Great job Zachary! We lost a lot of great people at The Journal. It seemed to me that people wanted their news immediately and didn't really care whether we had the police report or were waiting for a source to call, they wanted it now. Also, there was a endorsed pay check signed by Samuel Clemens that was framed and hung in the publisher's office that disappeared one day. Sam's brother, Orrin Clemens was the Journal's editor.
So howcome you didn't say anything when I was emailing Sullivan at the start of the Covid fun with you on the email list? You guys weren't asking any of the hard and necessary questions; you were still doing arts reporting with your staff of no one. And I wrote to (at) Sullivan saying look, look what's going on here, we have an AWOL congressman who says he's a big rural-broadband guy and meanwhile our ed systems are falling apart because no one's got bandwidth, we're not getting real answers out of the local tertiary hospital, what the fuck with our child state health director, we can't even find out how well or poorly prepped we are for this, because we have a rotted-out shell of a Gannett victim for a local paper and the most substantial reporting we have comes from college students. And I don't see your voice anywhere in that set of emails. Nor did you follow up on those stories.
News > elegies when we have no newspapers. Leave the elegies to the nonfiction workshop.
Great job Zachary! We lost a lot of great people at The Journal. It seemed to me that people wanted their news immediately and didn't really care whether we had the police report or were waiting for a source to call, they wanted it now. Also, there was a endorsed pay check signed by Samuel Clemens that was framed and hung in the publisher's office that disappeared one day. Sam's brother, Orrin Clemens was the Journal's editor.
Thanks for writing about this tragedy. We need to start calling for public funding of local newspapers.
So howcome you didn't say anything when I was emailing Sullivan at the start of the Covid fun with you on the email list? You guys weren't asking any of the hard and necessary questions; you were still doing arts reporting with your staff of no one. And I wrote to (at) Sullivan saying look, look what's going on here, we have an AWOL congressman who says he's a big rural-broadband guy and meanwhile our ed systems are falling apart because no one's got bandwidth, we're not getting real answers out of the local tertiary hospital, what the fuck with our child state health director, we can't even find out how well or poorly prepped we are for this, because we have a rotted-out shell of a Gannett victim for a local paper and the most substantial reporting we have comes from college students. And I don't see your voice anywhere in that set of emails. Nor did you follow up on those stories.
News > elegies when we have no newspapers. Leave the elegies to the nonfiction workshop.
I wrote about Bob McChesney's visit to UI 6 years ago. https://blogforiowa.com/2014/03/13/mcchesney-we-need-public-funding-for-journalism/
A great reflection on the meaning and effect of the decimation of local journalism.