"Laid off at 51"

I will not honor Williams’s death

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 09:36:00 +0000

Robin Williams: 1951-2014 (Publicity photos)

But I will remember a comic and acting genius who gifted us for decades with laughter, tears.

The suicide of Robin Williams came as a shock to many of us. His genius was as readily apparent in his manic comedy as it was in his insightful, incredible talent as an actor. There is no doubt that the world has seen a shining star fall from the sky, its dazzling brilliance extinguished.

That his death was a suicide actually angered me for so many reasons — my own experiences dealing with depression throughout much of my own adult life, watching the pain of others struggling with the beast that Winston Churchill dubbed as his own “black dog,” and ultimately seeing the effect suicide has had on members of my own family.

Then, to my dismay, I started seeing Facebook posts asking people to “honor Williams’s death” by promoting the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

However well-intentioned those posts may be, they are misguided, and at the risk of being perceived as being both heartless and politically incorrect, I refuse to honor Williams’s death in any way.

I will however, honor the memory of a valuable, wonderful person whose life brought laughter to so many people. And I will do that by promoting the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-2738255.

There is no honor in suicide. Those who tell themselves otherwise are seeking comfort in a lie that relegates a conscious act of will solely to the effects of a disease called depression.

To borrow a line I hear younger folk use from time to time, and please excuse the scatological reference, but “I call bullshit.”

I have read much about depression over the years, and have written from time to time about my own struggles with it particularly as I have waded through layoffs; protracted and frustrating job searches, failed relationships, and worries for one I hold dear who checked into a hospital after confessing to trying to overdose on Tylenol and having suicidal thoughts.

Here is the bottom line as I have seen it, both from the perspective of one who has struggled with suicidal thoughts and as one who has seen the effects suicide can have.

Robin Williams made a choice, certainly driven by desperation resulting from his struggle with depression. He also had been seeking help for it and for his struggle with addiction. He knew there were other options available to him but he chose to ignore them.
Ultimately, suicide is a supreme act of selfishness, although some have tried to paint it as selfless, or as solely disease=driven. The point at which the final decision is made, the individual is consumed by his or her own pain and wants it to stop, consequences be damned. That is the selfishness to which I referred, because the consequences will be very real to the survivors. Williams had to know how devastating his suicide would be to his wife and children, yet he did it anyway. Here’s the kicker, though. He probably rationalized that it would be OK, because they would not have to watch him suffer over the course of the rest of his life, say for another 10 or 15 or 20 years. Instead, for the rest of their lives, his wife and children will be haunted by the specter of “Was there something more I could have done?”
Suicide is an act of cowardice. I say that without equivocation. There are two choices: The easy way out, and the way that will test you and help you to grow. The test requires effort, perseverance and fortitude, not to mention selflessness, which involves loving others enough to place their needs ahead of your own. Those are all elements of courage. They also distinguish suicide, for example, from the desperate act of self-sacrifice soldiers have displayed from time to time on the battlefield, throwing themselves upon a grenade to shield their companions, for example.

So, no, I will not honor Williams’s death by urging people to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. His death represents his failure, his own poor choices and nothing more.

Like many others, however, I will mourn his loss, remember fondly the laughter he brought in his comedy, and recall how profoundly he, as an actor, could draw out my empathy, even to the point of tears in Good Morning Vietnam and in Patch Adams, among others.

And THAT is why I will urge those who are struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-2738255. Evert life is precious, and every moment God gives us is a gift.

“If you feel you are in a crisis, whether or not you are thinking about killing yourself, please call the Lifeline. People have called us for help with substance abuse, economic worries, relationship and family problems, sexual orientation, illness, getting over abuse, depression, mental and physical illness, and even loneliness.” — The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Missing ‘Time on the Water’

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 11:48:00 +0000

Several men wet their lines in the Fox River near Slade Avenue Park in Elgin, Illinois, as the sun sets on July 9, 2014. | Credit: Ted Schnell

Sometimes the things that matter require sacrifice.

Some may scoff, but I have found that fishing is a spiritual activity in many respects.

Just as water is a focal point for life, a lake or river that is habitable to fish and other aquatic life is a focal point for the beauty of God’s creation. The reflections and the motion of the waves have an allure that is almost hypnotic, demanding inward reflection that can bring clarity to clouded thoughts, peace to troubled minds, comfort to broken hearts. Such is has been my experience when fishing, times I have used as much as for prayer as for pleasure.

I have not been fishing since late summer or fall in 2010, just a few scant months before my first layoff in late 2010.

My reason for giving it up then is straightforward: I have what I call a “passion for splashin’,” and I half -feared that if I picked up a fishing license in 2011, I just might spend more time trying to catch a big bass than trying to land a full-time job.

After 19 months of freelance work, I finally did land a full-time job as the local editor for St. Charles Patch and, later for Wheaton Patch. But, because I usually worked 60 hours or more a week, the second half of 2012 and all of 2013 passed by without seeing me wet a line.

Patch laid me off in January 2014, and I remain without a license, holding one of my great passions at bay yet a while longer as I search for full-time work.

My more than three years of abstinence from angling stands in stark contrast with the experiences journalist Bill Gardner wrote about after he took about a year off of work to stalk the ultimate musky in the northern lakes of Wisconsin and, if memory serves, of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Gardner wrote about his 200 days of fishing in his book, Time on the Water, which was published in 1982, as I was entering my final semester of college. I read Gardner’s book a year or so later and envied this man. While he never caught his “ultimate musky,” he did take the time to try, and he did catch some, just not the monster for which he longed.

Few people other than anglers or hunters truly can appreciate what that time represents.

For me, as an adult, fishing has been a mostly shore-bound venture that for years I enjoyed once or twice a week with my father-in-law, Guy, when my wife and I still lived in Wyoming. We would fish for all manner of trout, sometimes with spinning rods, sometimes with fly rods. We always enjoyed our times on the water, whether on the North Platte River and its famous Miracle Mile, the Encampment River, or the streams and lakes of the mountains to the south of Rawlins, Wyoming. I lived for seven years in that town — my “second hometown” —where I took my first news job, met my wife, where we had our first son and bought our first home.

When we moved to Fort Collins, Colo., in 1990, I pretty much abandoned fishing for the next four years. It is a nice place to live except for the fishing, which I found largely unproductive for a variety of reasons. I also was commuting too far for a job that demanded too much of my time. Many weekends I simply was too exhausted to go out.

When I returned to my native Elgin, Illinois, in the mid-1990s, my work hours dropped back to a manageable 40 or so hours a week. I took up my sport again, getting out at least once a week, twice if I could. Typically, I would fish when I’d visit my parents, who at that time still lived in the home they built west of Elgin in a subdivision called Wildwood Valley.

The 2-acre lake in that subdivision is open only to residents and their guests, so I was very blessed to be able to fish there so often. I would regularly catch 2- and 3-pound bass measuring 18 or 19 inches in length. The largest bass I ever caught in that little lake came before I had a scale to weigh it, but it was a full 22 inches long and had a hefty girth. My wife, who rarely accompanies me fishing, happened to be nearby when I caught that one. She even cracked a smile as I held it up and, in my best Steve Irwin voice, called out, “Crikey! Look at this beauty!”

I find that time on the water is time well-spent.

In addition to its contemplative aspect, I enjoy fishing for the hunt:

Trying to figure out the lay of the land, as it were, by peering into the depths through sunglasses with polarized lenses to see gaps in the weeds, drop-offs, sunken rocks or logs and other spots that bass might use as ambush points to prey on other fish, tadpoles, frogs, or even small snakes. In murky conditions, or when the water’s surface is too static to see through, you learn to use your lure to “feel” the layout of the areas you fish.
Learning which lures to use and under which conditions to use them — top-water baits, minnow baits, spinnerbaits, rubber worms and other soft baits, jigs, crankbaits. Each serves a different purpose, and each can be fished in more than one way to trigger a strike.

The satisfaction, I think, is threefold:

The strike: Demonstrates you have found that ambush point and that you are presenting the lure properly.
Setting the hook: It’s no guarantee you actually will catch the fish, which still could break the line, for example. But, when you do it right, you are well on the road to the next step.
Playing and landing the fish: This is the final stage of the “battle.” When I was young, I learned to play the fish slowly, to tire it out so it would not break the line. Today, the prevailing wisdom is to use extra-heavy line to reel in the fish much more quickly. Horsing the fish in rapidly helps ensure they do not become exhausted and assure their ability to recover when released.

I even find releasing the fish after I’ve unhooked it to be an exhilarating part of the sport, and, like at least a few other anglers, I have my own little ritual before gently returning the fish to the water.

I work quickly to measure and weigh it, then pause only a moment or two to look over it, admire its color, perhaps its scars, and the beauty it represents. The whole time, I thank God for such precious moments. And, as I release the fish back into the water, and even though I know it is not capable of understanding me, I say thanks for playing.

It has been more than three years since I last went fishing, and I continue to set aside my time on the water until I find work. Someday soon, I hope, I will play again.

Wildwood Revisited: We've Changed Along with Our Fields of Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 09:13:00 +0000

A white-tail deer pauses beneath a willow tree that stands in a pasture area that once was home to a large pond in Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois, on Thursday, July 3, 2014. | Credit: Ted Schnell

Childhood friends reunite after nearly four decades

The 1989 film Field of Dreams starred Kevin Costner as an Iowa farmer who follows the mantra, “If you build it, he will come,” building a baseball field amid his crop of corn, ultimately to recapture a piece of his childhood with his father.

Twenty-five years after that film’s release, three friends returned to their fields of dreams — the former pastures and farmland now known as Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois. We had no need to build anything, for the fields in which we played and formulated our dreams for the future are still there.

Granted, things have changed. Thick brush and small woods of 30- to 40-year-old oaks, shagbark hickory and myriad other trees now cover the slopes of gentle hillsides once covered with waist-high grass that rolled like waves on a breezy day.

Related photos, Site to Sight: Roots of My Childhood

That same growth now obscures the once-open vistas that allowed us, as children, to step out onto the deck of my parents’ former home on Brindlewood Lane in Wildwood Valley, from which on a clear day we could see the John Hancock Building, some 35 miles away. In fact, twice a year — once in the spring and again in late summer or early fall — the rays of the setting sun would reflect off that Chicago skyscraper and stand on the horizon like a distant torch. Our first glimpse of that phenomenon had us believing there was a big fire in Elgin.

So the three of us — Kevin O’Rourke, Ed Sieracki and I — reunited on July 3, 2014, to revisit our old stomping grounds, where we had played as kids in the late 1960s through mid-1970s while growing up in Wildwood Valley.

Despite the changes, much of the area remains recognizable to us, even if the remnants of old forts, a ball field and sledding hills no longer are clearly visible. Long gone is an abandoned hay wagon, where we sometimes ate lunch during our hikes, for example. But, the trail that passes by the spot — in fact, the main north-south trail along the western edge of the preserve — still follows nearly the same path originally created by the black Angus cattle that once grazed those fields.

Along one trail, near an old spring once used to water those cattle, is a pair of trees enveloped in deep brush. One of the trees bears a large scar in its bark, where we, as children, once carved the first initial of each of our names — K, E and T, although not necessarily in that order. Our handiwork no longer is visible, long ago covered over as the tree’s bark grew back over the bare patch. Also gone is the lean-to, of sorts, we had built there as a primitive shelter. The fallen branches and logs rotted away long ago, although a trench we had tried to dig — a rock under the ground there that probably was bigger than we were, thwarted us — remains, although time and erosion have filled it nearly completely.

Each step we took jarred loose a memory, which we discussed, sometimes in detail, as we revisited past jaunts, old adventures. We talked about times that, through the eyes of middle-aged men who perhaps have grown a little jaded by the sorrows and burdens we’ve accumulated over the years, somehow seemed better, purer, cleaner.

We recognize that nostalgia looks back at the past through rose-colored glasses, often choosing to overlook the tragedies even the young experience. Even so, some things were better — things that are hard to ignore in a world that seems to grow increasing uncaring and too often violent.

We did not worry about things like rapists and pedophiles, street gangs, shootouts. Bullying occurred too often, yet far less frequently, I think, than today.

Then, we would leave our homes early in the morning and seldom returned until dinnertime, whether we were simply playing within the subdivision borders or were making our frequent hikes, crossing field after field or following the railroad track en route to Tyler Creek, just a little south of Camp Big Timber, at Big Timber and Tyrrell roads.

They were genuinely good times. We ran wild through the hills and valleys, never worrying for a minute about what we might encounter, although today, as we look back, we’re fairly certain our parents would have been mortified at some of the risks we took. But we were “indestructible” children for whom these simply were grand adventures.

