All I could think after hearing journalist John Nichols and economist Robert McChesney—the pair are on a book tour that included a stop at the University of Massachusetts—describe the peril of journalism’s infrastructure was this: our country has press and an Internet the way it has a health care system; at this point, it’s almost entirely in the hands of large corporate control, it’s expensive, lacking, not accessible to all and crumbling, and somehow, we stand a better chance of letting it fall completely apart than starting to fix it.
And having witnessed the health care debacle, the only reasonable response is, well, terror, followed by resolve to do something.
That’s exactly what McChesney and Nichols did.
Along with Josh Silver, the pair co-founded Free Press. If you don’t know about Free Press yet, you should, because this organization cares about the “unsexy” and wonky aspects of access, in terms of something like the Internet, the stuff we might take for granted, but absolutely need to pay attention to (so, click, baby, click).
You can start with a two-word primer, net neutrality: in essence, access to the Internet unfettered by censorship or corporate control. If you’ve never heard of net neutrality before, learn up, roll it around your tongue all day today, and then start talking about it (and don’t stop). If you are reading this blog, which you could click on and—voilå—read, then I am going to assume you care about net neutrality.
Hearing McChesney and Nichols speak about journalism as eroding infrastructure is kind of like hearing a reality laid out you knew of, were aware of, and then realizing how truly terrifying what you’ve been witnessing–without adequate fear—actually is. Nichols and McChesney complied the numbers in their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. Like the National Priorities Project provides the numbers of tax dollars spent on say, war, the sheer numbers that comprise the demise of news sources is also quite astonishing.
For a freelance writer, the numbers only affirm personal experience and I kept thinking how fitting it was to stand beside Jim Foudy of the Daily Hampshire Gazette while Nichols and McChesney laid out journalism’s crumbling landscape. Practically my first paid piece of writing was a First Person column for the paper’s Hampshire Life Friday magazine (I think it was an elegy to the much loved breakfast and lunch institution on Northampton’s Main Street, Curtis and Schwartz, and still we long for the luxury of hankering for those pan fried potatoes only to go to town to eat them). I was paid $50. These days, I occasionally write First Person columns for Hampshire Life—for free. The freelance budget for those pieces has been gone for a long time.
Having access to local news is so integral to our quality of life in this region. We are so fortunate that newspapers and radio stations and new media endure here, chronicling and commenting upon and sharing our community’s experiences. Think about what it’d be like without those platforms and my guess is this: we’d miss knowing as much about one another and things would feel more generic and they’d seem quieter and more isolated.
Funnily enough, I first learned about Free Press by putting on my kind of scruffy journalist hat. The Free Press office was down the hall from the Pilates/Gyrotonic studio I went to (both office and studio have now moved) and I kept wondering what this Free Press thing was, so I did what we do with Internet access; I googled it and was intrigued. So I did what we journalists do, and figured out how to write a story about Free Press (for the Valley Advocate, which houses this blog). And then, I did what a democracy lover with some money to donate does: I became a supporter of Free Press (and maybe you will, too).
