Inside the Front Page

"There is something solid and lasting about a printed word. It doesn't float away into the ether like the spoken word. So many of the words used over the airwaves and cable, all those modifying adjectives and adverbs, the polarizing interchanges among talking heads, are often useless, even detrimental, to reporting the news. They create emotions and opinions that rob a listener of independent thought, a power to think events through. There have been many changes in media in recent years. Newspapers have had a tough slough of it in the last half of the 20th and into the beginning of the 21st-century. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, daily and weekly newspaper publishers employed 455,000 reporters, clerks, salespeople, editors, designers, photographers and the like in 1990. By January, 2017 that workforce had been more than halved to 173,000 and the slide continues. The decline is ominous. In a 2018 article in the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan wrote that research shows newspapers still produce 85% of accountability journalism, journalism that unearths corruption and exposes abuse of power. New technology has given us the internet, Twitter, Facebook, and thousands of other sites to communicate with each other on the World Wide Web. Everybody, more or less, has become neighbors. In cyberspace, we share thoughts and, maybe, dreams with others. But, do we get hard facts that are crucial to wise decisions? Or, is it mostly idle chatter? Is it nothing more in the end than constituency journalism?"--Prologue