The landscape indeed has changed over the years. Just as there is more brush and trees cover the landscape, we too have changed. Crow’s feet accent our still bright eyes, and the worries and cares of more than five decades line our faces. Gray has begun to take over as the dominant color of what hair we have left.

But while we walk together in these fields of our dreams, we can almost be boys again, perhaps in part as we relive those precious years, but also as we renew old friendships that had been sundered by circumstance for far too long.

We shall do this again, soon, and create new memories as we go.

Not much to celebrate this Fourth

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 22:59:00 +0000

Credit: Beverly & Pack, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Independence loses meaning when you’re not working

Before I begin, I want to express my greatest respect and admiration for those who have fought for this country, who have sacrificed their lives, or were willing to put their lives on the line, to preserve our freedom.

You did not fail.

I fear, however, that many others have, from the citizenry to corporate America to those we have elected to public office.

That is why I find it incredibly difficult to celebrate a holiday centered on the theme of our nation’s independence, when in fact we live in a nation where much of the citizenry has been left little more than indentured servants. We’ve sucked fast to the empty promise of an American dream that’s really a marketing gimmick to get people to spend, not save.

As I enter the final weeks of unemployment and face the prospect, for the first time in my life, of applying for welfare, I am having a difficult time looking ahead to the coming year in a nation where bigotry is acceptable. Nor do I look forward to the automatic condemnation some pronounce on people like me, victims not of laziness, nor drug abuse, nor disobedience at work, but of an economy that has left many of us out of work with few prospects for the future, and businesses so intent on next quarter’s profits that they apparently no longer know how to plan for long-term viability.

Nor do I look forward to those "clever" (I mean bigoted) Facebook posts in which some express their belief that people like me should pee in a cup before being considered eligible for government assistance. I am, after all, poor, and cannot be trusted. I would venture to guess that these are the same people who, upon seeing my Hispanic friends, are inclined to conclude “illegals” — you know, because painting with a broad brush is completely acceptable.

And I do not look forward to the condemnation for owning things that I purchased when I was gainfully employed. You know what I mean — those emails some people like to send around or post on Facebook in which they point to that bastard wearing $60 Nikes as he uses food stamps to pays for groceries. You know, because poor people secretly are wealthy and can afford these things, or they must have stolen them.

I’ve already been criticized for having a laptop computer that my parents gave me after my first layoff so that I could write my resume and the daily cover letters I send out with it to potential employers. I’ve used this laptop to work from home while juggling four part-time jobs during much of 19-month period it took me to find a full-time position after my first layoff in 2010.

If I sound bitter, I am.

I never wanted to be laid off, nor did I do anything to deserve it. I’ve been a hardworking, loyal employee in the past and will continue to be again some day, if I am lucky.

Not working is a moment-by-moment source of frustration, not to mention an ongoing source of humiliation. Each day I try to network, write cover letters, and apply online for jobs with little more than an email acknowledging that I’ve applied, seldom a notice that I’ve been rejected, and never any feedback about why I wasn’t called in for an interview.

For my ultraconservative friends who think unemployment is a generous thing, I defy you to request to be laid off and find out how little it really is. Then watch with such immense frustration as your pantries diminish that you begin skipping meals from time to time to make things stretch more for your kids.

I’d venture to guess the same is true of the 9,474,000 Americans the Labor Department lists as unemployed in June. The raw total carries greater impact, I think, than the relatively meaningless jobless rate often reported on TV and radio — that rate, by the way, is 6.1 percent.

So I sit here at my computer, taking a break from my daily job search to listen to the occasional crackle of neighborhood fireworks and to reflect on a holiday called Independence Day, in marked contrast with my dependence on a government in which I have had no faith, as well as assistance from my parent, which soon may count against me and my family if we are forced to seek public assistance.

I don’t want a damned holiday. I want a decent job.

When did bigotry return to fashion?

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 10:21:00 +0000

Intolerance, lack of respect encourage double standard

I was shocked, saddened and, initially at least, more than a little angry over an encounter I had on Facebook in the middle of last week when I publicly shared a link to a story about an ACLU report critical of what it called the militarization of our police forces.

The encounter also left me asking: When did it ever become OK to refer to people as “white trash?” It is racist and reminiscent of the equally reprehensive term “trailer trash.” Ultimately, both terms are expressions of disdain or hatred based on economic status — in other words, they are class-based slurs. How can these kinds of terms be any less hateful than other racial or ethnic epithets?

As a nation, we have worked for such a long time, sometimes futilely, it seems, to eliminate such epithets from our lexicon. Yet, we seem to have little trouble finding substitute targets and slurs.

I believe I probably lost this Facebook “friend” on Wednesday for two reasons:

One, I called his use of the term “white trash” racist and said that I would not tolerate it.
Two, he became angry with me because we differ on a political issue — gun control — and perhaps others as well. Because I support gun rights, he decided to attack me personally, saying, “you’re just part of the problem, aren’t you?”

I would point out that while I support gun rights, I do not hold to the no-compromise positions the NRA seems to advance.

Moments later, I realized he had unfriended me, which was his right.

It seems to me, however, that the situation reflects a greater, dual problem in America today: Bigotry, which is a narrow-mindedness that is intolerant of other viewpoints, long has been the norm in Washington politics, where it is politely called partisanship. It endures in plain sight among both Democrats and Republicans, and it gives rise to an us-versus-them mentality that clearly places party priorities above those of voters.

And it appears to be spreading, giving rise to a far too-prevalent double standard in our purportedly free society. It says, “I have a right to my beliefs … but you do not.”

Rarely is it said so plainly, but the attitude and animosity are clear. Actions, after all, speak louder than words. When discussion devolves into personal attacks, ridicule, cursing, hateful words, and intimidation, then reason has departed and with it, respect. What remains does nothing to advance the discussion and in fact serves only to build greater enmity.

This is most plainly visible in Internet threads, where people add their comments to articles, blogs and similar posts. Often, what begin as intelligent, thoughtful discussions devolve into profane, hateful diatribes.

At its core is a lack of respect — whether for the individual or for the group. Unless we restore that respect — in other words, until each of us starts giving respect freely to others — I fear the growing vitriol I see will bubble over more and more, perhaps even violently.

America, renowned as the melting pot where cultures came together to forge a newer, stronger culture, is failing. I believe that restoring respect can reverse that.

Finally, one of the great ironies in a situation where a personal, or ad hominem attack is made is that it often serves as an admission that “I have run out of good arguments to prove my point and to discredit yours.”

So remember that the next time you hear a Republican call a Democratic proposal “socialist,” or the next time you hear a Democrat call an ultra-right Republican a “tea bagger” or obstructionist.

Chances are, they simply have run out of intelligent things to say.

Note: I declined to name the individual referred to in this post for several reasons, not the least of which is respect, but also because this exchange only serves to illustrates a broader concern I have had for years.

Growing up in Wildwood

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Wed, 28 May 2014 11:25:00 +0000

Burnidge Forest Preserve once was a largely grassy pastureland that was the playground upon which my neighbors and I played. | Ted Schnell

Former neighbor's death recalls a great place to grow up, a remarkable legacy

The legacy you leave behind is reflected, I think, in the quality of the people who loved you, knew you, respected you.

I write this not as I look back on my own life per se, although I find myself doing that a fair amount these days. I am at an age when men often do look back. I weight my failings against my accomplishment, all the while wondering such things as:

Have I changed the world as I once imagined I could?
What kind of legacy will I leave?
In a hundred years, will the way I lived, loved, worked, and believed have any relevance to anyone?

Ultimately, I suppose, it boils down to, “Will I have made a difference?”

I ponder these things once again just a day after attending a wake on Tuesday afternoon, May 27, 2014, for Phyllis O’Rourke, a St. Charles woman and former longtime Elgin resident.

Mrs. O’Rourke attended high school with my Dad, and eventually married a guy name Jim who I always remember as a friendly but sometimes gruff man whose laugh was loud and could spread as swiftly as the brush fires he occasionally started in the spring. The laughter was intentional, the brush fires were not.

Like my folks, the O’Rourkes had six kids and built a home in Wildwood Valley, a subdivision east of Coombs Road, west of Elgin. My folks built a home there a little later, and our families became quite close.

In recent weeks, I have thought a lot about growing up with the O’Rourkes. Memories come flooding back every time I go traipsing about Burnidge and Paul Wolff Forest Preserves, where I go fairly often to photograph wildlife, wildflowers and other things that strike me.

You see, those preserves were once a vast playground for the O’Rourke and Schnell kids, and a host of other children whose families built homes in and around Wildwood. Then, the eastern portion of Burnidge largely was pastureland for black Angus cows.

The fields were oceans of rich green grass that, on windy days, rippled on the rolling hills like waves on a lake. They were the grass- and brush-covered palettes for the fertile imaginings of children growing up in a better world — or perhaps in a more sheltered world. On a sunny summer day, our parents could chase us out of our houses at 9 or so and not see us until dinnertime. They never paused to worry about our safety.

While Wildwood Valley’s 2-acre lake doubled as our fishing hole and swimming hole, the ponds and the woodlands of Burnidge were truly our playgrounds. The ponds were treasure troves of frog and salamander tadpoles, leopard and pickerel frogs, toads that started peeing the moment you picked them up, freshwater shrimp and crayfish, and bullfrogs large enough to cover most of a dinner plate.

In fact, Mr. O’Rourke paid us 50 cents for each bullfrog we would catch in the subdivision’s lake — the bounty was conditional, however, requiring that we take each frog back to one of the three ponds in those fields east of our homes. The O’Rourke’s home was located at the thin end of Wildwood’s lake, near a small stone dam, where the behemoths often sat and did what bullfrogs do — eat bugs, small snakes and other things, as well as belt out their loud, deep croaks, sometimes for hours on end. Behind their home — and behind ours, which was two doors to the north — were the pasturelands that would become Burnidge Forest Preserve.

The 50-cent bounty, we learned, was Mr. O’Rourke’s attempt to ensure he could sleep at night during the summers. So, after showing him our catch and receiving our due, we would march into the fields to release these big frogs.

Some years later, it occurred to me, two of those ponds often dried up toward the end of summer, when the population of bullfrogs in Wildwood’s lake would explode. I now suspect the frogs we caught earlier actually returned as the ponds subsided, and I wonder if Mr. O’Rourke ever suspected as much at the time.

Those were some of the best years of my life. Kevin O’Rourke, a year older than me, was my first best friend. We would climb into the low-hanging branches of an old oak in his backyard, where we would dream about one day becoming forest rangers with eagles, bears and mountain lions as our pets. No dream was out of reach, no obstacle impossible to overcome.

We looked up to Kevin’s older brothers, Tom and Jim, as well as to the Miller boys.

Tom was the adventurer and climber of tall trees. Jim was more quiet and studious, with an early interest in science, which always impressed me. Of course, he went on to become a doctor.

These older teenagers already were nearly “grownups” in our young eyes. They seemed fearless when all the neighborhood kids would join for games of “Ditch ‘Em” and other variations of hide-and-seek or tag.

Kevin’s older sister, Maureen, turned the heads and broke the hearts of every pre-teen and teenage boy in the neighborhood without even being aware of it. That was a different time, too, when a boy’s crush was framed by an innocence that envisioned simply holding hands, a first kiss, and a happily ever after.

Mike is Kevin’s younger brother and two years my junior. While he more frequently hung out with my younger brother Bill, Mike also palling around from time to time with Kevin and me. One winter, after Kevin headed off to college, Mike hiked out with me a couple of miles through deep snow to dig out the car I’d had to abandon the night before after sliding into a ditch during heavy snow.

The youngest of the O’Rourke siblings is Sharon, who is the same age as my sister Barbara, the youngest of our brood. One of my favorite memories of the two — I call it the Cul-de-sac Goldfish Calamity — came one summer a day after they returned from a church ice cream social, where each had won a pet goldfish.

The demise of the innocent fish came to light the next afternoon, I think, when Mom happened to look out a front window to see Sharon and Barb sitting on a big boulder in the cul-de-sac in front of our homes. The girls appeared to be talking to their clenched hands.

Mom went out to look into this curiosity, where she learned the girls were indeed not talking into their hands, but were talking to their now-dead goldfish, which they held in their tiny little hands as they told them how cute and special they were and other sweet nothings that children often tell their pets.

Sharon and Barb were not old enough to understand that fish need water to breathe, and so out of their gentlest love and appreciation was borne the tragic and untimely demise of two small bejeweled pets.

These are but bits and pieces of a larger, much more complicated tapestry weaving together the lives of 16 people in just two of the families in Wildwood Valley. Many other kids and their parents also played big parts in weaving that tapestry.

