Does journalism make a difference in a community?

What were once LTV’s smokestacks in Cleveland. (Photo by Andrew Bardwell via Flickr)

The first day of my first journalism class in college, we went around the room saying our names and answer a couple of questions from the prof, former Chicago’s American and Chicago Today editor Dick Hainey. There I was, happy to be able to say I was co-editor of my high school paper … happy until the first kid announced he’d been writing for his hometown paper for a couple of years. And the next one was sole editor of her paper and freelancing for a big-city sheet. And so on down the line. By the time it got to me, I felt like Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoon that Charles Schulz said was his own favorite:

That was the one where the kids are looking at the clouds and Linus says ‘See that one cloud over there? It sort of looks like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous portrait painter. And that other group over there – that looks as though it could be a map of British Honduras. And then do you see that large group of clouds up there? I see the stoning of Stephen. Over to the side I can see the figure of the apostle Paul standing’. Then Lucy says, ‘That’s very good, Linus. It shows you have quite a good imagination. What do you see in the clouds , Charlie Brown?’ And Charlie says, ‘Well I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsey but I’ve changed my mind.”

The other question Hainey had asked was why we wanted to be journalists. This was 1976, so there was a lot of “I want to change the world” stuff. Me, I just liked to write. Possibly about duckies and horseys, I guess.

It’s with a similar feeling that I approach the next in Steve Buttry’s questions for prospective Digital First leaders:

Brag about your journalism experience: How has your work made a difference in your community(ies)?

There was the time that the fine teachers and upstanding parents of the St. Charles, Mich., school district blamed me for the defeat of a school property tax and the local weekly editorialized that I was just out “to increase newsstands” with my reporting. But perhaps that’s not the kind of difference he’s referring to.

Or the time I ran a set of stories in our personal finance section on buying a new car, including info on how to shop online and get the best deal even if it was across the state (this was in the mid-’90s). Our advertising folks assured me I was personally responsible for the loss of several tens of thousands of dollars in advertising. Might even have been more than $100,000, now that I think of it. But that was really more about making a difference inside the building.

I oversaw a 2006 series called “Retire at your own risk” that commenters on cleveland.com occasionally still hark back to when problems with pensions or other retirement plans are back in the news. But given the frequency with which they’re back in the news, our series was less like the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike and more like if he had stood back a ways and said “Gee, is it supposed to be leaking like that?”

Truth is, most journalists will go through their careers without making as much of a difference in their communities as the average suburban council member. Oh, we give ourselves awards for public service, and if you look across the whole country in any given year you’ll find some good examples. But usually the “difference” comes down to “and then government did something.” Because reporting and opinion writing can’t prosecute a criminal or repeal an unjust law.

Wilbur Storey, fiery old newspaper editor, said, “It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news, and raise hell.” Inside that quote are all the difference-making that most journalists can aspire to. And that’s fine with me.

If I’m going to boast about a difference I made, it’s not going to be about taking down a president or editorializing in favor of a new form of county government. It’s going to be about publishing the news — news that is important to readers, news that they need to know, news that they can’t get elsewhere. (I’ve raised a little hell, too, but mostly by printing news.)

Go back to late December 2000. Very late December — last week of the year, the newsroom’s half-empty or more as everyone takes vacations during what is usually a dead period for news. I’m the only editor on duty in a short-staffed Business department when the editor comes by with a small bit of news leaked to him by a local congresscritter: LTV Corp., headquartered in Cleveland and a major local employer through its steel mill, is filing Chapter 11 protection from creditors.

Corporations don’t talk much. Corporations in bankruptcy, they talk even less. Over the next year or so, as jobs were cut while executives got big bonuses to stay, I was in charge of our LTV reporting team. We attacked that story from every angle. We profiled so many workers that you couldn’t find anyone quoted on TV or in other papers that hadn’t talked to us first. We explained bankruptcy law. We laid out the troubles of the federal pension guaranty fund years before airline bankruptcies brought it to national attention. Our veteran labor reporter, Sandy Livingston, spent night after night hanging out in the halls of a Pittsburgh hotel, getting the inside story on negotiations.

In the end, LTV turned out the lights. A few months into 2002, it was sold to a venture capitalist, who sold it again (of course). More jobs were lost. Our coverage didn’t save LTV, and it didn’t protect those jobs.

But somewhere in the middle of that year, I started hearing stories from people who went to the mill. They said that at every break, they’d see workers pulling out their Plain Dealers. That wasn’t so unusual; we were the only paper in town. But they weren’t turning to the sports pages, as they used to. They were opening up to the Business section, because that’s where they could find out what was going on. They weren’t hearing from their bosses; they weren’t even hearing from their union leaders. But The Plain Dealer — that’s where they could go.

That’s the difference I’ve made. Well, me and the dozen or so reporters who were a part of our team at one point or another, and Business Editor Debbie Van Tassel, and several fantastic visual journalists. We didn’t change the world. But during a time of confusion and anxiety, when several thousand men and women were wondering whether they’d still have a job the next day, we were the one place they could go for information.

That’s good enough for me.