SALENA ZITO: All news is local.
There rarely is a proper obituary for old newspapers, nothing to chronicle how they were there when the school board was caught in a corruption sting, or how the local volunteer fire department saved the elderly couple on River Road. No one to praise when reporters held the town council accountable for reckless spending or caught a local politician taking cash from a union official or how the town rallied when flood waters crested the banks of the Youghiogheny or saved people when the train derailed.
It just dies.
Along with that death comes the death of the local reporter: the man or woman who knows their community inside and out, a career that typically starts with the cops beat or the local school boards, the places where a reporter really gets to know the pulse of their hometown and their people. Who knows how the town ticks. Who knows how it ebbs and flows. Who knows where the bad guys are, both on the street and behind a podium.
Who knows fundamentally that all politics is local.
Good journalism is not glamorous. It’s not sexy. It means long hours; it often means no personal life; it means wear and tear on your car; it means driving on rural roads where there are more deer than people or alleys where the state of the bodies you see outlined with chalk behind yellow tape will haunt you forever.
And when you go to a bar, you go to a bar; you don’t go to a cocktail party.
It is often not done in a fancy office with a ping-pong table and an espresso machine; the coffee is typically awful, and you spend more time chasing something down in a neighborhood than on Google.
And you never stop at the top – you pay your dues, you sacrifice your personal life, and you work your way up.
Not many reporters like that left. Thank goodness for Salena Zito! But as Andrew Kreig’s prescient book, Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America’s Oldest Newspaper made clear, newspapers got rid of shoe leather reporting because it was expensive, and replaced it with fluff that’s easy to get via the Internet, and then wondered why nobody was subscribing anymore.