But my recent hikes through Burnidge stirred deep memories of my childhood. The wake for Phyllis, and that her son Kevin was, as he put it while introducing me to some others as “my original friend,” refocused my attention on our two families, the joys and struggles we shared growing up in one of the best places we could have ever imagined.

Mrs. O’Rourke and Mom often seemed to be the neighborhood counselors for some of the kids, in addition to being wonderful moms to their own, rather large broods. I believe the priests often referred to the O’Rourkes and the Schnells as “good (meaning large, as well as well-behaved) Catholic families.”

I look on these “children” I grew up with and marvel at the memories we share of a youth enmeshed in a wonderful rural landscape, where freedom was as wide as our imaginations, and our imaginations knew no bounds.

We’re all adults now, in body if not in in mind, and many of us have our own children. As adults, we now bear scars from personal tragedies, hurts from wounds that are unimaginable, not to mention the inevitable loss of the innocence we once held. Yet, I believe that each of us wants the same innocence, the same sense of freedom we once held for the generation we’re raising, and for the one that follows. At the same time, as our parents have done before us, we fear the consequences our children and grandchildren will face in a world that seems to be growing increasingly corrupt and perverse.

And, while I look back at this period through the eyes of nostalgia, which depending on your temperament and experiences casts the past either as evil, hard times, or as blissful, perfect times, I recognize there were issues that from time to time rocked our worlds.

But that in no way diminishes that we grew up in a great location, surrounded by some truly wonderful people. That is the kind of legacy that Mrs. O’Rourke and her husband helped to build for their children; it is the same kind of legacy my parents tried to build for us.

Mrs. O’Rourke left children and grandchildren who loved her dearly and who will miss her. She had friends and family who loved and respected her. These people are the kinds who work within their own spheres of influence to improve the world. Theirs is a family who had a place in changing mine.

All told, in my view, that’s a heck of a legacy.

Free speech and Donald Sterling

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 00:27:00 +0000

A constitutional right does not mean you are immune from consequences

I was appalled Tuesday, April 29, 2014, to see some people on Facebook citing the First Amendment as the basis for questioning the NBA’s decision to ban and fine Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

I find it both ironic and sad that the amendment that lays out some of our base freedoms is so clearly misunderstood by the citizenry it protects:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Sterling’s free-speech rights were never at issue in the NBA’s decision to ban him for life and to fine him $2.5 million and possibly forcing him to sell his Clippers over racist remarks he made while being recorded by his former girlfriend. He said what he said and the government didn’t do squat about it.

At its core, the First Amendment is protection from government interference based on the spoken or written word. But, contrary to what many people seem to believe, the First Amendment never offered carte blanche protection from the consequences of saying something stupid or irresponsible.

Therefore, while Sterling certainly was free to say what he said, he was never free from the consequences.

It is the same for you and me in our everyday lives. We can say whatever we want, but we might lose friendships for saying it, even risk losing a job or customers.

But even in law, there are limits to free speech, and such limitations are constitutional. Journalists are protected from government interference when it comes to reporting the truth, event when that truth is damaging to a public official’s reputation. Defamation laws, however, are in place — libel laws pertain to the printed word, slander to the spoken — to curb abuse of that freedom, so that, for example, a news organization does not carelessly or maliciously publish false information about someone.

There are plenty of other exceptions besides that most should be aware of simply from everyday experiences or common knowledge.

For example, you can be prosecuted for yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, and if you are caught lying after swearing in court to tell the truth, you can be prosecuted for perjury.

Some find this counterintuitive, because they look at the text of the First Amendment and see the words “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …” But they forget that the Constitution is a foundational document. It is the basis for the other laws to protect the citizenry — even from those who exercise their rights.

So, while I have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as stated in the Declaration of Independence and defined in the Constitution, I do not have the right to pursue that happiness by robbing a bank, because doing so would impinge on the rights of the owners of that bank. For the same reason, local governments have building codes designed to ensure public safety and to set standards to ensure one homeowner’s actions do not injure another’s.

Donald Sterling was within his rights to say what he said, and the NBA was within its rights to penalize him. This was not an issue about governance.

But, as former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pointed out in a piece he wrote for Time, Sterling has had run-ins with the government that certainly reflect back on the racist remarks he reportedly made to his former girlfriend.

According to Abdul-Jabbar’s piece, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Sterling in 2006 and 2009 for housing discrimination — the first suit alleged discrimination against blacks, the second against blacks, Hispanics, and families with children.

He also was sued in 2009 by a Clippers executive for reported age- and race-based employment discrimination.

So for those who believe the First Amendment gives a free rein to say anything without fear of retribution, be careful. The U.S. Constitution does give you the right to free speech, but there are limits, and there are consequences for those who exceed those limits.

Sterling certainly has the freedom to embrace even the outrageous beliefs he reportedly has expressed. But he also has paid a price after he apparently put some of those beliefs into action in terms of housing and employment. In the case of his NBA penalties, he’s paying a price for expressing idiot views in a way that could harm that organization, not to mention piss off a lot of people, whether they are basketball fans or not.

It's not just news, it's people

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 10:22:00 +0000

Second layoff likely means —30— for journalism career

It was 2:30 in the morning on a late summer day in 1985 or ’86, I think, when the call came. The Carbon County Fair was in full swing in Rawlins, Wyo. that week, and until a tragic incident the prior afternoon, I had been tasked to “cover the fair.”

Instead, I was called away to cover a standoff in which a mentally ill man ended up being shot by police when he attempted to use a large knife to attack an officer. Authorities would not discuss the incident with another reporter at the paper, and my boss hoped I would have more success. And I did.

“Where do you get off writing stuff like this? You made my brother look like a criminal,” the caller said. The raw emotion in his voice was thick with anger, but also, I felt, with anguish. I recall imagining vividly that there must have been tears in his eyes as he talked.

“No, I don’t make anyone look like a criminal,” I responded, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and trying to keep my voice low so my wife, who had answered the call, could get back to sleep. “He did that himself. I accurately reported what happened.”

I was not unsympathetic. I did not intend, however, to take the blame for casting someone in a bad light in writing about the actions of that individual, deranged or not. Nevertheless, the caller was not done, so for the next 15 minutes or so, I listened.

What had unfolded the day that story broke, during the early morning phone call, and in the days that followed, highlighted the importance of relationships in this profession — relationships built on trust, integrity, and ultimately, on mutual respect. Some months before, I had told Rawlins’ new police chief, “If your guys are good cops, you have nothing to fear from me — the stories I write will accurately reflect that. But if they do wrong, I’ll write that, too.”

But I also told the police chief that if he noticed me making a mistake, he should call me on it, so that I could check it out and make a correction if he was correct.

The chief understood where I was coming from — I respect the authority police wield, just as I recognize the responsibility and scrutiny that comes with bearing such authority. The two go hand in hand, and the Fourth Estate has a role in that.

Ultimately, that conversation set the parameters for a solid relationship I developed with him and his officers. They knew they could tell me things, which I would verify elsewhere, without them getting into hot water with the county prosecutor. He frequently was confounded by the information I knew before he had filed a criminal complaint in a case, but again, I cultivated a relationship with him also based on mutual respect.

So it was that I gathered information on a hot, arid August afternoon and wrote about a schizophrenic man who had gone off his meds. On this particular day, he barricaded himself inside his apartment and began flailing a knife out his window at passers-by.

Police had tried to talk him out, then tried two or three times to force him out with teargas. When that failed, a sheriff’s deputy and a police officer donned gas masks and protective gear and entered the apartment.

The cop entered first. Through his mask, he saw nothing but tear gas, which filled the apartment like a thick fog. Suddenly a figure emerged from the fog. A knife slashed toward the officer, who fired his weapon. His assailant went down.

Flashback to the phone call: “Ernie’s not a criminal,” the caller said. “He didn’t know what he was doing. You made him look like a criminal …”

In the days that followed, I wrote more stories as more information became available, as a criminal complaint was filed against Ernie, who survived the shooting. I talked again with members of Ernie’s family. I don’t believe they ever changed their minds about my coverage, but I am fairly certain that they appreciated my listening to their grievances.

Listening is one more aspect of building relationships, perhaps the hardest part for someone who talks as much as I do, but it is key.

I have been a journalist now for 30 years, and the tales like this one resonate particularly with me at this moment, as do the relationships I have built with co-workers over the years.

The hardest part, every time I have moved on, has been the relationships lost or diminished by an end to daily contact. We say keep in touch, but often those contacts fade, albeit not entirely thanks to social media like Facebook.

A little more than three years ago, I was devastated by such a loss, as well as feelings pf hurt and even betrayal was a financial struggling Sun-Times Media laid me off after 16 years of faithful, loyal and usually stellar work for that company.

That event left me feeling eviscerated. I lost a job in a career I thoroughly love, daily contact with a wonderful group of people representing three different suburban daily newspapers, not to mention my income. I collected unemployment for six months as I developed leads and developed four contract jobs, two of which eventually also were cut back. In the meantime, I also spent my retirement savings to keep a roof over the heads of my family. Finally, I secured a job with Patch, a network of community news and information websites. My duties initially were in St. Charles, Ill.

On Jan. 29, 2014, after 18 months with Patch, I was among hundreds of other community journalists whose tenures came to an unwilling but inevitable end as Patch laid us off. For at least a few of us, this was the second layoff we had gone through. There likely are some who have gone through this three or more times.

As stunning and debilitating as the Sun-Times Media layoff was for me, this time around I felt remarkably little. Actually, Aol-Patch is treating us far better than Sun-Times Media did. During the past 18 months, I received more training than I had my 16 years with my prior employer, including training in new skills, as well as honing those I already had.

As I leave Patch, I also carry away the pride I felt as a participant in a bold experiment, which Patch has been and I trust will continue to be. Hand in glove with that is the pride I carry in serving a wonderful community — St. Charles, Ill. — for the past 18 months, in addition to Wheaton, Ill. over the past six months.

Despite ungodly long hours, juggling myriad priorities that seemed sometimes to change from minute to minute, Patch provided me an opportunity to stretch out a career in journalism to the 30-year mark. It also proved that I am an eager learner who can embrace changes within my profession with enthusiasm. One young lady who served as my supervisor/mentor during my first year with Patch told me at one point that my eagerness to embrace new technology set me up as a leader in our area for the younger “Patchers” in our area. It was one of the most encouraging and endearing compliments I have ever received professionally.

I already miss the folks I worked with at Patch, as well as the folks I have come to know in St. Charles and Wheaton.

It is my hope and prayer that my attitude and the ability I have demonstrated repeatedly over the years to embrace and to adapt to change will make me more marketable as I again try to gain a foothold in the job market.

I do not approach this task lightly, and perhaps I do so with a degree of reluctance and a pending sense of sorrow as I prepare to set aside one of my greatest passions for the past 30 years. As much as I have loved this calling on my life — indeed, I can refer to journalism as nothing less — I find it difficult to stomach the idea of subjecting my family to the continued contortions of an industry that has imploded, largely by its own arrogance and inflexibility.

Certainly if the right position came along, I would be tempted to stay within my field. But, like many others since the Great Recession, an underwater mortgage tethers me to this area for at least a while longer, and let’s face it: The Chicago area has far more unemployed or underemployed journalists than positions available.

Looking at other career options, I believe, will prove the wisest move for my family. Journalism was never lucrative for most of us in the field. I doubt the industry will see much stability until news providers figure out a business model that will allow them to succeed financially in the digital age.

Seeking Joy in Change is on Facebook.

A greater gratitude for Labor Day

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 05:01:00 +0000

In December 2010 I was laid off and struggled for the next 19 months to juggle multiple jobs even as I searched for full-time work. This year, Labor Day is more than a day off. It’s a symbol of answered prayer.

It used to be just another holiday. In my book, Labor Day had some obscure relationship to work, but as far as I was concerned, it’s greater significance was that it meant a three-day weekend. I learned early on as a young adult that three-day weekends were a rarity to be appreciated, and so I did.

Wikipedia’s entry defines it as a holiday that “celebrates the economic and social contributions of workers” and that it first was proposed by labor unions. Perhaps that’s one reason I’d never paid particular attention to the holiday. I’ve had run-ins with labor groups starting at a time when I was too young and naïve to understand why, as an assistant foreman walking out a factory door after work one night, I was called names and jeered at as I walked across the parking lot to my car. I guess they considered considered me "management," although my wages at the time surely didn't reflect that, and to my bosses, I was a likable, young college kid who for all practical purposes was just another grunt.

Other conflicts arose when I was a reporter in Wyoming, where some members of the teachers union resented my efforts to cover school board-teacher negotiations. When I started using Wyoming’s relatively new Freedom of Information Act to gain access to offers and counteroffers, I started receiving veiled and sometimes pretty clear threats.

