By Brenda Dickinson
It’s been a great pleasure working with The Michigan Airway team. I became involved while working in the Section of Pediatric Anesthesiology at Mott Children’s Hospital. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in Communication from the U-M in 1991, and working as a newspaper reporter, I convinced the department to let me contribute to the newsletter.
I’ve since moved on to the Department of Dermatology at the U-M, but remain on the staff of the Airway as an editorial assistant and writer. Members of the Airway spend thoughtful time planning features and fingering their colleagues for stories. Our new editor, Dr. Doug McLaren, has brought many fresh ideas and formats for our enjoyment.
I am also currently a freelance reporter for The View, a local, weekly newspaper in Belleville, MI, a small lakefront city in Wayne County, about 30 miles southwest of Ann Arbor. I cover the city and school board beats. Reporting the news is hard work but very rewarding. I attend one or two meetings every week that sometimes run until 11:00 p.m., then I run home to write the story and fax it in to my editor at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., (or else I hear quite a wail the following day if she hasn’t received it yet).
One aspect of being a reporter that is so interesting is the challenge and excitement of becoming knowledgeable about so many subjects. Reporters become experts in all fields, depending upon the subject matter they are working on at the moment. In my case, currently I have learned about anesthesiology, public school administration, and the inner workings of city council. It is easiest to just ask questions and let the doctors or other professionals answer in their own words and use these in quotes or paraphrase them. My editor at The View loves lots of quotes and sometimes it feels like I am transcribing minutes of a meeting. But it sure feels good to (objectively) slam home an article on a controversial subject, (such as a health and reproduction curriculum in the schools) where board members and members of the public stand up and voice their opinions. It is surprising how vocal they can be and how many hours they can talk about certain subjects.
In college, a reporter is told to verify information with at least three sources. I have not found this to be a requirement at any of the publications where I have worked, but have been told that The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press editors do require this and documentation of fact checking. By the way, many of the striking reporters at Detroit papers who crossed picket lines to return to work said they did so out of love for their paper, to save it from going under. Mitch Albom, a high-profile Detroit Free Press columnist, wrote on his first day back in early September that he was crossing over for the sake of the readers, and that he wanted to save the Free Press. He also vowed to give The Newspaper Guild much of his salary. At the January Bruce Springsteen concert in the city, he announced to fans he would donate all profits from the concert, plus match them with his own funds Guild.
About 2,500 members of six unions of The Newspaper Guild, the newspaper’s labor organization, went on strike July 13, 1995. The newspapers continued to publish, using corporate loaners from other papers in the chains, using managers, nonunion workers, returning strikers and more than 1,000 new hires for production, as journalists and delivery drivers. There are 700 fewer people employed than when the strike started. The newspapers wanted to cut jobs and change work rules, mainly to switch to an individual merit pay system and to cap overtime pay. The Gannett Company, Inc., which publishes The Detroit News, wanted to allow and encourage reporters to shift from hourly to salaried status and then bargain individually, while nominally remaining in the union. The guild saw this as diminishing its collective strength, an invitation to slow suicide.
The Detroit Newspaper Agency, the outfit that operates the two papers under a joint operating agreement—Gannett and Knight-Ridder, Inc., the owner of the Detroit Free Press—has been losing thousands of readers and has earned profits only in the last two years. In December, Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer and Roman Catholic Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit persuaded both sides in the bitter, five-month-old Detroit newspaper strike to talk to each other again. Archer said the strike reflects poorly on Detroit, with images of violent outbursts between police and pickets hurting the city’s efforts to recruit new out-of-state or international businesses. Detroit Newspapers chief executive Frank Vega said the two sides are so far apart it would be very close to a miracle to think they could settle quickly.
When angry strikers surrounded the New’s printing plant, helicopters were used twice to get the papers over picket lines. Robert Giles, the New’s editor and publisher since 1989, says the papers’ only goal was to become “more efficient and competitive,” and that they are going to hire a whole new work force and go on without unions or they can surrender unconditionally and salvage what they can. About 40 percent of the journalists crossed over the picket lines by October, saying they could not let the guild’s loyalty to other unions sink their careers.
Those sticking with the guild say they are furious because of an increasingly exhausting pace of work over the last few years, without compensation. The promise of merit pay, in their eyes, was in reality the threat of a longer wage freeze. In its last contract with the JOA partners in 1992, the guild and ten unions had accepted a pay freeze. Many of those still striking have published a weekly paper of their own, The Sunday Journal. Some say that it is full of anger and vengeance.
The communications industry like everything else sure is changing rapidly, with Internet shopping, bulletin boards and e-mail providing direct access to sources. I believe reporters will still be needed though, to sort through and pull together pertinent information to present to the world. I also think that consumers are too used to reading a broadsheet with their morning coffee and therefore that medium won’t change. One prediction I heard recently is that national television news stations like CNN will try to provide more local news to compete with local programming. To combat this effort, many stations like TV2 in Detroit have come up with the philosophy that they will be the best provider of local news in the city. They have worked hard to bring us stories about local people, like small town heroes who saved a cat or returned a lost wallet containing a welfare mother’s last few dollars. Its easy to show murder, fire and tragedy on the screen, but finding a normal, working Joe like most of us and telling how he made good is a lot harder. Ah well, most of us are getting our fill of news about the federal budget, and Hillary Clinton is making headlines again as the presidential horse-race begins. I suppose it’s nice to see fluff after hard news like that.