This week, Zachary, back from a summer reporting assignment for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and I sat down to dig into a problem I think cuts across nearly every American community: local journalism is collapsing as a business, and with it goes a big part of how citizens find out what’s happening in their own towns. I wanted Zachary to walk listeners through what the job looks like day to day, and to push him on some of the standard industry critiques: that reporters are scandal-hungry, that they’re partisan, that a 22-year-old asking a county board a hard question doesn’t understand how institutions actually run. Zachary provided some marvelous insights.
What I found most useful was how Zachary talked through how a story like the one he wrote on Milwaukee County’s 2001 pension decision gets built: not just interviewing the former governor and policy experts, but standing at bus stops and closed pools asking ordinary residents how service cuts made decades ago changed their daily lives. That’s the piece I think most people miss when they wave off local news as boring: the translation work between a budget line item and someone’s commute or swim schedule. We also got into how he manages press handlers who no longer need reporters the way reporters need them, now that politicians can route around the press entirely on social media, and why he thinks that shift cuts both ways.
I ended the episode more convinced than when we started that this is a story about democratic infrastructure, not just an industry in decline, though I’ll admit my optimism here is partly a proud father talking.
Click here to listen to the full episode or read the transcript.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.