So most of my experiences with labor unions over the years have not been particularly good, and many were downright bad. Still, labor unions have performed some very valuable services to workers, particularly in terms of safe conditions, standardized work hours, among many more.

But one thing labor unions have never been able to conquer is the economy, and when the stock market and GDP go south, so do jobs.

And really, jobs are what Labor Day is all about — the ability to work and do your best to provide for your family and, if you earn enough, perhaps even pursue the American dream, which I still believe is no more than a marketing ploy by corporate America to trick us into spending more and more on things we could get alone without, to pursue luxury with such a vengeance that we lose our souls in the process.

So when the recession began in 2008, I and many of my other colleagues braced ourselves for more cuts — although the newspaper industry had been cutting in fits and starts years earlier. Still, I thought I’d positioned myself better than most: After more than 17 years as a copy editor, I had moved to the Web team for Sun-Times Media’s suburban papers, believing that was where my future would be.

That was in September 2007, The truth be told, my move probably saved my job for another three years. Newspapers were hurt badly — the recession was the second in eight years, and those came as the industry bumbled around trying to make the Internet work like a newspaper. It does not, and the industry was not prepared for the revenue losses that would follow, particularly in the late 1990s, when Craigslist stole away the lion’s share of newspaper revenues by offering for free what newspapers long had make a killing from — classified advertising.

So in December 2010, my career collided with — what do you call it? Destiny? Reality? Regardless, for the first time in about three decades of work, including summer and part-time jobs I held in college — I found out what it was like to be let go, laid off with little more than a perfunctory “thank you for your years of service.”

For the next 19 months — as represented in this collection of blog posts — I struggled through the pain of losing that job, suffered through the accompanying loss of self-esteem, worried about my family’s well-being, and experienced the daily frustration of trying to find a job in the digital world.

I had some help and encouragement along the way, and as painful as those 19 months of un/underemployment were, I still feel fortunate in many ways. There are plenty others out there who, since even before 2008, have measured their period of un/underemployment in years rather than months.

Throughout my ordeal, I wanted to remain in journalism, and worked part-time jobs that allowed that. For about a year, I worked as a freelance guest copy editor for some Patch.com websites. When full-time positions opened up, I’d ask, most frequently learning I lived too far from this community or that.

Until a position opened at the St. Charles Patch. St. Charles is a 10-minute drive from my Elgin home, is a lovely, vibrant community with a lot going for it.

And the folks at Patch liked me.

August was my first full month at Patch. The work has been at times exhilarating and exhausting. Largely, it’s been fun and, as with any new job, often daunting or overwhelming. But I adapt well, and I’m doing good.

So here it is, Labor Day 2012, and I am a little more than a month into a job for which I hold great hope and for which I have a great appreciation. So many times over the years, Labor Day was a time for a picnic, maybe a cookout, a day to get out and fish.

But this year, it means much more than that to me. I am a working journalist again, now for Patch. I get to do the things I enjoy: write, make pictures, edit, write headlines — oh yeah, and practice the social media skills I gained during my 19-month hiatus from the work force.

For the most part, barring some major news event(s) today, I’ll have my day off today, Labor Day. But this year, Labor Day is much more than a day off for me. It is a symbol of answered prayer.

Change comes again with new job, new name for this blog

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 21:19:00 +0000

It’s been a busy month since I last posted. Change, one of the immutable facts about the universe, has been happening, and I start this month again writing about change, and changing the name of this blog.

I am no longer a laid-off father of five looking for work, and I do not want to be defined forever by what befell me in December 2010, although losing my job at that time undoubtedly will continue to shape my future. It’s not the pain from the past that continues to be relevant, I think, but it is what we do with it, where we go from there.

When I entered the blogosphere two weeks after I was laid off, I had several intents. I wanted to keep up on my skills as a writer and editor. On that end, my Dad often has been the better editor, calling me from time to time with questions or to point out typos. That’s been a welcome boon. Over the years, I’ve had reporters tell me as they turned in stories “You don’t have to worry about editing it — I went through it myself already.” My response to them nearly always has been, “I am my own worst editor,” the implication being that we shared that trait.

That’s because when we write something, whether it’s a headline, a photo caption or a story, we know in our minds what we intended to write and therefore are more likely when we re-read our work to gloss over it and miss a typo. So Dad’s been a welcome guest editor who has helped me keep my presentation more polished.

Another purpose that I did not immediately recognize was cathartic, particularly at the outset, but intermittently as well. There were a lot of emotions and hurt to work through, and writing provided an outlet for that. As the months progressed, I found that writing about some industry trends, particularly as they relate to Chicago’s western suburbs, helped me to develop a greater understanding of what has happened over the past 15 years or so that has so devastated the newspaper industry and added to my own skepticism about its future. It also has helped me to understand and flesh out my own views of why digital media is where the industry’s future is.

Toward that end, everything I’ve done professionally over the past four to five years has been moving me in this direction: Three years as a Web content editor with Sun-Times Media’s suburban papers, then 19 months of part-time work with various online news websites.

Ultimately, early in July, my career advanced another step in that direction when, after so many discouraging months of looking for work, I accepted a position with Patch.com as the editor of its website in St. Charles, where I see a ton of potential and an opportunity to participate in what I have described for some time as Patch’s courageous experiment to return local news to communities that in recent decades largely have been abandoned or neglected by the newspaper industry.

It is an exciting opportunity that also represents change, and change can be painful.

The pain, however, does not make it bad. I am learning different approaches to using the skills I have, am learning new skills and trying to define structure from what amount to my new “Patch” eyes as chaos. I would point out that this is no different than the change one makes any time there is a career change, and after my first week in the saddle, I am confident I will adapt.

I also would describe the pain of this change as akin to that experienced after a return to exercise — the muscles ache, but it is a good ache that promises greater strength, perseverance, conditioning. In other words, this is a pain with promise.

And that is related to one of the other points I laid out when I began writing this blog. I wanted my posts to serve as an encouragement to other journalists who, like myself, had fallen victim to the industry’s woes. Sometimes I wrote about the gritty emotions I was sorting through, other times about an established industry’s inept attempts to adapt to pivotal changes in the presentation of news.

Through it all, this blog has been about change — starting with the change wrought on my life by a layoff, then by the changes I made in my attempts to find new work, and by examination of what has been happening in the industry.

Sometimes in my writing I expressed my own discouragement, even anger toward the industry’s leaders. But I have tried overall to balance that with an optimism about the future — not for the newspaper industry, but for the news industry. I’ve held for years that the Internet would mean a sea change, and that it would be painful, sometimes frightening and yet exciting as journalists learn new ways of gathering and relaying information, and telling stories on a medium that is so wonderfully versatile.

So today, Laid off at 51: Seeking joy in change becomes, simply, Seeking joy in change, reflecting the hope I have held onto for much of this process. It’s a hope borne of my faith in God, an optimism reflecting the exciting changes in the way news is being presented online instead of solely in print.

I cannot promise to blog as often as I did before — the demands of my new position are great right now, largely because I am still learning the skills, learning about the community of St. Charles. But I shall try to grab some time now and then to post here. I still have views about the industry’s future, insights to share and, I hope, encouragement for those in the midst of their own changes to find time for the joy God intends for us, even when we’re stretched to the extreme.

Laid off at 51, picked up at 53: Eager to be a full-time journalist again

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:49:00 +0000

First off, I should apologize for writing so much. But I've been carving today's tome since yesterday.

Late last week, part of me was dreading the Monday ahead. It had the potential to be a tough day.

It was, after all, the second day of yet another month — in fact, 19 in all since the start of one of the toughest personal challenges I have ever faced. The second of each month has come as an increasingly bitter milestone of sorts. Some have been harder than others; some have slipped past with little fanfare.

Still, a part of me was hopeful, even as I tried to quell my excitement. I had concluded the sixth and final interview of the hiring process for one company, and all I had heard from the interviewers so far had been very positive. Still, I had tried to suppress whatever excitement I was inclined to feel about this opportunity. The excitement, the eagerness to get back to work, turned all the more bitter with each rejection — whether by the potential employer or by me.

I had turned down a newspaper job in March, a bitter pill after a process that included an editing test and 10 interviews in the course of an afternoon. They had liked my experience as a longtime copy editor and appreciated my three years of work setting up Sun-Times Media’s websites. While I remain skeptical about the future of print media, I found this company in Chicago’s northwest suburbs a plus in many ways — 10 of those pluses were the 10 people who had interviewed me.

When the offer came, however, the pay was far lower — 40 percent less — than what I had earned before Sun-Times Media laid me off. After all these months, over the course of which I had blogged many times about the sea change technology was bringing to the newspaper industry, another bitter reality hit home that day. The industry’s travails have pushed back the pay scale for journalists, which never has been great, by perhaps 20 years or more.

Welcome to an unwelcome aspect of the new reality of modern journalism.

So even as I began this week driving to church Sunday morning, I pondered the past several weeks, which included six separate interviews and a writing test, all for one company. The process, I was confident, had gone well. Each person who interviewed me brought to the table a palpable excitement about the work, an enthusiasm I share for community journalism, and an eagerness to see how technology will continue to change and shape the way we as journalists do our jobs and communicate what we learn to our readers/users/viewers.

Still, I tried to suppress my excitement as I recalled some of the words I had read in April 2010, eight months before Sun-Times Media would let me go as just one more in a phenomenally long list of layoffs.

“The truth is, it’s always been a lousy business.”

They were the opening words in a post Mimi Johnson had written two months earlier on her blog, Ruby Eyed Fox.com. The entire post encapsulated what many journalists felt or knew at some level but feared to face. Perhaps we were being the proverbial ostriches, hiding our heads in the sand with hopes the bad times would pass without touching us.

More likely, we were so mired in our work and worries that we thought if we just kept working hard enough and long enough and intently enough, no matter how untenable the conditions, we would be allowed to work one more day, one more week, another month. We were exhausted and corporately had been beaten to a stunned, bloody pulp — either we were unable to move or were trying futilely to find a way into another line of work at a time in our nation’s history when jobs were evaporating all over.

Newspaper cuts were occurring all over the nation as the industry struggled with the Great Recession and its own miscues, not to mention its lack of corporate foresight, in trying to adapt to the Internet. Thousands of journalists have been laid off since 2007. The layoffs are continuing. Newspapers continue to cut back in other ways, as well. One trend is to reduce publication schedules from seven days a week to six, to five, to four....

I fully expect that more newspapers will shutter their operations in the coming year.

Mimi is a blogger and writer who since has entered the world of novelists (Amazon.com recently released her e-book Gathering String — I’m engrossed in it now). She had written her blog post with heart-wrenching honesty about her husband’s decision to end his 38-year career in print journalism.

Mimi made a couple of points that struck particularly close to home:

“So who would want to be a journalist? It has always been work for the strong-hearted, the bull-headed and the hopelessly romantic. People do this work because they love it. They love telling stories, however grim, seamy, or heartbreaking. In fact, the more heartbreaking the better.”

I suspect that my wife, who questions whether I should stay in the profession, would nod her head in agreement with the second sentence — more specifically at the word bull-headed. Her simple honesty is among many of the traits which I so value in her.

And:

“Son, you can love this business with everything you’ve got. Just don’t forget that it is never, ever, going to love you back.”

Judging by the number of re-tweets of the link to this post on the day I first saw it in April 2010, there were many other journalists who also caught glimpses of themselves in Mimi’s words.

Strong-hearted. Bull-headed. Hopelessly romantic. And I love the work, to boot.

Perhaps those are some of the qualities that helped me cope during the past 19 months, as I sent out hundreds of cover letters and resumes for positions for which I felt qualified, both in and out of journalism. All the while, I prayed for work and hoped that it would be in journalism.

I give greater credit to God and my faith in Him, however, for coping through these long months. I seldom felt strong-hearted — just the opposite in fact during this transition in my life, although I’ve always had bull-headedness to spare.

But bits of encouragement have come over the course of the past year and a half — through friends and the church we attend, family, people from my past.

One of the first four or five people I called the night I was laid off was my former managing editor at The Courier-News. I had come to trust and respect Mike Bailey, starting with the process that led to my employment with him and extending over the years until he was laid off, about a year before I was.

Mike and his son, J.J., had partnered with Ruth and Steve Munson to start a website, BocaJump.com, which they launched about six months earlier. He offered to put me to work for up to 15 hours a week. He knew I’d need something to supplement unemployment, and he knew that I would provide him with quality journalism. I knew nothing but gratitude. I’ve long referred to Mike as my boss or former boss, but over the past year and a half, I’ve learned to think of him much more as a loyal friend. That’s a level of trust, respect and affection I’ve reserved for a select few over the years.

