Despite what you may have read on the Internet machine over these last few years, let me assure you newspapers still have a cultural role, a mission to conduct, an audience to inform and sometimes even surprise.
Despite what you may have read on the Internet machine over these last few years, let me assure you newspapers still have a cultural role, a mission to conduct, an audience to inform and sometimes even surprise.
Take today, for example. It would be difficult to say who is more surprised, you, seeing a new name and face attached to a column on the front of the Tribune-Herald sports section, or me, that guy whose mug you’re looking at.
When we finally moved to the Big Island last year, culminating a lifelong goal of this native Seattleite, I had no expectation I’d be doing this, but it’s funny what the profession does to you. It sticks to your bones. It doesn’t leave. Early on in journalism, you come to see things in a more varied way. You mentally walk around events of the day, sizing them up, trying to see all sides to make some sense of an issue and the process never ends.
We often have an overlooked role in newspapers, up until those moments when we can do what others can’t do. Indiana Governor Mike Pence was strongly supportive of signing religious freedom legislation a week ago until the community revolted. After the Indianapolis Star produced a riveting front page, demanding correction to the bill, national businesses started bailing out, NASCAR and the NCAA issued strong statements and before you knew it, Pence backed down.
You often see broadcast journalists at the scene of some disaster or long-awaited sporting event, holding up a front page of a newspaper to show to the nation what that community feels. Newspapers tap into a community’s collective energy. Good news, bad news, we’re there with you.
It’s who we are and what we do, drawn to journalism by a desire to ask the questions, get the answers and be the first to frame and tell the truth of something that impacts everyone in the community. The catch is that once you start, it’s very hard to stop. And why? Every reporter I know has friends who started out in the business, decided to leave because of the hours or the need for a bigger paycheck and then spend the rest of their careers pining for the loss of a life in news.
That’s my story, I’m a lifer, a believer in the concept, having written columns in Washington state newspapers located in Lynden (Tribune), Bellevue (Journal-American), Bremerton (Sun), and Tacoma, (News Tribune), the Portland Oregonian, The Corpus Christi Caller-Times (Texas), and the Greenville (SC) News.
The move to Mountain View was going to end all that, but I should have known, there’s no ending the thing you do that gives your life direction and purpose.
At some level, I think we all understand this. There are people among us who, as kids, looked out at Hilo Bay and felt an undeniable need to be out there. One day they got the opportunity and it felt like home, it becomes a part of them, right at the core where they live.
Imagine a lifelong gardener, someone who plants, rotates flowers and vegetables and doesn’t feel comfortable in their own skin until they get their fingers in the dirt, you know these people, right? Place that person in an apartment with no garden, no planter boxes and the psychic energy to garden is ruptured, the days are less meaningful, and the gardener soon feels imprisoned.
It’s with respect and gratitude that I write for the Tribune-Herald and endeavor to do what newspapers do best — reflect and amplify the communities they serve.
This is where you come to read about what people are doing where you live and it’s a great pleasure to be a part of that effort. Keep in touch, drop me a note, mahalo.
Email Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com