Thinking Locally, Acting Locally

Despite the ongoing post-mortems for print media, I maintain an affection for old-fashioned newsprint and magazine spreads. What I lack affection for is the never-ending outsourcing and corporatization that saps smaller newspapers and journals of their primary purposes - informing local citizens and speaking to a specific community. When New York's (or, more accurately, Greenwich Village's) Village Voice was acquired in 2005 by Phoenix, AZ-based New Times - a publishing company that owned eleven other alterna-weekly news magazines across the country - the legendary paper changed from a site-specific source of information to merely the biggest in a chain of similar ventures. Massive shake ups ensued. Film and music reviews, in particular, were impacted by roster changes, and a new reliance on outside reviewers - that is to say, non-New Yorkers - diluted the inimitable Voice character.

Here in America's Finest City, our dominant news source is the San Diego Union-Tribune. It's been up for sale since July of 2008, with organizations from the Tribune Co. and MediaNews Group expressing interest in purchase. As with other news sources, the Union-Tribune has seen a major loss in advertising and a drop in circulation. Less financially painful, but equally as destructive, have been a number of buyouts that closed down the paper's Washington, D.C. office and forced the departure of several high-profile journalists. A larger corporate takeover would likely compromise the paper's individuality even more.

Which is not to lament the demise of the Union-Tribune, at least not in the same spirit as that of the Village Voice. The U-T has hardly engaged in speaking truth to power. Being one of the few major newspapers to endorse Sen. John McCain for president last month was less an act of individuality and more one of deep attachment to the moneyed ruling class in a city dominated by the military, social conservatives and land developers. When the paper breaks out of this mold - busting Randy "Duke" Cunningham, for example, or offering an excellent report on Western forests being impacted by global warming - it highlights the wide gap between their reporters and their editorialists. And they're losing those reporters like crazy.

An alternative to this compromised source of information can be found in the smaller newspapers and magazines available throughout the city and county. The San Diego Weekly Reader and CityBeat are free, easily located and fiercely opinionated. The opinions, however, come from those not yet ensconced in the pockets of well-heeled bureaucrats. There is clearly an agenda - a leftist agenda - at work in both sources, but it's less a question of political affiliation and more one of concern for human rights, environmental protection and checks on abuses of power.

But if print media is truly on the downward spiral, perhaps we can take heart in the recent rise of web-based sources of local news and reporting. I've made several references to a local blog called The OB Rag Blog, a new incarnation of a paper-based project from the 1970s. This blog has only been up and running for a year, but it has already proved to be a solid source of information for events impacting both the community of Ocean Beach and the broader San Diego area. A larger operation is the Voice of San Diego, a nonprofit and independent online newspaper focusing specifically on local issues. They were recently featured in a New York Times article exploring the rise of Web-based journalism, and the impact such organizations are having on traditional print-based news groups.

If political blogs are enjoyable partly due to the absence of corporate editorializing, their lack of editors and fact-checkers can sometimes blunt their effectiveness (yes, yes, physician heal thyself...). And community newspapers sometimes display mere boosterism in the face of larger political realities. And yet I've found both above-named sources to often be much stronger and reliable sources of coverage for the issues impacting San Diego residents than the Union-Tribune.

I'll offer a quick example of how the OB Rag and the Voice of San Diego differ from the U-T. It's a small example - the ongoing campaign by the mayor's office to close down seven library locations and ten park and rec facilities (the vote by city council will theoretically take place this afternoon). The OB Rag has offered extensive coverage of the two rallies held in support of the Ocean Beach Library, and has linked to video footage of council member Kevin Falcouner speaking to the crowd and pledging to vote against the closure. The Voice of San Diego has presented pieces laying out council opinions, with one segment tracking down various council members and posting their responses and pledges to the issue, in an effort to gage some kind of anticipation of how the upcoming vote will proceed (the mood is hopeful). A longer piece by David Washburn investigates the complete absence from both politicians and community advocates of any suggestion to raise taxes to save the embattled facilities - a fascinating piece on the historical stinginess of San Diego, and a much-needed overview of the larger issues which helped create the current impasse. And the Union-Tribune? I found this article online yesterday - "Bookworms back branch libraries," a decent but short piece which quotes a few people and, through the headline's wording, seems to suggest that libraries merely exist as a repository for books and that only awkward, non-outdoors types have been involved in the process of rallying support. When it serves your own interest to back the mayor's office, it's easy to stereotype. "Bookworms," "hippies," "anarchists," - you know, outsiders. I've simplified the U-T's coverage, of course (there's also this excellent blog post, which raises some interesting statistics regarding the city's libraries and thier funding), but I'm still consistently surprised at how unsatisfactorily this and issues have been covered.

Long live print media. But kudos to the new kids.