J.J., Ruth and Steve, who passed away last fall, likewise have been a source of joy and encouragement during this period of transition. Great people all the way around.

Writing this blog also has helped. Mimi’s blog had introduced me to her husband, Steve Buttry, who I came to know better as I read his blog, The Buttry Diary, which I’ve said before is a treasure trove representing the wisdom and experience of a man who has been in the profession more than 40 years. If you are a journalist, Steve’s blog is a must-have resource.

When I was laid off and started my own blog, Mimi saw me post a tweet about it and got Steve to take a look. He immediately posted in the comments section a series of links to posts in his blog about searching for work in digital media.

They both have been a great encouragement from afar ever since. Thanks to his blog, and the times he has reached out individually, I consider him a long-distance mentor, among the very best of the mentors I’ve had over the years.

This blog marked the start of something I had longed for without realizing it for some time — a return to writing. It, in turn, led me to learn new skills in terms of not only displaying and illustrating my work online, but also in learning how to promote it.

My first two weeks in late December 2010 garnered 869 page views. I had no way of knowing whether that was good or bad, but January 2011 brought only 453. I had started out using email and Twitter to get the word out. By February, I also was promoting it on my LinkedIn and new Facebook account — it’s called social media marketing, and it is a skill employers find desirable.

As of June 30, my blog has averaged nearly 1,462 page views a month since its inception. I’ve been told that’s pretty good for a blog that’s been around less than two years. When I started, I had no idea what was good or what even to expect. I’ve been immensely gratified just to see the numbers grow — and amazed at how this blog drew such a diverse audience representing so many nations from around the world. Googling some of them has improved my knowledge of geography, as well.

Also coming into play has been another of my part-time jobs — as a copy editor for some of Patch.com’s websites.

At one point, for several months last summer, I was working part-time for two Patch regions, which afforded me the equivalent of full-time work, in addition to that which I continued for BocaJump. There were cuts, however, and my hours were reduced but not wholly eliminated.

I’ve written about Patch before in this blog. I believe nearly every time I’ve mentioned it, I’ve referred to it as AOL’s courageous experiment to restore community journalism to communities that long ago had been abandoned by traditional print media.

It’s an exciting endeavor as well, although critics pan it for any number of reasons. But many of those critics haven’t offered any suggestions of their own. It’s always easy, I think, to criticize when you duck the responsibility of offering ideas for improvement.

The local and regional editors at Patch whom I have edited for have been a joy to work with — passionate, committed journalists eager to make this experiment a long-term reality.

Monday morning, I received an offer to work as a local editor for Patch in St. Charles, Ill. This morning, I accepted that offer and am beginning to move through the process of becoming an employee. Is it the perfect job? I have no idea, but the potential is immense. Patch is trying to do on a digital platform what few are trying — at least on such a grand scale, and I find that exciting, invigorating and very, very promising.

The interview process itself also was very encouraging — it is clear that Patch wants people who are passionate, committed and can play in a team environment. The care shown in this process has been exceptional.

So, barring any unforeseen complications — and I have nothing to fear from the background check — I will begin full-time work as a Patch local editor on July 16.

I am grateful to Patch for this opportunity, and to the cheerleaders I’ve had inside Patch — some I had worked with in the past, some I have edited for over the past year.

On Dec. 2, 2010, Sun-Times Media laid me off at 51. Since then, I’ve tried — sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing — to find joy in this change.

Monday, exactly 19 months later, Patch offered me a job. On Tuesday, at age 53, I accepted that offer. For that I thank God, I thank my friends, and I thank Patch. As with every job I’ve taken over the years, my intent is to do them proud.

I guess that’s because despite its ups and downs — journalism is, after all, a lousy business — there are some in the world who are called to be journalists. While I’ve had strong doubts about the future in recent months, I’ve never really doubted that calling, nor have I abandoned it even as I considered other career options.

I am, after all, bull-headed, perhaps strong-hearted as well. And part of me is a hopeless romantic when it comes to this profession. Of course, I also love the work.

Maligned media, Part 2: The truth will out, but it can take time

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 07:03:00 +0000

Sometimes they shoot the messenger.

It’s an expression related to the idea of killing off the bearer of unwelcome tidings — as if the messenger really is to blame for unwanted or bad news.

To be clear, as I noted in Maligned media, Part 1 of this missive, sometimes the negative perception of the media is justified, such
as when we let our egos take center stage at news events, or when our aggressiveness as journalists become rude and unreasonable. As Steve Buttry pointed out in a comment he posted on Part 1, “We do have to know when to be aggressive as journalists. But I find I get a lot further by being polite and persuasive most times.”

I have found the same true throughout my career, but not only in journalism. Yes, there are times you have to get into someone’s face when ferreting out the truth, but that generally is the exception, not the rule. Most folks appreciate someone who is polite, persuasive, persistent — even insistent — especially when they are willing to take the time to listen, to understand the facts and what they mean.

Integrity is key to credibility

Still, rudeness is not the worst accusation leveled against journalists. We’ve been called jackals and vultures when we descend en masse upon a big news event.

Others accuse the media of sensationalizing news, of having a liberal bias, of playing fast and loose with the facts, even failing to report the facts. In recent years, the American media have taken consistent hits in terms of credibility, as indicated in a 2010 Gallup poll on media credibility.

Credibility should be a sore point for all journalists and is among the reasons the Society of Professional Journalists over the years adopted a code of ethics that serves as a guide for many newsrooms. I also adhere to the group that calls itself the TAO of Journalism, for transparency, accountability and openness to other views.

The bottom line in the area of integrity is truth, accuracy, honesty, fairness and accountability.

As an aside, I would point out that some people believe, falsely, that fairness means allowing them to say whatever they want to say without having the veracity of their claims questioned. That kind of misunderstanding will be a huge burr under the saddle for anyone portraying fiction as fact.

Acting always with integrity is one way we journalists can preserve our credibility. Another is holding ourselves accountable to the readership we serve.

That means adhering to some of the nitty-gritty of journalism — spell names correctly, get ages, addresses and street names right as well, make sure the numbers add up to what you say they do, and that the facts you present are, well, factual.

Throughout my career, I’ve made a point of telling my sources, my readers, the public officials who answer my questions, the local standouts I interview, that if they think I got something wrong, they should call me at once so that I can verify and then correct the error. That opens the door to another step — determining how the error was made so that it can be avoided in the future.

Character maligned

Still, even when we follow all ethical rules, dotting every ethical “i” and crossing every ethical “t,” even then, there is a good chance someone will be willing to malign our integrity.

Journalists devote their careers to truth, accuracy, fairness, keeping the communities they serve informed about what’s happening in their schools, with their local, state and federal governments, about crime on the streets, about justice or injustice in the courts.

Professional integrity speaks volumes in terms of our credibility as individuals. That translates corporately as well — a news organization that espouses and adheres to high ethical values and enforces standards to hold its journalists accountable gains believability in the eyes of its readers, as well as its critics. Or it should.

Among all the bad raps journalists take, whether deserved or not, few are worse than those that malign our integrity.

We aspire to be bearers of light — shining the beacon of truth into dark places, uncovering injustice and corruption, offering our readers what we hope are accurate, truthful, fair and insightful interpretations of what is happening in our communities.

Those who do dislike the news we write, those who cannot accept truth, those whose view of reality is inconsistent with truth and accuracy would prefer to shoot the messenger. Sometimes they try.

Fighting the good fight

During my first seven years as a journalist at the Rawlins Daily Times in Rawlins, Wyo., my reporting of facts put me at odds variously with:

Eventually, the city manager chose to accuse my editor of mischaracterizing his administration in editorials. He then accused the newspaper of twisting facts, lying and reporting half-truths. We did no such thing. The facts we cited were well-documented and spoke for themselves. The only half-truths were the constantly changing stream of explanations coming from the city manager about the sudden state of disarray in city finances. New reasons were cited, first on a near-daily basis, then weekly, shifting each time the truth showcased the flaws in the earlier statements.
A city manager who fired a headstrong, longtime city treasurer who kept the city’s books the old-fashioned way — in a handwritten ledger. Several months later, a bank refused to deposit a Rawlins police officer’s paycheck due to insufficient funds, which turned out to be nothing more than a procedural error — someone forgot to transfer money from the city’s interest-bearing account to its no-interest payroll checking account. That episode, however, ushered in the discovery that the city administration mistakenly had spent tens of thousands of dollars from the police pension fund. That was reflected in the handwritten ledgers.
On an earlier occasion, this same city manager once locked me in his office for nearly two hours as he tried to interrogate me to learn the source I had cited in a story. This was one of the few times in my career that I had used an anonymous source, with my editor’s approval. The story arose from a spat between the city’s part-paid, part-volunteer fire department and the local hospital, leading to a vote by the volunteers to stop responding to ambulance calls outside the city limits in protest of some hospital policies. No one believed they actually would not respond when called. It was a protest vote at best, but it was embarrassing to the city, and the city manager was livid that I had found out about it, let alone written about it. He wanted to fire the person who had told me. When I continued to refuse and got up to leave, he began impugning my integrity, saying my use of an anonymous source was unethical. I guess he never paused to consider locking me in his office might be construed in the same manner. He never did learn the name of my source, but if I recall correctly, he did try the locked-door routine again later, on the reporter who eventually replaced me on the city beat.
I pushed hard, if naïvely, over the course of five years to gain public access to school board-teacher negotiations. When I started, public information about those negotiations amounted to a one-paragraph statement marking the start of talks, and another at the end announcing the ratification of a contract and the contract terms. I say I pushed naïvely because Wyoming’s public meetings law did not apply to the negotiations sessions, since less than a quorum of the board participated. For five years I asked and was told no. Toward the end of that time, however, I stumbled upon a loophole I could exploit via the state’s public records law. Whatever documents the two sides exchanged in negotiations were considered unrestricted public records under the law. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for copies. Suddenly, both sides wanted the press in to cover the actual negotiations sessions, because the sessions would provide greater context than the documents alone would. Still, in the final weeks before that nut cracked open, people I knew began relaying to me that I had angered the union and that my life might be in jeopardy if I did not back away. I never took the threats seriously, although words began to spread that I was out to get the union. I started getting phone calls from angry residents because, well, in addition to the teachers union, Rawlins was a railroad hub, and there were a lot of union guys working for Union Pacific.

As an aside, about a year later, I mentioned the threats in passing to the police chief. I think I was proud of myself for standing up for myself that way, but I was surprised when he scolded me for not reporting the threats. As he put it, “What if something had happened to you? We wouldn’t have had a clue who to start looking at because you hadn’t reported it.” He was right, and in retrospect, I should have done so.

The latest assault

Fast forward to today and the work I have been doing at BocaJump, covering the city government in Elgin, Ill.

Over the past 18 months, I have had ample time to become acquainted with the city’s budget process. Some things do not change all that much from a small town to a large one. The numbers are larger, there are more departments and a greater number of separate funds to consider, but basic budgeting principles remain the same. Money comes in from taxes, money goes out. Most of the money goes to personnel costs, the rest to infrastructure, maintenance and paying for such diverse things as equipment, supplies and utilities.

Reporters for other news organizations and I covered the budget deliberations from start to finish. We at varying points covered different aspects of the budget, but the numbers jived with the city’s figures, with what city officials were saying, with the official budget documents the city adopted in January and posted on its website.

But there were naysayers, and understandably so, to a somewhat complicated albeit straightforward budget restructuring plan that would add new taxes and fees, most of which will be offset by a $10 million property tax cut phased in by 2014.

The bottom line is that by 2014, the net increase from new taxes and new fees will be about $4.6 million, and the city’s revenues streams, which formerly relied most heavily on property and sales taxes, will be spread among twice as many taxes and fees as they had been before. It is a move that officials believe will minimize the ebb and flow of revenues that can wreak havoc on city finances.

The critics of this plan have spoken up many times. I’ve written stories about the group and live-blogged its members’ comments during City Council meetings. But they have made some incendiary claims over the past year and thrown out numbers that clearly are wrong but which they claim prove their points. On several occasions, I ran stories that refuted some of their claims. The most recent was last weekend (you can read it here).

'The truth will out'

“The truth will out” is a phrase Shakespeare used in The Merchant of Venice, meaning the truth will be known at some point, and when you are making claims that are not supported by the truth, you end up looking bad.

When you are the messenger who brings that truth, you may become a target.

The first shot came by email early last week as a courtesy from a group member to let me know it was responding to that last story. The second shot also came by email, which was forwarded to me from a friend who is on the group’s email list. This email introduced my story as the “propaganda piece” I had written for the city.

That attack on my integrity stung. But I have been assaulted with this tactic before and am not afraid, nor am I particularly angry.

