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On Friday, we took a trip down memory lane as I mused on my time with The Signal. Some of you likely suspect my hindsight is rosy-hued 20/20, but it’s not. It’s simply that the further we move from a situation, we gain a fuller grasp and understanding.
To be sure, The Signal’s existence, particularly over roughly the past 30 years, has been marked with mismanagement, missteps, missed opportunities…the list could go on, but I digress. But guess what? Every paper goes through these things. I want you to understand, I’m not trying to defend corporate’s and/or management’s decisions. If anything, what I am trying to do is create some empathy for the staff that day-in, day-out put in an honest day’s work.
I haven’t darkened the door of that newsroom in nearly four years. I can’t speak exactly to how things run now, but trust me, I’ve got a fairly good idea.
When you’re on the outside of a situation, it’s easy to be critical. We’re all experts at knowing that we could totally do (fill in the blank) better than the person who’s actually doing it (and sometimes, maybe that’s true). So, having been on both sides of the situation, I empathize and sympathize with a local newspaper staff that can pretty much never do a good job in the eyes of the public. Because I can tell you, with the resources they have they do a decent job, and until you’ve been in that situation you don’t quite understand what it entails.
To a certain degree, The Signal’s current staffing situation is reminiscent of midway through my tenure there, when we had a very slim staff. Here’s the thing: Even when you only have two reporters, there’s still an entire front page and news section to fill every day. So there’s the regular City Council update stories, or the seasonal campaign coverage, or the school board budget meetings, or the new playground dedication, or the weekend nonprofit fundraiser, or the guy who built a scale model of Colossus in his backyard (made that one up), or the fatal collision on the freeway, or the seasonal weather reports….it goes on and on. Every single day you start at zero, with a goal to fill that day’s paper. Which means the big stories, the ones you believe matter more than the retiree with a biodiesel conversion VW Beetle, the ones that take the time and resources of digging in and doing some investigative journalism…generally those have to get back-burnered. When you’re tasked with having to constantly do more with less, that series on unsolved murders in the SCV gets more and more difficult to pursue unless you want to work 24 hours a day.
Side note: Don’t get me started with crime reporting. Now, I believe the SCV Sheriff’s Station relationship with the local media is quite a bit improved from the better part of a decade ago, but when it comes down to it, it takes a lot to earn cops’ trust, and when you don’t have a dedicated crime beat reporter to build that relationship and trust over time, coverage will suffer.
Why am I saying this? I guess because over the past decade, as the immediacy of advanced technology has changed our lives in amazing ways, it has also started to turn us into idiots who are ready to hack someone down to size without hesitation and without filters, from behind the safety of our keyboard. Gone is civil discourse and criticism, replaced by anonymous comments and thoughtless dismissal.
Listen, no one at The Signal’s behind this. I don’t expect to ever be on the Morris Multimedia payroll again. I’m honestly just trying to lend a bit of perspective, and I stand by my belief that this community is better with The Signal without.
But, is it too late? Has the paper gone too close to the waterfall before it plummets over and is dashed on the rocks? Is it just eking out an existence before it finally collapses in the dust and breathes its last?
I don’t know. I want to believe there is hope. I want to believe it can remain a vital resource for a community whose population continues to grow.
I believe radical steps are in order. And I mean more than adding more video, or doing more glossy special sections. And as Aaron Kushner’s experiment with the OC, Long Beach and Los Angeles Register papers is proving, daily newspapers do not exactly live on optimism alone.
The Signal has not always been a daily paper, and honestly, there is no law that says it should remain one. I’ve long thought the paper, and the community, would be better served by a shift to a strident, vigilant, continuous daily online presence coupled with an in-depth, page-turning Sunday edition. Imagine a Signal website as a go-to for daily reporting, and a Sunday edition that’s nothing but a closer look at the stories that matter. Imagine a weekly print product that people looked forward to, and that got them talking. Is that a pipe dream, or is that a big risk with a potentially big payoff? Who knows, it could be a terrible idea.
The Signal has lasted for nearly 100 years. Think about that. Through all the massive changes to this valley, and how unrecognizable it is from the open fields of 1914, that newspaper has continued to be the record of this community’s history. Noteworthy indeed, but if the paper intends to continue for another century, its corporate overlords will need to be willing to allow for risks and something new.
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