For each of the last 222 weeks, I’ve come to work looking for what’s wrong with The News & Observer.
As public editor, I’ve considered it my responsibility to monitor the papers journalism for fairness, accuracy, honesty and truth-telling and to give you a report card in this space each week. The idea has been to make the paper accountable and transparent to readers.
I’ve had plenty of help from you in this problem-sniffing enterprise. Each week, about 400 e-mails, phone calls and other contacts from readers come to me, and most are not compliments — who calls if he’s happy? Virtually every column I’ve written originated with a reader’s question or complaint, and that’s as it should be.
Together we have found problems — of unfairness, insensitivity, sensationalism, inaccuracy, sloppy journalism. If we had room, I’d relay some more — such as the four grammatical errors in one op-ed column Tuesday that a reader pointed out to me.
But I don’t think it would be fair to leave you — this is my final column — with the impression that The News & Observer is an inferior newspaper. To the contrary, it is one of the best for its size in the country. Don’t take my word for it. Read “The News about the News,” the 2002 book by two Washington Post editors who wrote, “The News & Observer stands out from most American newspapers because of its ambition and execution.”
The N&O aggressively monitors the gearings of society and the people in power who work the levers. So, in that same Tuesday paper last week, you read about a local company that sent tainted drugs into hospitals and about a children’s mental hospital plagued by vermin, clogged toilets and cold bedrooms.
That’s consistent with the hard-edged reporting that characterizes The N&O, such as two series last year, one on mental health and the other on the state’s probation system, and the coverage the year before that helped send the state’s speaker of the House to federal prison.
A member of The N&O’s Community Panel — readers who meet with us regularly to critique coverage — last month surveyed his acquaintances asking about the N&O’s coverage. There was plenty of criticism, but also this: “I am grateful for the investigations they often publish. Sometimes I think the only way the state or local government is motivated to get something done is by the fact that The N&O has revealed the issue.”
It’s not just the big watchdog projects that define a good newspaper. Just as important is the day-in, day-out coverage of the mundane city council and school board meetings where somebody has to watch for the citizens.
The most frequent complaint I get is about liberal bias. There is something to that. Any good newspaper sees advocacy for the voiceless against the powerful as one of its roles. It’s part of the public service responsibility of journalism, and that often translates into coverage that makes the established uncomfortable. Newspapers are biased against the status quo.
But a reformist impulse doesn’t equate to a political agenda, and I don’t see much reporting that’s driven by ideology.
There’s much attention paid these days to the newspaper financial crisis, and that’s not an exaggerated problem. Just last week, a Denver paper closed and two more newspaper companies filed for bankruptcy (Philadelphia and New Haven).
N&O critics seem to delight in newspapers’ woes, as if they’ve brought misery upon themselves by being so out of touch with mainstream social thought. Wish it were that simple. The industry is in a long-term shakeout brought about by the Internet and exacerbated by recession.
I invite you to consider a future without newspapers — whether in print or online. It’s reliably estimated that 80 percent of the content that appears on news blogs such as Huffington Post and the Drudge Report — and is masticated by opinionators Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann — originates in newspapers. WRAL-TV regularly picks up stories from The News & Observer without attributing them to the source.
That’s not surprising. Even though The N&O’s news staff is much reduced, the paper still fields a force of 160 or so journalists providing you with an account of the day’s happenings. No other local news provider comes close to committing that kind of resource to information gathering. It takes a news enterprise of size to monitor big institutions.
To be sure, The News & Observer has issues. I worry that an increasing focus on local news tends to elevate the inconsequential and tawdry, such as crime and violence. The Web is perceived to be newspapers’ salvation — rightly, I think — but the emphasis on immediacy and 24-7 content generation results in short attention-span journalism, prone to corner-cutting and mistakes. There is a danger that cutbacks in space and staffing deprive you of the deep reporting that is newspapers’ competitive advantage.
But such problems will self-correct, with your help. I’m convinced that there will always be a demand for the public service journalism that The N&O and other newspapers provide, just not in the formats we’re accustomed to. It will be a challenging and painful journey to get to whatever new models emerge.
In the meantime, hug your local reporter. Demand the most of The News & Observer, but continue to read. It’s worth the 50 cents. Of course, I’m biased.