Sometimes they shoot the messenger because he’s delivering information they do not want to hear.

I have nothing to fear from character assassination.

I believe the truth will out, and when it does, the truth always reflects badly on those who try to twist or contradict it. I don't say this to be cocky or arrogant, but I have nothing to fear from truth. Nothing at all.

Maligned media, Part 1: Sometimes the negative perception is justified

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 04:50:00 +0000

(Image by Stock.xchng vi)

Journalists often are a maligned lot.

I would blame some of that on the nature of the work we do, particularly in competitive markets or when a big news story breaks in a small town, drawing hordes of journalists.

In our most visible
roles, we appear to descend upon tragedy like vultures vying for the choicest bits of flesh from a fresh carcass. That imagery comes to mind every time I consider mobs of reporters, camera crews and photographers descending upon a crime scene, for example, or the home of a family recently bereft of a loved one in some awful tragedy.

To be fair, we’re there to do a job, to record a news event, a tragedy or other piece of history that is unfolding in the communities we serve. Yes, we are there for the scoop, and we exult in the adrenaline rush that comes with chasing down a reporting a good story, capturing a great image. We’re there to record raw emotion on film, a 15-second sound bite, or the details we writers need to elicit a greater emotional response from our reader.

Generally, we want the work we do to count for something, to have an impact.

We are an idealistic fellowship that accepts a lifetime of lousy to mediocre pay, often awful hours and frequently a day-in, day-out lack of appreciation from the public we serve. In exchange, we work with the hope that the truth will effect change and perhaps help make the world a better place.

Of course, with the havoc the tech change has wrought on the industry in recent years, many of us simply hope to work.

Still human beings

But journalists remain human beings, fully equipped to aspire to greatness and to fumble face-first into the mire. So when news breaks, it can spark a media frenzy fueled by competitiveness, pride, a hunger to rise up and stand out above the rest, however briefly, with the greatest footage, the most compelling prose. In those moments, I think the purest intent — to clearly, fairly, accurately and truthfully inform the community about what has happened and why it matters — can get lost.

You likely have seen these scenes unfold on television. Perhaps, if you are a journalist like myself, you at some point have been a player in such a drama. Maybe you remember your own hunger while pondering:

How can I make my story stand out better than everyone else’s can?
Will this story be my big break?
Can I get some private time with the victim’s mother/father/sibling? Perhaps s/he will tell me something no one else knows … Maybe the neighbor knows something ...

To be honest and transparent, it is very easy to get caught up in that, because most of us want to rise up to meet the challenges, and we want to shine.

But the adrenaline rush of excitement that comes with chasing down a big story can override the sensitivity that journalists most need to show yet sometimes lose in these situations. From the perspective of the storyteller — whether a visual journalist working with images or those of us who specialize in the written or spoken word — accurately and skillfully relating detail and drama while eliciting an emotional response from the reader is at the heart of our craft. It is a cherished skill. For a few minutes or so, we become the eyes and ears of our readers, offering them an intimate glimpse of another’s heartbreak or triumph.

The best stories not only accurately and nearly completely convey the pertinent details, they also elicit that emotional response — joy, exultation, dread, anger, sadness, fear — that places the reader in the midst of the drama, good or bad.

But because we are human, sometimes the same hunger that drives us to be good journalists comes off as crass, insensitive and even self-serving.

A significant news event will draw out-of-town media in droves like swarms of angry hornets. I have watched “rising-star” television personalities push their way into a press briefing or to the front of a line with an air of entitlement they clearly believed they had. When it was demonstrated they did not, tempers fueled by hurt egos often flared.

Drawing distinctions

Let me make it clear that I draw a clear distinction between an aggressive journalist who is doing the job, hopefully with some sensitivity, and those who simply believe their status as a reporter for this or that organization entitles them to something they have not earned. The latter might seem to look down their noses at “lesser” beings such as community journalists. Yet they want the same information, and they want it now, that the local journalists have developed because of their contacts in the community.

I point this out because the Cheyenne, Wyo., and the Denver bureaus of The Associated Press, for example, often sent out top-notch journalists who could be aggressive but also respectful. They were welcome in our newsroom at the Rawlins Daily Times. For some reason, however, the TV journalists I encountered from Denver in those years appeared as arrogant and insensitive as they were aggressive.

My co-workers and I encountered this on a handful of occasions during my seven years as a reporter in Rawlins, a small city the high plains of south-central Wyoming. Then, Rawlins was home to perhaps 10,000 people; today, the Census Bureau estimates there are about 9,000.

One of those occasions was a hostage crisis at the Wyoming State Penitentiary; another was the kidnapping, rape and brutal murder of a 17-year-old girl. Both brought media scurrying into town from Denver, a good four- to five-hour drive from the southeast, and even from Salt Lake City, which was about the same distance but to the southwest.

During the hostage incident, a TV station helicopter defied FAA airspace restrictions over the Wyoming State Penitentiary, hovering where it wanted as its cameraman looked for a good angle and tried to determine exactly which building was home to the drama.

At some point, after repeated warnings, the sheriff radioed the helicopter pilot and told him to leave before the lead started flying. He just laid it out as if he was ordering a cup of joe, saying something like, “You know you’re not supposed to be up there, and if you don’t leave in about 30 seconds, we’re going to shoot you down. I don’t think either one of us wants that.”

The chopper left, immediately. A co-worker who had been in the prison’s pressroom told me later there were prison guards and sheriff’s deputies, perhaps a couple of state troopers to boot aiming rifles at the aircraft, just waiting for the order. Denver’s broadcast media did itself no favors that day as far as advancing its reputation among southern Wyoming law enforcement.

Some are pushy and rude

But some of the big-city media carried itself with even greater arrogance a couple of years later when it showed up to cover the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl who went missing late one night while walking her dog.

Our paper, the Rawlins Daily Times, covered that story like a hawk. From the morning after her disappearance and the discovery that day of a bloody bundle of clothing just outside of town, to the days of searches that followed, we chronicled our community’s efforts to find a girl who was much loved by her family, friends and neighbors.

When the girl’s body was found and a press conference was called to announce the arrest of the budding serial killer whose path she crossed on March 31, 1990, I arrived early, sat down in the front row with my camera and waited.

I was certain I already had all the details — I’d been virtually camped out at the sheriff’s office for four days, had met the missing girl’s mom and had talked to her dad on the phone. The night before the press conference, I was in the sheriff’s office when they brought in the girl’s family to let them know they had made an arrest and recovered her body.

The press conference the next day was a formality, but I needed to be there, as much to be certain that I didn’t miss anything as to ensure I would have a photograph of the sheriff and maybe the county attorney to go with the story I would write.

When the Denver media arrived later, they sized up the room, looking for the best place to position themselves and their cameras. There was a contingent from a TV station that clearly envied the spot I had staked out.

Several of them insisted I should move so they could have better camera angles “because we’re with (whichever) television station in Denver.” I pointed out there were plenty of other seats in the room and held my ground. Besides, they were here for the thrill of a sensational story in a community with which they had no connection. This was a flash in the pan for them; for the people in Rawlins, this was a pain that would last.

One of them called me a small-town hick, which drew some chuckles from his compatriots. He pressed the point on their behalf, insisting again they were the big-city media, implying that I should defer to their Denver-flavored awesomeness.

I did not.

I had less self-restraint back then but held my tongue anyway. While I had a bevy of clever insults in my arsenal with which to counter this arrogance, I simply told “Mr. TV” that I would not move and turned to wait for the press conference to start. Still, I was angry.

My exchange with Mr. TV left a lasting impression and serves to remind me today that we journalists do have egos. Part of me wanted badly to put Mr. TV in his place, but doing so would have served no useful purpose. It would not have reflected well on me, on the Rawlins Daily Times, or on my community. It also would have put our egos at front and center on a day when they were even more irrelevant than usual.

The real story that day was not the media. It was the beginning of justice in an incredible sad, violent tragedy.

The perception that the media are little better than a self-serving pack of jackals more interested in making names for ourselves than in serving the public can be as accurate as it can be wrong. On this day, the big-city media was there for a hot, tragic tale that would play well for a day as a regional news story. They left when they got their piece of it, even though the story would not conclude for another six or seven months.

The Rawlins Daily Times covered that story from the beginning, before the outisde media took interest, and we covered it to the end. One of the last stories I wrote for that paper was about the day a judge sentenced Robert Lee Clegg to multiple life terms for the murder of Lisa Marie Hansen.

The Rawlins Daily Times reported the story for its duration, as should any local news organization truly intent upon serving its community. We were not the among the jackals.

But the jackals indeed were there, at least for a while.
----------
Addendum: I want to take a moment to respond and to clarify after a journalist I respect and trust, Steve Buttry, offered a constructive criticism (below) of this piece. Let me make it clear the big-city media had a right to be there and, generally speaking, their presence fulfilled a necessary and vital role.

The writing of this dredged up some intense memories, good and bad, including the indignation I felt at the time. I would hate, as Steve put it, to paint big-city media with a broad brush. I mentioned The Associate Press reporters and photographers I encountered out there specifically because in my mind, they often reflected the best in terms of professional demeanor and good journalism when they followed news into small communities like Rawlins.

In the situations I discussed, there were just a couple of bad apples who served to cast the broader media in a poor light. Unfortunately, the impressions they left in that community served to reinforce the negative stereotypes about the media.

Then and now: Peaks and valleys on a journalist's career roller coaster

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:44:00 +0000

Over the past 18 months or so, I have found that working through an extended season of un/underemployment can be a roller-coaster ride.

There are flat stretches when not little more happens than the passage of time. There are hills — solid job leads for which I must slow down and carefully consider my steps. Hopes rise with an initial email contact, then soar with a phone screening and the prospect of a face-to-face interview.

Until now, there has been a thundering, rapid descent into blackness — perhaps with the realization, a week or so later, that
there would be no subsequent interview, or that when an offer did come in to go to work with a great crew of people, the pay would be phenomenally low.

The black dog licks at my heels at times like those.

In almost every way, this has been far more difficult to navigate than my transition from college to the working world of news, which also was a significant trial. I graduated during a recession, at a time when, like today, the newspaper industry was struggling. Starting in the spring semester before leading to my graduation in 1982, it seemed that every week, I read or listened to news reports of more newspaper layoffs. In Minnesota, where I attended college and hoped to land my first job, newspapers were folding. The same was true elsewhere in the Midwest.

After I graduated, I had something like 200 resumes printed. In that first year, long before email, I sent out 150 of them. My cover letters were typed, because home computers were a luxury few could afford. It would be some time before prices fell, their quality increased and they rose to the level of ubiquity at which they exist today. I learned quickly to type slowly and carefully — there were no spell checkers in most electric typewriters back then, and because I had chosen to have my resume printed on gray parchment — ditto with the letterhead for my cover letters — Whiteout and erasers were not an option.

I wrote mainly to papers that were not even advertising, because very few were hiring; those that had openings were giving preference to experienced journalists who had lost their jobs. I always thought that was as it should be.

In the meantime, I worked long hours in a warehouse, lived with my parents, made friends, had backyard cookouts featuring beer, brats and volleyball, and generally had a good time. But as time passed, my frustration grew. My idled dreams left me sullen, angry. My education, my longing and what, over the course of my life I have come to know as my vocation, were not germinating but dormant in sterile soil.

I went 18 months from the time I graduated to the day I started my first newspaper job at a small daily, the Rawlins Daily Times, in Rawlins, Wyo. It was a “Wild West” adventure I’ll always cherish, working with some great journalists who were good people, good friends. The people in that town and throughout the state were best caliber, like myself often blunt or direct, and could disagree loudly and then meet up at the bar later to share a few laughs and some brews.

Fast forward nearly three decades and the scenario has similar elements yet is vastly different.

Then, I was single, living with my folks and without much responsibility. Today, I have my own family — a lovely, many-talented wife, and five wonderful children. The roof over our heads comes with a monthly mortgage payment. There are bills to pay and daily expenses such as food and clothing that perhaps we took too much for granted when I was bringing home a paycheck that reflected full-time work.

I’ve mellowed over the years — less inclined to anger, more patient, more appreciative of those around me. I attribute much of that to my faith in and love of God. There also have been people around me over the years, whether at home, at church or at work, who set good examples for me to emulate in terms of optimism, encouragement, perseverance.

Another great difference between then and today is the industry itself. The sea change called the Internet arrived in the 1990s. It is a technological marvel that has sparked a paradigm shift in how journalism is done, that has add varied and spectacular methods of storytelling and presenting information in ways that newspapers never had had available to them.

