Our editorial page this week features words from me regarding individuals I once knew, as well as developments in the media industry. One talks about how good editors become hometown heroes, while another shares news about the importance of local journalism. A final column comes from North Carolina Press Association award-winning columnist Jonathan Tobias about the recent tragedy in Minnesota. And we have columns from various local writers that will be posted later today.     

Originally published by the Poynter Institute about legendary Herald-Standard Editor Buzz Storey, the first column comes from John Miller, the editor of the Exponent Telegram in Clarksburg, W.Va. — Miller passed away this past week. RIP. Miller managed a great newspaper — truly a regional influence and a state leader in West Virginia.  

Many years ago, I worked at large newspapers in communities covering the border between West Virginia and Pennsylvania, including the Herald-Standard in Uniontown, Pa., so I am very familiar with the journalists, people and places in that part of the world — brings back a lot of memories.  

The other column talks about how the loss of local news is linked with increased government secrecy, according to a new study conducted by the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida.

Lastly, Tobias writes, “Like, as real as the shooting deaths of two little boys (8 and 10 years old) and the shooting injuries of 14 other children and 3 elderly parishioners? While praying during Mass at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis? Shot by a deranged 23-year-old bent on revenge against Catholics, who committed suicide after shooting through the stained glass windows, perhaps to put an exclamation point on their enraged and despairing insanity.”

Looking Back At A Time When Small-Town Newspaper Editors Could Be Heroes

By John W. Miller

April 1, 2021

The monument on Main Street in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, that caught my eye was not for a quarterback or soldier.

This gritty industrial community of 10,000 in Southwestern Pennsylvania named its central square after a newsman.

“Community journalist for more than six decades,” says a plaque for Walter “Buzz” Storey, introducing Storey Square.

This is who a newspaper editor could be in small-town America: a hero.

And that’s the missing piece in the conversation about rebuilding local journalism and its artisanal truth-gathering practices with the holy superpower to defang conspiracy theories, rebuild shared narratives and make democracy possible.

To trust the work of journalists they don’t know, Americans need to see journalists they do know making phone calls, knocking on doors and printing corrections when they screw up.

“It’s one thing to look at a TV and say ‘national media sucks,’ it’s another to look a journalist who you actually know in the eye and say that,” John Isner, co-host of the popular West Virginia-based Appodlachia podcast told me. Without local journalism, he added, “the connection of rural America and national-level news is forever fragmented.”

America is becoming a land of news deserts. The U.S. has lost 2,100 newspapers in the last 15 years, and many of the surviving 6,700 papers have become “ghost newspapers,” shadows of their former selves, according to the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

There is hope — in the form of digital startups, philanthropic aid and reinvestment in local news. ProPublica is partnering with local newsrooms around the country. Report for America has funded hundreds of new local journalism jobs. The American Journalism Project is raising $50 million to invest in newsrooms. More investment — a Marshall Plan, to invoke the legacy of Uniontown’s own Gen. George C. Marshall — is needed.

“Local journalism can’t take place without institutional support,” said Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy without Journalism?” “You have to fertilize for new shoots to arrive.”

The money going into coding new websites, apps and algorithms is welcome, but the legacy of people like Buzz Storey is a reminder that good journalism is really about people, and that journalists have often been treasured members of working-class American communities.

In Moundsville, West Virginia, where I co-directed the PBS film “Moundsville,” an attempt to create a shared narrative of a classic American town, people still talk about editor Sam Shaw, who died in 1995. He rode his bicycle around town, covering the courthouse, knocking on doors for interviews and collecting the news from conversations on the street. The eccentric bachelor was celebrated for his integrity — and beloved for his bird-watching, choir-singing and fondness for walking marathons and finishing last.

Storey was born in Uniontown in 1921. After working a paper route as a teenager, he joined the news staff of the Daily News Standard, which became the Herald-Standard. He learned his craft, overcame a stutter and learned to read newstype upside down. For the next 61 years, he wrote about council meetings, crimes and fires, mainly as city editor.

Occasionally, there was a really big story. Hometown hero Gen. Marshall, who has his own statue near Storey Square, visited in 1953. In 1962, a mine explosion killed 37 men. In 1985, Uniontown flooded on election day, forcing Storey to cover the disaster from a helicopter.

