The Shrinking Of A Newsroom Shrinks Us All

Yesterday it was announced that the Bay Area News Group will consolidate its operations and lay off up to 40 newsroom employees. This does not come as good news for Martinez Patch – rather, it is a sad statement not of the state of news today, but of the particular organization that runs the Contra Costa Times.

Gathering and reporting the news may seem relatively easy; it’s not supposed to look hard. But it is. Particularly at the local level, finding and reporting relatively mundane issues is a difficult and often thankless task, but it is also an extremely important one. It is the local issues that matter most to all of us, those are the ones that affect us on a close-up, personal level, every day.

The newsroom at the Contra Costa Times, as well as those at the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News and all the other publications under the umbrella of the Bay Area News Group, are populated with writers, photographers, and editors who spend their lives making sure you know what’s going on in your town. These are people who do not make, and never will make, vast amounts of money doing what they do. They are not recognized when they go out to dinner. In fact, these days being a journalist will not win you many friends or much respect in the general population. It is, to say the least, a less-than-glamorous job.

But it’s a job that needs doing. You need trained, dedicated journalists to make sense of the often-senseless goings-on of local and regional government. Someone has to sit through those endless meetings and translate the vague, bureaucratic language that gets batted around into digestible English. You want qualified people covering crime scenes, court cases, and disasters. Journalism gives us perspective on the seemingly random events that happen every day.

The company that owns Bay Area News Group is ransacking its long-term future health, and that of the communities it serves, for the benefit of its short-term bottom line.

In this instance, as in so many others, it is all of us who ultimately pay the price for this short-sightedness. Yes, the Contra Costa Times competes with our publication and with the Martinez News Gazette for your time and attention. But we keep each other honest, and we all have the same goal in mind – to keep you informed. When you diminish one of us, we all get diminished.

EVENTS:

TODAY IN HISTORY (from Wikipedia):

1814 - British troops invade Washington, D.C. and burn down the White House and several other buildings.

1857 - The Panic of 1857 begins, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in United States history.

1891 - Thomas Edison patents the motion picture camera.

1932 - Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly across the United States non-stop (from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey).

1967 - Led by Abbie Hoffman, the Youth International Party temporarily disrupts trading at the NYSE by throwing dollar bills from the viewing gallery, causing trading to cease as brokers scramble to grab them.

1995 - Computer software developer Microsoft releases its Windows 95 operating system.

2006 - The International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefines the term "planet" such that Pluto is now considered a Dwarf Planet.