Think of the thrilling sequences you’ve seen in the great journalism films: Bob Woodward huddling with Deep Throat in the parking garage in “All The President’s Men,” for example, or Hildy Johnson hiding her key source, an escaped convict, in a rolltop newsroom desk in “His Girl Friday.”
Most days, my first newspaper job looked nothing like that.
It was with The Citizen, a 200-year-old newspaper covering the largely rural area around Auburn, New York, halfway between Rochester and Syracuse. When I was hired there straight out of journalism school in 2010, the metro desk had five reporters, each with a tightly defined beat. Mine was Cayuga County government.
Among many other duties, the job required attending the legislature’s seven monthly meetings and writing seven stories about what happened. This did not always result in compelling content.
Sometimes I got to write about significant expenditures of public money or entertaining personality flare-ups or meaningful policy debates. More often, though, I did not. It was a small town and most of the business was small-town business. If the parks committee spent its meeting discussing bids for new paint on the park benches, that was the headline in the next day’s newspaper.
In journalism, we call a story like that a daily — a short- to medium-length piece, reported and written in a single day with few pretensions toward art or posterity. It might summarize a press conference, report, or lawsuit, or give the initial details on a house fire or traffic accident. A write-up of a public meeting, usually done at night on deadline, is the canonical daily.
During the time that we now think of as local journalism’s golden age, these sorts of stories made up the broad middle class of the newspaper. The labor-intensive, prize-winning investigations and features were reserved for the weekend front pages, while the inside front cover or some other out-of-the-way place held whatever scandal and vice the city had coughed up the day before.
The rest of it — column inch upon column inch, broad swaths of newsprint serving as ballast for the obituaries, funny pages and mattress sales — was, for the most part, dailies.
Those stories, considered individually, were neither impactful nor memorable; a metrics-driven editor in the 21st century would axe them without a second thought. But I have come to believe that the humble daily has been greatly underappreciated. More than anything else in the newspaper, it serves as critical civic infrastructure, justifying not just the business of journalism but its now-precarious status as a guarantor of democracy.
The story about the parks committee, for example, does more than identify the paint vendor. It serves to inform the citizenry about what the government is doing on its behalf. In doing so it provides a foundation for people to become involved in whatever way they choose.
That could be voting or protesting or running for office, but it usually isn’t that ambitious. Many mornings I would stop into a coffee shop in downtown Auburn and find a klatch of old men and women arguing about the dailies my colleagues and I had written the night before. The steady publication of reliable news in easily digestible chunks allowed for ongoing truth-based conversations within the community.
Conversely, the government interpreted my presence at the parks committee meeting as a sign that the public had an observer and advocate in the room. That is no small thing. Indeed, research has shown that the very presence of local journalists in a community has a measurable impact on, for instance, interest rates on public projects. Banks feel more confident making loans when they know a reporter is there to guard against government corruption.
Writing a lot of dailies inevitably means talking to a lot of people — those in power, but everyone else, too. Especially in a small community, readers of a well-equipped local news source will often find dailies about their own friends, family members, neighborhoods or jobs. To the extent these small stories are reported accurately and comport with their own witness, they deepen relationships within the community and provide a level of trust for the entire journalistic operation.
Collected over the days, months and years, dailies constitute a community’s historical record. The rote work that goes into them — gathering quotes, spelling names accurately, hitting deadlines — provides a critical training stage for early-career reporters. And every now and then, of course, a reporter filing a daily from a seemingly uneventful public meeting will stumble upon something monumental.
One last thing that dailies do very well: fill up enough physical space for the newspaper to make a satisfying thud on the front step. This feels trivial, but I believe it gets at the heart of the mistrust many Americans feel for the media. These people know there’s news happening where they live. After all, many of them used to read dailies about it in the newspaper 30 years ago, and the world hasn’t slowed down since then. But those stories aren’t there anymore — so, who’s hiding them?
The culprit, as any reporter can tell you in any journalistic crisis: publishers, then editors. The widespread availability of web metrics and with the crushing pressure of for-profit ownership have incentivized quick-hit clickbait, obsessively tailored to readers’ perceived interest.
These are the ersatz dailies of a free press torn from its moorings: food recalls, repackaged football power rankings, weather reports in question form (the better to ape search results). In place of an independent local news operation, most communities across the United States today have an absurdist Ask Jeeves, blithely barking out instructions for how to watch various things on television.
Dailies about the regular working of local government, by contrast, are regarded as hopelessly antiquated and out of touch with readers’ wishes — even though many readers will tell you they’d prefer almost anything to what their local newspaper currently offers. I have heard editors argue that no one ever used to read them anyway; certainly many such stories have landed in the recycling bin without a glance. The virtues of the daily as a class, though, far outweighs the shortcomings of any single exemplar. And someone read all of them — the public officials whose names were mentioned can tell you that.
How can the daily be rescued? First and foremost, by placing more bodies in newsrooms. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, where I worked for the last 12 years, has nine reporters dedicated solely to local news, tasked with covering a county of 750,000 people. It would be futile to ask them to replicate the depth of coverage that a newsroom 10 times that size was able to achieve a few decades ago.
Even without a major influx of reporters, though, news sources today could prioritize dailies with their existing resources. Perhaps to cover up the aroma of the pink slime “online content” steadily oozing from their newsrooms, editors often also push in-depth investigations and long-form prestige pieces. Ambitious nonprofit startup operations, too, use blockbuster packages to establish their journalistic bona fides and set themselves apart from hopelessly compromised legacy media. These pieces are often important and well done — but how many people take the half hour needed to consume them? I have come to doubt whether an award-winning piece that took a team of journalists two months to report is always of greater value than the several dozen dailies they otherwise could have produced over the same period.
Today’s dailies are yesterday’s news and tomorrow’s distant memory. They also represent a stubborn dedication to truthfulness and accountability. Without them, local news is in peril.