Buzz Storey had his own politics. He was an FDR Democrat, but Republicans respected him “because he was fair-minded,” said Ted Storey, one of his six children. “And he did what a lot of small-town papers used to do, which is foster civil debate.” That integrity gave Storey a respect that transcended partisan politics, and fueled support among town elders for naming the square after him when he died in 2004, said Mark O’Keefe, former executive editor of the Herald-Standard. (The paper still exists, in diminished form. The current editor declined an interview.)

Storey Square in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. (Photo: John W. Miller)

It might sound crazy in the age of unverified information flooding our senses and Facebook-fueled partisan bickering, but there’s a hopeful, and heroic, cohort of news pioneers now figuring out how to make local online journalism work.

These successful new digital journalists understand the human quality of journalism.

“It’s simple, people are looking for somebody who will go knock on the door of their favorite bar to find out why it closed,” said Shamus Toomey, co-founder of Block Club Chicago, a digital startup covering Chicago neighborhoods that started in 2018. “And with stories going online so quickly, you can gain instant credibility.”

Local journalism actually demands more accountability than national reporting.

“It’s a lot harder to write a story that makes the wife of your kid’s soccer coach look bad than it is to parachute in for The New York Times, write a story about dirty water and then leave,” said Ken Ward Jr., co-founder of the Mountain State Spotlight, a digital startup covering West Virginia that’s partnered with the American Journalism Project, ProPublica and Report for America. Ward believes that the solution to funding new local news outlets is tapping into local philanthropic networks. Americans will have to recognize that “a news organization is like the local health care clinic or the local library,” said Ward, who in 2018 won a MacArthur fellowship for his coverage of coal mining.

When Chris Horne founded The Devil Strip, an online newspaper which also publishes a monthly magazine edition in Akron, Ohio, in 2015, he spent months introducing himself in person to as many people in the community as possible.

“You have to be willing to be the person readers call on the phone to yell at,” he said. The Devil Strip now has a monthly audience of around 40,000 and is run by a co-op board elected by readers.

Of course, old-school pipe-smoking newspaper editors tended to be male and white. The next generation is already looking more like America.

In 2017, veteran Black journalist Wendi C. Thomas started MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism, a digital-only newsroom, with the goal of covering social justice issues in Memphis. It has around 30,000 readers a month, and an annual budget around $700,000, mostly from grants. When Thomas started the site, it helped that she had been a metro columnist in Memphis for 11 years.

She’s found an appetite to understand how journalism works. “Some of our most popular Facebook posts are where I explain how we got the story,” she said.

And that, in the end, is how you rebuild trust in journalism — by doing the work.

“It may sound like an opinion to you, but if you disagree when I say wealth in Memphis has been hoarded by whites, I say let’s go check out Census Bureau data,” said Thomas. “If you’re transparent about what you’re doing, and people can see the work, you get respect.”

That kind of integrity, incarnated by somebody keeping their finger on the pulse of their community, resonates with people who remember Buzz Storey.

“One time, somebody in our neighborhood killed a lady with a car and wanted to keep it out of the paper,” Phil Storey, another son, told me. “My dad said, just because I know you doesn’t mean I can treat you any differently.”

The story ran.

Lack of Local News Tied to Government Secrecy, New Report Says

By John Volk

The loss of local news is linked with increased government secrecy, according to a new study conducted by the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida.

The findings lend the first empirical evidence to the connection long intuited between the declining health of local news ecosystems and decreased government transparency. They add to the growing body of research that demonstrates the impact of news deserts on democracy, including increased partisanship, lower voter participation, and diminished civic engagement.

“Where there are no newspapers and weakened newspaper systems, government secrecy is flourishing,” said David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center and author of the report. “Government officials see that journalists are hurting, and they’re taking advantage of that.”

To measure transparency, Cuillier and his colleague Brett Posner-Ferdman, a law student at Penn State, requested the same seven records from 44 state governments under each state’s public records law. They found that the states with fewer newspapers per capita were more likely to deny or ignore their requests. They also found that responsiveness to requests improved in states with stronger press associations. Overall, about a quarter of requests were fully complied with, while another quarter were outright denied or not responded to.

The Medill Local News Initiative has tracked a net loss of more than 3,300 local newspapers and 45,000 newspaper journalists in the US since 2005. Those losses represent drops of about 33% and 60%, respectively.

