This isn’t Wall Street

A strong and healthy press is one of the most important institutions to a free and open society. In this age of information and rapid expansion in human progress, when millions can come together around to world to create the greatest concentration of knowledge in history, it is shameful that we allow the watchdogs of progress to starve.

Journalists fill the margins of history for the most part.

The vast majority seek no great credit or lasting fame. They live in small towns. They’ve worked the same couple papers for the last fifteen years. They go to school board meetings. They interview the hospice nurse Joanne and they talk to Bob her dying charge with the nasal cannula, and this is one of the last great ways Americans are able to preserve their sense of community.

Because the information age has isolated us with the same rapidity that it has allowed our knowledge of the world to expand.

This isn’t about saving a few big players who keep their boys in the White House press room. This isn’t about one glorious act of investigative reporting that makes it to celluloid.

Though there’s a place for that kind of reporting and that kind of journalism in the world, too.

And this isn’t about preserving a few big newspapers chains. We could do with fewer of those and more locally owned operations in this country.

No.

This is about all the small town papers that don’t have the breathing room to let their reporters dig up the petty crimes, the nascent criminals masquerading as pillars of the community who left in the dark become monsters.

It’s about the embezzling of $200,000 by a school board that goes unnoticed, or the shattering silence that meets the cry for help of a marginalized border community as it is exploited by an unregulated dairy industry while the pesticide factory across the street pumps poison into its aquifer.

It’s about the modest reporter who records and exposes ineptitude in the daily act of asking questions, or the quietly intelligent city editor who encourages the hounds to dig around where there is a faint odor of malfeasance.

Keep the little monsters in their little ponds from becoming big monsters in big ponds. This is a good way to ensure we have a healthy society.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about institutions that are, “too big to fail.”

I’ll tell you what a few of those are: Journalism, education, law enforcement, and the military.

Journalists aren’t in it for the money. The few of us that are married don’t have children, because we can’t afford it. Going into PR or becoming the mouthpiece for a well-established non-profit, that pays. But it’s not journalism, and journalism is a craft. Few will want to learn it or pursue it honorably and ethically if it’s impossible to make a living while doing.

No one’s asking for a blank check or a free ride at the papers I’ve seen. This isn’t Wall Street. They’re just looking for a fair shake — from Google.

As someone commented on a recent column by Maureen Dowd, “Google should somehow partner with the content providers not out of charity but because they won’t have anything worthwhile to search for in a few years if they don’t fork over some of their profits.”

The newspaper industry and by proxy print journalism — paper and electronic — is dying an unnecessary death, like a man in an ER who is left to slowly perish because he does not have insurance.

And that’s a shame.