The Internet is immediate — information can be made available as quickly as it can be gathered. Conversely, newspapers are nearly the informational equivalent of a snail, with information that gathered, say at 8 in the evening delivered to your driveway 10 hours later. It is that difference in timeliness, not to mention the expense of printing, that will doom newspapers, or at best relegate them to more of a roll as a holdout or remnant. I say that with a fair degree of confidence since it already is occurring.

Sun-Times Media took its suburban papers down to six days a week several years ago. Since then, it has considered cutting the number of publication days further at The Courier-News in Elgin, my hometown. Since that consideration, however, the company has changed hands, which makes it difficult to predict when the publication cycle will diminish, but it will happen. That example is close to home but is by no means the exception.

Elsewhere, publications have ceased to print entirely, cutting and converting their news operations to delivery by website. One was the widely reported decision by the Christian Science Monitor to eschew print in 2008, another was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2009.

In February 2009, many in the Sun-Times Media newsroom in Aurora watched with dread an online video about the closure of the Rocky Mountain News. My eyes teared up as I watched the interviews — I once worked with some of those very people earlier in our careers in a newsroom in Cheyenne, Wyo.

In recent weeks, however, there have been signs that other steps are becoming more common. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans announced it was cutting its staff by 200 workers in preparation to shift from a daily publication cycle to just three days a week, with daily delivery of news via its website. Steve Buttry, in his blog The Buttry Diary, wrote a salute to the paper and its staff, whose coverage of Hurricane Katrina earned the paper the motto, “We publish come hell and high water.” In his blog, Buttry notes that Advance Newspapers, which owns the Times-Picayune, already has cut back is daily publications to three days a week at other papers it owns in Michigan, and is doing the same thing at papers it has in Alabama.

I can honestly say these recent developments, while sad, were hardly surprising. I’ve been reading in discussion boards now for the better part of a year discussions by media professionals predicting these very types of cutbacks. Some have suggested scenarios in which big-city papers might cut back to printing just once or twice a week to conserve costs as they struggle to preserve some revenues from the print side of their operations.

Time will tell.

Some blame the industry’s troubles today on the Internet. While I agree the turmoil it has wrought kind of stinks — I don’t like my status any more than any other un/underemployed journalist — I do remain enamored of the potential I see.

I said much the same about the technology changes in the years leading up to my layoff, more so in 2007 when I transitioned to Sun-Times Media’s suburban Web desk. Where some of my print-side colleagues perceived the Internet as a threat to our industry, I saw potential for dynamic change. I warned everyone, in words that today of course seem more like a self-fulfilling prophecy, that our profession was facing a technological roller-coaster ride that would be both painful and exciting.

When my own layoff came, the pain became even more intense than it had been watching time and again as co-workers were let go. Still, I held onto my excitement about the change, even in my worst moments during the valleys of my own roller-coaster ride over the past year and a half. There is so much potential for this profession to grow, to mature, to develop new, more effective ways of communicating with people about what is happening in their communities and the rest of the world.

But the reality facing my family and myself has been difficult to navigate. On the long, flat stretches of this ride, I’ve tried to establish a routine — working on my blog, my part-time work with BocaJump and as a guest editor for Patch.com’s northwest Chicago region and others, all the while monitoring job boards, writing cover letters, sending out resumes. At the same time, I’ve tried to keep up on my reading of industry events via blogs by Buttry, Jim Romenesko, Poynter and many others, as well as participating in online discussions of issues facing the industry today. After the first of the year, however, I had to cut back or set a lot of that aside as I adjusted my routine to accommodate the training I sought on Adobe software.

The high points of the ride have been encouraging. Some involved job interviews, much of them involved my work with BocaJump. Many involved writing this blog and looking on in wonder as the number of people coming to take a look grew from several hundred page views a month what has grown to an average of more than 1,400 page views a month over the course of the 18 months I have been writing. Blog traffic has slowed, however, since the first of the year, but then I’ve not been writing as often.

But I’ve plumbed the depths of the valleys on this ride as well. I’ve struggled with doubt about sticking with a profession that cast me off with little more than a thank you, now leave. Self-worth is more than a paycheck, but of course it’s hard to feel validated about the skills you have wielded successfully throughout your career when no one seems interested in hiring you any longer.

The black dog has been a close companion but no friend during these times.

In the past couple of weeks, the roller-coaster again has ticked upward. Part of me wants desperately not to get excited, not to get my hopes up, because if there’s a letdown it’s going to hurt like hell. It gets worse each time.

But, as Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed creation Sherlock Holmes once said, “Come Watson, come! The game is afoot.” I can bridle my optimism and excitement no more than Holmes and Watson could set aside their search for Moriarty.

I am eager to learn more, to become a part of something that not only would make use of my skills and my experience, but also would provide a full-time paycheck and ease the strain my family has faced throughout this ordeal.

So I am excited, yet I tread cautiously. Perhaps this latest avenue will be my path, and I hope it is. If not, I dread another reunion with my canine companion on this trek. The black dog follows patiently. But perhaps this time he will lose the scent.

Are newspaper paywalls a corporate recognition that the end is near?

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 09:53:00 +0000

If you aren’t concerned, you should be
The debate about paywalls continues as more and more newspapers gravitate toward requiring online subscriptions to their websites. For me, the debate grows more fascinating at each turn, and in the past several weeks, I have come across some interesting reading material related to the debate, whether directly or indirectly.

Steve Buttry has written much about paywalls in his blog, The Buttry Diary, which I consider a treasure trove of experience and knowledge covering an array of journalism-related issues. In recent years, he has focused heavily on digital journalism, community engagement and the use of social media to gather and disseminate news and to draw out discussion among readers and their journalists. Frankly, his blog has been a resource that has helped me to continue to mature in the rapidly changing field of digital journalism during 18 long months of un/underemployment. He and his wife, Mimi Johnson, also a fantastic writer, have been an encouragement to me from afar during that time.

One last plug for Steve: If you are a journalist and you’re not taking advantage of the nuggets in The Buttry Diary, you are missing out. Period. Steve offers a great mix of practical guidance on a variety of skills and resources, as well as focused discussion of headier issues, such as journalism ethics, career planning and acquiring new skills.

Last week, Steve offered a short post about the paywall issue, in which he introduced a link to a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review written by Howard Owens. The context for Owens’ piece is that it was written in response to another author’s submission in support of paywalls.

Newspapers need little urging to jump on the paywall bandwagon, even though it has failed before. Print revenues havebeen declining at a faster pace than the growth in online advertising. Also, online advertising generates a drop in the bucket compared to print ads. Columnist Peter Preston, of the Guardian and the Observer, wrote in August 2011 that online ads bring in “between 10 percent and 20 percent of the price of the same ads in print.” That’s an alarming difference for an industry that, after virtually ignoring the Internet for 15 years, suddenly understood that is where the future is, and that the future started … 15 years ago.

So, at a time when many online businesses over the years had established business models that worked for their particular products or services, newspapers were starting anew without a clue, desperate for revenue.

They threw together websites, sometimes hastily and often with little understanding or without planning for how users would want to navigate through their Web pages. There was little understanding about how to be effective online and with its broad selection of digital platforms and capabilities. There is video and audio, animation, the written word — including blogs (like this one) and microblogs like Twitter, to other social media such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Digg, and Quora, to name a few of the more popular in an ever-increasing swarm.

Entering the game late is bad. More alarming is that newspaper publishers, while panicked by their revenue declines, still may be taking comfort in their ability to continue to make a buck in print, even though readers spend much less time with their newspapers.

Poynter ‘s Jeff Sonderman wrote a May 30 piece, The one chart that should scare the hell out of print media, which indicates that ad spending in print is fairly high in comparison to the number of people looking at those ads. At the same time, because ad spending online — mobile and Internet — is lagging behind print, publishers appear more inclined to focus on print revenue, even though history demonstrates that cannot last.

The chart Sonderman references is a comparison of ad spending levels by medium (print, radio, TV, Internet and mobile) alongside the time viewers/users spend with that medium. Publishers, Sonderman’s piece makes clear, should be alarmed that print advertising is continuing to bring in a significant share of their revenue when readers’ time spent with their product is so small. But, as the subject in Sonderman’s piece, venture capitalist Mary Meeker points out, that ad spending follows those media which attract the most users. That is a troubling forecast for an already troubled product.

By way of illustrating the historical validity of Meeker’s point, newspapers once had a virtual monopoly on advertising. Radio came along and cut into that. Television came along and cut out its piece of the pie. The same scenario began playing out again, this time with the Internet beginning in the late 1990s with the emergence of Craigslist, which offered free classified ads to people who once paid newspapers for that service.

Companies also are creating their own websites and promoting themselves using social media, instead of paying a newspaper to promote them via advertisements. The popularity of mobile platforms — still Internet-based, but in an age when devices like cellphones and tablet computers, when users no longer are confined to home or office computers — is adding to the drag on print revenues.

None of this is going away.

Which brings me back to Steve Buttry’s post about Howard Owens’ Columbia Journalism Review piece. Owens’ 10 points against paywalls were, as Steve wrote, “the most detailed, reasoned, fact-based analysis of the paywall issue I have read, certainly more so than any I have written.”

As much as I’ve read about paywalls in the past 18 months, I agree. But there was one point Owens made in particular on which I intend to focus, particularly in light of Sonderman’s piece.

Of the 10 points Owens makes, No. 8 is quite salient and more than a little disturbing.

He writes that “on the whole, a lot of the push for paywalls is being driven by old-school journalists and executives with publicly traded newspaper chains. The irony is that these two traditional rivals have come together in a conspiracy to, in reality, kill newspapers.”

Owens pegs these individuals as the same group of executives who in the 1990s had labeled the Internet a fad. I have met some of these people. He also writes that paywalls are a bean-counter’s method of slowing down the revenue loss. That sounds legit, until Owens quotes author Phillip Meyer, who wrote in his book The Vanishing Newspaper, that paywalls are part of the “take-the-money-and-run” of newspapers’ corporate owners plan to “harvest” the papers.

“No newspaper company is instituting paywalls to protect journalism,” Owens writes. “They’re doing it to protect profits, or at least slow the bleed out.”

Look around at the examples. James Tyree rallied a group of investors to buy for a pittance the financially strapped Sun-Times News Group, which became Sun-Times Media. Everyone received shiny new mugs with the company logo because we had been saved when we were within days or weeks of closing. Then the new owners began selling the company’s assets — selling off real property, which had real value in spite of the times. They shuttered some operations, outsourced services and trimmed the workforce, saving plenty of cash even as they were making cash selling those assets. Then they sold Sun-Times Media to a new group of investors — and at a profit.

And instituted paywalls.

The Arlington Heights-based Daily Herald also has implemented paywalls after years of struggling. There likewise have been pay cuts and layoffs during its period of pain.

I am not certain how either company feels about the success — or lack thereof — it is experiencing with its paywalls. But I think it’s right for readers and journalists to be concerned, for if the conclusions of Owens and Meyer on this issue are correct, these companies already know the end is in sight, and they don’t care.

Under such a scenario, they simply want to suck out as much revenue as possible from their operations before they collapse entirely.

Hospitals can be symbols of peace, great joy — and sometimes dread

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 06:10:00 +0000

For me, it’s kind of like water.

Gentle waves lapping at the shore can have a deliciously calming effect, instilling a feeling of peace and relaxation, a salve to the raw nerves of a tense day.

A fish splashing at the end of a monofilament line, however, can trigger great joy and excitement — particularly for this guy. Whether it’s a rainbow trout leaping from a river, a largemouth bass punching the surface of a lake, or a girthy, river-bred northern pike grabbing your lure and — at least at first — charging at you faster than you can reel, it’s guaranteed to get my adrenalin flowing, my heart a-pumping.

Then there are the surf’s-up kind of waves, such as those I raced along the breakwaters on Lake Michigan in February or March 1978, the year I lived in Chicago. Of course, my friends and I were invincible college freshmen then. We did not fear death —we had our futures ahead of us and did not realize, perhaps, just how fragile life is. So we ran headlong from the end of the breakwater and toward the shore, confident in our ability to beat what seemed like monstrous, 30-foot waves before they could crush and soak and chill us. Sometimes they did. Part of the thrill was enmeshed in the sheer terror we felt, knowing just how potentially deadly these mountains of water could be. Yet we were so full of life that I do not think we had the wisdom to fear such risk.

Conversely, in the post-Jaws years, having that movie’s theme unexpectedly enter your mind while swimming in deep water, even in a mere freshwater lake, could inspire a mounting panic.

My thoughts drifted toward such thoughts many times this past week as I traveled back and forth to visit a loved one who took ill and then was hospitalized.