The researchers did not find a significant connection between the density of digital-only local news sites and government transparency. Cuillier argued that these typically small start-ups can’t be expected to replace the work once done by large newspaper teams.

“They’re stretched so thin in trying to produce content that they often don’t have time to pursue public records, let alone sue for them,” Cuillier said of digital-only local news sites.

David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center, explained the local news crisis may lead pulbic officials to feel emboldened to withhold documents. “This is a terrible, terrible situation for democracy,” Cuillier said.

Former Washington Post journalist and Fulbright Scholar Miranda Spivack explained that government secrecy can take its most damaging form at the state and local levels where most citizens encounter government. She documented local officials’ attempts to hide critical information about issues ranging from toxic chemicals in firefighter gear to dirty drinking water in her book “Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back” published earlier this year.

“It paralyzes communities in a lot of ways,” Spivack said of local governments’ noncompliance with transparency laws. “It puts a lot of power in the hands of officials and private companies, usually, that they’re doing business with.”

Medill researchers requested records from a sample of 165 news desert counties earlier this year, looking to learn who, if anyone, was requesting records from these local governments. Almost half did not respond to the requests. Of the 54 counties that produced records in full, more than 70% received no records requests from journalists in a full year.

In many cases, news desert counties are small and rural. Cindy Ornsbey, the county clerk and recorder in Slope County, North Dakota said she had no memory of any records requests in her five years on the job. “The population here is about 740 people,” Ornsbey wrote over email. “There would be no reason that any news media organizations would need any records from Podunk.”

Long wait times and copying fees also stood in the way of access to documents, both in Medill’s look at the local level and Cuillier’s look at the state level. The Department of Natural Resources in Iowa asked Cuillier for more than $16,000 for access to records on hunting and fishing licenses.

Cuillier listed four paths toward improving government compliance with records requests: Strengthened local news ecosystems; stronger laws that mandate attorney’s fees and monetary penalties if an agency is found improperly withholding documents; independent information commissions in each state; and bolstered litigation efforts.

He noted The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has made strides on this final point. It launched the Local Legal Initiative in 2020 to provide on-the-ground legal support for local journalists with backing from the Knight Foundation and Press Forward, a nationwide philanthropic coalition working to strengthen local news.

Eric Feder, the director of the Local Legal Initiative, explained that the initial request is only the starting point of the battle for public records. He hopes that increased litigation from initiatives like his can change the culture around government transparency.

“Bringing a lawsuit gets results,” Feder said. “It doesn’t win every time, but keeping the pressure on, holding agencies accountable has this almost immediate effect.”

John Volk manages, updates and analyzes the Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative’s database of news organizations. A two-time Northwestern graduate (MS and BS in journalism, double major in statistics), he has previously worked at the Star Tribune, the Local News Accelerator and Northwestern Athletics.

Love Is The Answer

By Jonathan Tobias

Let’s zoom back to 1984. No, not George Orwell, though God knows how that book’s gotten so spot on these days.

Rather, a song from that year by the soft rock band Foreigner. It poses a deep, existential (if not ontological) question: “I wanna know what love is, I want you to show me.”

I’m going to reframe the song for an overriding purpose, taking it out of its original amorous context. Events from last week call for setting the song in a higher, more profound key.

Although this probably didn’t cross Foreigner’s mind, the fact remains that they hit upon a question that people have been asking for a long time. From day one, in fact. You could say the Bible (and even other religious texts) is a record of people asking “I wanna know what love is.”

In a few weeks I’m going up to Pennsylvania to make a physical appearance at the seminary where I teach. Most of my weekly classes are online, but once in a while I need to show up to prove that I’m not just an AI construct. And this semester, I’m teaching the hardest course in the seminary’s curriculum: theology about the Holy Trinity.

You may be wondering why I’m prattling about all this academic – and worse, religiousacademic – mumbo jumbo. And I don’t blame you. It’s the fault of people like me who’s made stuff that should be vastly interesting and exciting, let alone life-or-death subject matter, so dry and off-putting. It’s my fault and the fault of so many professors and writers and religious types for encasing glow-in-the-dark language in technical jargon. You have to wonder if we didn’t do this intentionally so that we didn’t have to answer questions and stand up and deliver.

