A few years ago, I took a huge leap of faith, answered an advertisement on a journalism website and fulfilled a dream of mine - that of becoming more than just a writer or an editor, but a publisher - and encompassing the entire experience of being involved in local media. Over the years, I was always drawn to small papers, because I value the importance of local news. Although I no longer have any connection to that paper, I do write a weekly article for a local newspaper where I currently live. In that vein, it saddens me to see local media collapsing or being swallowed up by corporate giants more intent on the bottom line than on the value of local news.
The collapse of the local news industry offers manipulators a mother lode of opportunity: a populace full of questions and a gaping hole where they used to go for answers. A network of nearly 1,300 websites recently discovered by New York Times is the latest example of bad actors exploiting the void.
The sites look like any local news outlet, with names such as Maine Business Daily and Illinois Valley Times. Yet, despite a note in most of their “about” pages promising “to provide objective, data-driven information without political bias,” they are not really offering reporting, but propaganda. A mishmash of conservative political operatives, public relations professionals and think tanks act as “clients” for the sites, paying freelancers to support whatever candidate they endorse.
The writers do not adopt traditional best practices and sometimes are instructed on precisely what to say.
This elucidates an existing trend of hyper-partisan outfits masquerading as local news - cloaking themselves in journalistic credibility while churning out smears. The trend is notable for revealing not only the startling size of the network it identifies, but also its pernicious pay-to-play nature, wherein writers are commissioned to write specific stories to influence elections.
The tactic is reminiscent of a strategy recently popular among Russian meddlers known as "narrative laundering": hiring unwitting freelancers located in target countries to produce content that citizens are more likely to consume uncritically.
The phenomenon of disguised political sites is enabled by fuzzy campaign finance regulations that make it difficult to find out where the money is coming from, and by the depletion of community newspapers, 2,100 of which have closed since 2004 as advertising revenue disappeared. Proposals to restore what was once a pillar of American democracy vary from beefing up philanthropy to harnessing taxpayer dollars to extracting revenue from technology companies such as Google and Facebook. These solutions have their advantages and their drawbacks, including threats to editorial independence.
Yet, something must be done. It has long been clear that the vacuum in local journalism means less knowledge, less accountability and probably more polarization. Now, it is also clear that the vacuum will not stay a vacuum: Someone else will fill it, and not with the real journalism that communities across the country so keenly need.
When I first moved to that small northern New Mexico town, I looked around me and stood outside my RV as alone as anyone could be. The Chama Valley sprawled outward, mountain-rimmed tundra tinged by a late winter snowfall over the early green of spring. I had a background in news and a passion for writing. Sounds like a pile of stories would just spill out, right? But in those days, my prose writing amounted to a sporadic weekly column and less than regular handwritten letters to family and friends. I was a few years removed from the paid journalistic writing I had enjoyed fresh out of college. Through the process, I kept one foot in the world from which I had come.
In that vein I had moved to the mountains to write. To experience nature the way it was meant to be experienced, like Thoreau and Muir. Writing, especially writing well, is a time-consuming sedentary process.
You would think, though, that a lover of literature from Shakespeare to Twain, who spent hours analyzing the great stories of all time would be all set once I decided to write about life beyond the basic news coverage inherent in journalism. But all my training was not what I needed to capture a sudden burst of light after a storm, the silhouette of a wolf at twilight, or the power and silence of a winter storm like I wanted to do. I needed to hone a different set of chops - a clean, visual style, a voice that allowed the reader to watch at my side. Learning how to tell - and, in some cases, even recognize - the stories that passed before me was a hard inward rail that demanded clarity of thought and word. Rightly so, growing as it did from a need to explain what I had experienced and what it all meant to the most important audience of all: myself.
Inch by inch, I found my way. I needed to write as much as I could, in one and two syllable cadences, fuss endlessly over rhythms, word choice and punctuation, and test every paragraph by reading aloud and revising, listening to what I called the music of words.
Three decades after I began writing for newspapers and several editors later, here I am, whacking away in this blog at what has become the story of my life. You would think that by now I would have learned to write faster, and every now and then a piece flows like melting snow, but most days, writing is more like trudging up an endless, rock-covered slope, like many of the trails along the Front Range. Sometimes I am stuck on a single sentence for hours, feeling my way forward, sometimes writing in my dreams.
I once thought I had nothing left to say and changed course. But, after returning to it, I found a new wind. Stories are always there. You just have to know how and where to look.
Of course, we all run out of tales sooner or later, or the breath to tell them. Until then, I plod up that same hill, one word at a time.
Kommentarer