look at the world this way, besides some entertaining insights about human desire.
As an intellectual matter, looking at the world from other species’ points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly, which is — and this is in the realm of intellectual history — which is that we have this Darwinian revolution 150 years ago … Ugh. Mini-Me. (Laughter)
We have this intellectual, this Darwinian revolution in which, thanks to Darwin, we figured out we are just one species among many; evolution is working on us the same way it’s working on all the others; we are acted upon as well as acting; we are really in the fiber, the fabric of life.
But the weird thing is, we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later; none of us really believes this. We are still Cartesians — the children of Descartes — who believe that subjectivity, consciousness, sets us apart; that the world is divided into subjects and objects; that there is nature on one side, culture on another.
As soon as you start seeing things from the plant’s point of view or the animal’s point of view, you realize that the real literary conceit is that — is the idea that nature is opposed to culture, the idea that consciousness is everything — and that’s another very important thing it does.
07:37 Looking at the world from other species’ points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness — which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness — is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world.
And it’s kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool. But, you know, there’s a comedian who said, “Well, who’s telling me that consciousness is so good and so important? Well, consciousness.” So when you look at the plants, you realize that there are other tools and they’re just as interesting.
I’ll give you two examples, also from the garden: lima beans.
You know what a lima bean does when it’s attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean.
So what plants have — while we have consciousness, tool making, language, they have biochemistry. And they have perfected that to a degree far beyond what we can imagine.
Their complexity, their sophistication, is something to really marvel at, and I think it’s really the scandal of the Human Genome Project. You know, we went into it thinking, 40,000 or 50,000 human genes and we came out with only 23,000.
Just to give you grounds for comparison, rice: 35,000 genes. So who’s the more sophisticated species? Well, we’re all equally sophisticated.
We’ve been evolving just as long, just along different paths. So, cure for self-importance, way to sort of make us feel the Darwinian idea. And that’s really what I do as a writer, as a storyteller, is try to make people feel what we know and tell stories that actually help us think ecologically.
Now, the other use of this is practical. And I’m going to take you to a farm right now, because I used this idea to develop my understanding of the food system and what I learned, in fact, is that we are all being manipulated by corn.
And the talk you heard about ethanol earlier today, to me, is the final triumph of corn over good sense. (Laughter)
It is part of corn’s scheme for world domination. (Laughter) And you will see, the amount of corn planted this year will be up dramatically from last year and there will be that much more habitat because we’ve decided ethanol is going to help us.
So it helped me understand industrial agriculture, which of course is a Cartesian system. It’s based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge, and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want. Let me take you to a very different kind of farm.
10:43 This is a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
I went looking for a farm where these ideas about looking at things from the species’ point of view are actually implemented, and I found it in a man. The farmer’s name is Joel Salatin.
And I spent a week as an apprentice on his farm, and I took away from this some of the most hopeful news about our relationship to nature that I’ve ever come across in 25 years of writing about nature.
And that is this: the farm is called Polyface, which means … the idea is he’s got six different species of animals, as well as some plants, growing in this very elaborate symbiotic arrangement.
It’s permaculture, those of you who know a little bit about this, such that the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the turkeys and the … what else does he have? All the six different species — rabbits, actually — are all performing ecological services for one another, such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another.
It’s a very elaborate and beautiful dance, but I’m going to just give you a close-up on one piece of it, and that is the relationship between his cattle and his chickens, his laying hens.
And I’ll show you, if you take this approach, what you get, OK? And this is a lot more than growing food, as you’ll see; this is a different way to think about nature and a way to get away from the zero-sum notion, the Cartesian idea that either nature’s winning or we’re winning, and that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished.
So, one day, cattle in a pen. The only technology involved here is this cheap electric fencing: relatively new, hooked to a car battery; even I could carry a quarter-acre paddock, set it up in 15 minutes. Cows graze one day. They move. They graze everything down, intensive grazing. He waits three days, and then we towed in something called the Eggmobile.
The Eggmobile is a very rickety contraption — it looks like a prairie schooner made out of boards — but it houses 350 chickens. He tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank, turns them down, and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank — clucking, gossiping as chickens will — and they make a beeline for the cow patties.
12:59 And what they’re doing is very interesting: they’re digging through the cow patties for the maggots, the grubs, the larvae of flies. And the reason he’s waited three days is because he knows that on the fourth day or the fifth day, those larvae will hatch and he’ll have a huge fly problem. But he waits that long to grow them as big and juicy and tasty as he can because they are the chickens’ favorite form of protein.
So the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they’re pushing around the manure to get at the grubs, and in the process they’re spreading the manure out. Very useful second ecosystem service.
And third, while they’re in this paddock they are, of course, defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field. They then move out to the next one, and in the course of just a few weeks, the grass just enters this blaze of growth.
And within four or five weeks, he can do it again. He can graze again, he can cut, he can bring in another species, like the lambs, or he can make hay for the winter.
I want you to just look really close up onto what’s happened there. So, it’s a very productive system. And what I need to tell you is that on 100 acres he gets 40,000 pounds of beef; 30,000 pounds of pork; 25,000 dozen eggs; 20,000 broilers; 1,000 turkeys; 1,000 rabbits — an immense amount of food.
You hear, “Can organic feed the world?” Well, look how much food you can produce on 100 acres if you give each species what it wants, let it realize its desires, its physiological distinctiveness. Put that in play.
14:43 But look at it from the point of view of the grass, now.
What happens to the grass when you do this? When a ruminant grazes grass, the grass is cut from this height to this height, and it immediately does something very interesting. Any one of you who gardens knows that there is something called the root-shoot ratio, and plants need to keep the root mass in some rough balance with the leaf mass to be happy.
So when they lose a lot of leaf mass, they shed roots; they kind of cauterize them and the roots die. And the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots, decomposing them — the earthworms, the fungi, the bacteria — and the result is new soil. This is how soil is created.
It’s created from the bottom up. This is how the prairies were built, the relationship between bison and grasses.
15:36 And what I realized when I understood this — and if you ask Joel Salatin what he is, he’ll tell you he’s not a chicken farmer, he’s not a sheep farmer, he’s not a cattle rancher; he’s a grass farmer, because grass is really the keystone species of such a system — is that, if you think about it, this completely contradicts the tragic idea of nature we hold in our heads, which is that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished.
More for us, less for nature. Here, all this food comes off this farm, and at the end of the season there is actually more soil, more fertility and more biodiversity.
It’s a remarkably hopeful thing to do. There are a lot of farmers doing this today. This is well beyond organic agriculture, which is still a Cartesian system, more or less.
And what it tells you is that if you begin to take account of other species, take account of the soil, that even with nothing more than this perspectival idea — because there is no technology involved here except for those fences, which are so cheap they could be all over Africa in no time — that we can take the food we need from the Earth and actually heal the Earth in the process.
17:03 This is a way to reanimate the world, and that’s what’s so exciting about this perspective. When we really begin to feel Darwin’s insights in our bones, the things we can do with nothing more than these ideas are something to be very hopeful about.