And you’d be right to wonder why now, of all times, I’m going down the garden path of a theological subject that even in most systematic theology textbooks is placed dead last at the end, almost as an appendix. What do terms like hypostasis (i.e., “person”) and ousia(i.e., essence) and perichoresis (i.e., co-inherence, or mutuality) and methexis (i.e., participation) have to do with anything real?

Like, as real as the shooting deaths of two little boys (8 and 10 years old) and the shooting injuries of 14 other children and 3 elderly parishioners? While praying during Mass at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis? Shot by a deranged 23-year-old bent on revenge against Catholics, who committed suicide after shooting through the stained glass windows, perhaps to put an exclamation point on their enraged and despairing insanity.

When I see children, dead and wounded … and bullet-wounded old folks in the pews … at Mass, for God’s sake –

I wanna know what love is.

The answer to that question is buried under the strata of all my philosophical, theological argot. It is the beginning and end of the golden braid that wends its way through every page of Scripture, getting clearer and clearer by stages from the gorgeous beginnings in Genesis, through the bewildering layers of Mosaic law and the twists and turns of the history of Israel and then the clarion calls of the Prophets and the heartrending peals of the Psalms, then the climactic apotheosis of the Gospel.

I am proud of both my daughters, but especially of my older daughter last Wednesday, the day of the shooting. She is a kindergarten teacher at a Jesuit school. She took her little ones to chapel and they sang “Lord I lift Your Name on high, Lord, I love to sing Your praises. I’m so glad You’re in my life. I’m so glad You came to save us.”

Can you imagine how a group of 14 tiny munchkins must have sounded in that large chapel?

Can you imagine how that sounded at the very moment when 600 miles away other children were at another Mass at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis?

I have a picture of Fr. Eric in front of my daughter’s kindergarten class in his alb, cincture, stole and chasuble. He’s kneeling down in front of them so he could be on their level. One of the little girls asked him her version of Foreigner’s question: “What is God made of?”

Children are often (if not usually better) theologians than I am. Fr. Eric scratched his unwhiskered chin (they make priests so young these days). He wisely gave himself time to think. Then, eye-to-eye, face-to-face, he told that little angel: “God is made of love-energy.” And she nodded, and so did the rest, including my teary-eyed daughter. It made perfect sense.

The theological answer to that “suffer the little ones” question is the Trinity. The Father loves the Son through the Holy Spirit. The Son and the Spirit give themselves completely in love to the Father. And the infinite expansion of this love fills the universe to overflowing. Despite the rejection of that love – a rejection that one day will be overcome … by the Son, of course, on one dark Friday outside the city walls. He simply did what the Trinity has always done and always will do. Love, by giving Oneself away to the Other — completely, without reserve.

But beyond that is where my academic course fails. I don’t know how to answer the other questions of us adults who’ve seen too much, who’ve been through too much, who’ve watched too many shootings on the news, who’ve been too up close to too many tragedies (and one tragedy is one too many). You know, questions like “Why did it happen to that child and not to an old guy like me?” Or “Why did it happen at all? If I were God I’d never have let something like this happen. Why do miracles happen to some people but not to others?”

Honestly, that’s beyond me. The answers to those questions have to do with the freedom to reject God and His love. But those answers are not what we need. What the children and people hurt by this tragedy really need is caring for, they need healing, they need, as Mister Rogers said, “to look for the helpers.” And for the rest of us? We all need hope. We need to become the helpers. We all – especially our children – need safety and peace. For my part, I need the presence of the One Who is the infinite energy of Love.

I wanna know what love is. Here’s the answer: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16).

So we’ll do more than send thoughts and prayers: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred let me sow love,” St Francis of Assisi prayed, and went out and did so. And so should we – that is, actually become part of the answer to our prayers. Because love is the answer.

Cue England Dan and John Ford Coley:

Tell me, are we alive or just a dying planet? (What are the chances?)
Ask the man in your heart for the answer
And when you feel afraid (love one another)
When you’ve lost your way (love one another)
Light of the world, shine on me
Love is the answer (let it shine)
Shine on us all, set us free
Love is the answer

I wanna know what love is, I want You to show me. And He does.

Jonathan Tobias is a priest, scholar and resident of Edenton.