In my youth, I had very limited experience in hospitals. Mom worked as a volunteer at the old Saint Joseph in Elgin when we were children, and sometimes she would take us along with her to help — I vaguely seem to remember it was a candy stand, although it well may have been a gift shop of sorts. All in all, it was a relatively nonthreatening, somewhat boring but quiet experience. It was peaceful, restful and a place with nuns.

We would not gain a fear of nuns until we were older, but that is for another tale.

But there were other times there when we had what I always considered somewhat disturbing and bizarre encounters in which complete strangers would boldly approach my younger siblings and I. The would “ooh” and “ahh,” sometimes even pinch our cheeks: “Awe, look at those big, beautiful brown eyes! You must be Schnells.”

I can’t speak for my siblings, but it was an experience that played out time and again in my life until I took my first newspaper job in Rawlins, Wyo. During my move to that state in late 1983, I was nearly traumatized when I drove past Chugwater and saw a mailbox for a Schnell family. I made some calls, however, and was assured the Chugwater Schnells were of the blue- and hazel-eyed variety. Thus, at age 24 in my sojourn to the Wild West, the cheek-pinching portion of my life drew to an end.

Entering adulthood, trips to the hospital became more intense. People were “having an operation,” or were “very ill” or even “dying,” often whispered phrases that commanded a level of solemnity and often grave concern.

Of course there also was another phrase that people associated with hospitals that conveyed great excitement and anticipation, but I would not appreciate that until after I met Lisa in Rawlins. We wed a little more than eight months after our first date.

When Lisa gave birth to our first-born, Brian, a little more than 2½ years later, the hospital came to convey a whole new meaning to me — one of unspeakable joy in witnessing a miracle and a great pride in my wife’s monumental endeavor, and a sense of gratitude that both she and Brian were well.

For the record, no fish I have ever caught over the years could compare with, nor has a catch ever generated the level of excitement than that which I experienced each time I witnessed the birth of one of our five children. Completely, unutterably awesome.

But time has a way of darkening even rose-colored glasses such as those. Some years after returning to Elgin in 1994, I came to associate hospitals more greatly with illness, and death.

I worked with a sweetheart of a guy named Tom, who had a few years on me but generally was kind, had a great sense of humor and was a pretty good copy editor. We were among what at that point was a particularly great crew at The Courier News. But we each have weaknesses. Tom’s was drink, and he hid it well from me, at least until toward the end.

Tom entered Sherman Hospital in Elgin in June 2000, where for 50 days he was treated for complications from his alcoholism. During those final seven weeks of his life, I visited with him daily for the first couple of weeks, but I also spent quite some time visiting his home to clear out years of neglect and debris. Toward the end, he slept more, and my visits slowed to about three times a week. During his final week, I unabashedly told Tom, “My friend, I want you to know I love you.” He nodded in glassy-eyed acknowledgement. By this time he frequently was too weak to say much, and I believe he knew what was too rapidly approaching.

Tom died in Aug. 4, 2000, and his elderly mother asked me to say a few words at his funeral. That was the first time I had ever done that, and I was honored to do so.

I recognize, too, that hospitals are a place for healing. Three times in the past 10 years, I’ve benefited from outpatient surgeries to resolve unrelated health issues. I’ve known many others who can share similar stories.

But over the past five or 10 years, a part of me has dreaded returning to one of these institutions. I am a little older now. I have seen pain and death. Others of my family are older still.

So the latter half of last week, in a process that will continue into this week and perhaps longer, I’ll be back and forth to the hospital, checking in on someone I love very dearly, trying to provide some level of comfort, warmth and love, but doing so without getting in the way of my siblings — or the health care professionals. While at home, I’ll field phone calls from the hospital and gather information to send by email to those of my siblings and other cherished family members who live in distant states.

I will pray and I will trust in God. Part of me will look forward with hope, knowing that God answers prayer. But, in the back of my mind there is a nagging dread, because sometimes His answer is no.

I’ll be grateful if the answer is, “Not now.”

More stress in store for Sun-Times?

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Sat, 26 May 2012 06:21:00 +0000

Growth plan to strain overworked newsrooms

(Image by Stock.xchng vi)

I read with a fair amount of skepticism Lynne Marek’s story in Crain’s Chicago Business about Michael Ferro’s plans to make the Sun-Times and its ragtag fleet of daily and weekly suburban papers the nation’s top local newspaper.

Ferro is chairman of Wrapports LLC, which purchased Sun-Times Media in December and, more recently, the Chicago Reader. Some believe the company is planning more acquisitions.

Marek’s story, under the headline, Sun-Times owner: ‘We’re not buying the Trib,’ laid out how Ferro said he intends to boost the media company’s subscriptions by 100,000 in the next two years.

I shook my head as I read, not at Marek’s reporting, but in wonder. Ferro’s plans are ambitious — beefed up sports coverage, a daily column written by celebrities with Chicago roots, a new Monday business section.

Nowhere in the story did I read anything about hiring more people to do the work. In fact, that would be counter to what is happening elsewhere in the industry.

Tens of thousands of newspaper employees have lost their jobs in the past five years as the industry suffered a stunning one-two punch:

· Just as dinosaurs failed to adapt to a changing environment in a time of planetary upheaval, the newspaper industry fell victim to its own institutional smugness with the advent of the Internet. By the time that media companies realized their errors in this — either ignoring it or trying to force their own business model upon the Internet — they had little choice but to scramble and dash to try to find a new business model that would work online. It appears to date that few companies are doing that successfully.

· The Great Recession of 2008 was near fatal to many publishers. Since the late 1990s, newspapers already had lost much of their revenue — classified advertising — to online rivals like Craigslist, which offered the same service for free. The recession, which followed one as we entered the new millennium, prompted advertisers to cut back. For some papers, it was too much: They simply closed. For others it was ugly —round after round of layoffs that were desperate bids for survival.

Ultimately, most papers these days have far fewer journalists doing far more work.

I can say from experience that journalism never has been a lucrative profession — except for the owners. So those who remain and were underpaid to begin with are more overworked than ever. I’m assured that’s just as true today at the Sun-Times publications as anywhere else.

Sadly, the cuts have been hell on newsrooms at multiple levels. Fewer reporters means they must scramble like seldom before — because each paper still has to have solid news coverage to remain relevant — both to print and online readers.

Assignment editors, who should be coaching writers, planning and assigning stories and directing news coverage, have been forced into broader rolls with more varied responsibilities. Consequently, there is little time to coach young reporters to become better information gatherers and better writers, let alone time enough to ensure their stories are ready for the copy desk.

Quality control is another great concern. Many newsroom casualties have been skilled copy editors — the people who ensure the reporters’ stories have names spelled correctly, that punctuation is in order, facts are correct, headlines make sense. Quality is expected but virtually invisible; lack of it is jarring and can push readers away. Seriously, can you trust a paper that fails to spell correctly the name of a four-term mayor? Failing to take the time to sweat the “small stuff” like spelling and punctuation reflects poorly — and detracts from the paper’s credibility — on coverage of greater issues.

With ever-shrinking copy desks, fewer sets of eyes are looking over each story. That greatly increases the likelihood of mistakes slipping through. Consider, too, that a copy editor who 15 years ago was editing, say 20 or 25 stories in a day, when workloads were considered tolerable, may be looking at twice that number of stories today. I stress the use of the term “looking at,” because with that kind of expectation, true editing cannot be taking place on each story. I worked under such conditions in 1990, when I coined the phrase “spray-and-pray editing” — meaning you sprayed your eyes over the story and you hoped to high heaven that you would catch all the mistakes.

The same is true of page design and graphic art. Instead of unique and compelling news and features presentations each day, many papers are relying on templated pages, where stories and photos are dropped into slots. That takes away much of the designer’s creativity and makes the job an assembly line kind of drudgery.

These kinds of work conditions breed mistakes.

I heard a newspaper executive in Cheyenne once describe newspapers as the impossible product from the outset. No other product sold anywhere, he said, has its content put together from scratch every day, and with each day comes a completely new list of ingredients, a completely different recipe and a completely different package design. That makes newspapers a unique, daily miracle to begin with, he told me at that time, which was about two decades ago.

Certainly he was talking about the printed product, but the same is true in many ways today about the news websites — new ingredients, new recipes daily.

Imagine if candy bars were made the same way, he said. But of course, if you scrimp on the ingredients or in their preparation, they might not taste as good. Then, when your fan base diminishes, you must cut back somewhere else, and the same thing happens, so you cut again, and again, and again. Soon, that candy bar tastes like crap, and no one wants to buy it.

That, in my view, is the hole many — not all, but many news organizations have been digging for themselves. They have been killing their quality, their own relevance in the communities they serve. It is no wonder that fewer people desire their declining level of service.

Yet here is Mr. Ferro telling a lunchtime audience at the Chicago City Club that he is going to add new features, new sections — and more work — to an already overburdened crew.

I wonder when they — my former co-workers who, unlike myself, survived the layoffs — will start to break. Will I start hearing of heart attacks, strokes and forced retirements?

Or will Ferro and his Wrapports investors step up with some relief for my ex-colleagues?

I hope but am skeptical that the latter will prove true.

In the meantime, I scour the online job boards with growing desperation. I want to work again, full-time and for at least a living wage. So I hope and I pray. But each day, I watch as the industry continues to languish and I wonder if the answer to my prayer is no. Each time I ponder that question my hope fades a little more, my desperation grows, and the seeds of bitterness begin to take root.

I am too young to be feeling this way.

There are heroes among us: Meet Sgt. Tom Linder

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:27:00 +0000

For as long as I remember — perhaps it was growing up with John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart as TV staples, or Clint Eastwood, either as Dirty Harry Callahan or the gun-slinging cowboy — I wanted to be the hero, someone’s knight in shining armor riding in at the last minute to save the day.

I wanted to charge in on my trusted stallion — it had to be either pure black or completely white — leading the cavalry to turn the tide at battle’s twilight. Or I wanted to dive in front of the gun and take the bullet speeding toward the villain’s intended victim, or to rescue some young lass or a child from certain death in a burning building.

Would-be heroes like myself learn, after nearly a lifetime, that such epic moments seldom present themselves, so we merely plug away, trying to be good parents, good spouses, good employees. Sometimes we succeed; often we fail. Mostly, we’re just everyday Joes who never quite live up to that dream.

So it tickled me to death early on in my career when an older man, a janitor at the newspaper where I first worked as a reporter, seemed to recognize that desire in me to do not only what is right, but to do so with a hero’s heart. His name, Vic Jacobs, I mention with affection. He was a big, burly guy, a former soldier — ex-Marine, I believe. As I recall, he had bright, steely gray eyes beneath a mop of somewhat unkempt, slate-gray hair, and a smile that, to the uninitiated, might have seemed more a smirk. But it was a smile, and it always adorned his rugged face when he took to calling me Clark Kent or describing me as a mild-mannered reporter.

It became a longstanding joke between us during the seven years I worked at that paper.

Vic said he liked me because I talked with him like a person, not like some people did, when they knew they were talking to a “janitor.” I liked Vic because, well, because I liked Vic. For a guy without much of a formal education, he sure knew a lot, and at the time he probably was among the wisest people I knew.

Each night, Vic would show up after deadline at The Rawlins Daily Times, where he would begin emptying the trash cans at each desk. Sometimes the presses would be running, sometimes they would have finished their nightly run, and quiet would descend upon the office. On most nights, he and I would talk for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. Sometimes we would discuss our different faiths, other times our families, our pasts, or perhaps just about life in a town called Rawlins, Wyo. Sooner or later, however, one of us would realize it was getting late, that Vic had to get back to work and I had to get home. We would have an exchange that typically followed the Superman theme Vic had initiated.

“Well, Clark, it’s getting late,” he’d say. Taking my cue, I would respond, “Yeah, I guess it’s time for me to fly,” as I’d lift up both arms in front of me as if Superman in flight. That nearly always brought a brief chuckle to this man I regarded as warm and interesting, someone who cared about the people around him.

Vic was one of those heroes who walk among us, with an outward appearance so like Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne that we are inclined to think of them as average when they are anything but that. Vic and I lost touch when I left Rawlins in late 1990.

He came to mind this week when I learned that another of those heroes among us had been struck down early this week by a serious health threat.

Sgt. Tom Linder in my mind is a hero like Vic, albeit it of another stripe. Instead of life in a town on the high plains of Wyoming, Tom has lived on the Great Plains in Illinois. Instead of wielding a broom and cleaning supplies, the tools of Tom’s trade have been a badge and a gun. Another hallmark: He is one of those people who share my Christian faith but who, from my encounters with him, lives that faith far more effectively than many of us do.

Regrettably, I can lay no great claim of friendship or kinship with Tom. For the most part, we had a passing acquaintanceship that began in the last quarter of 1994, when my family and I moved to Elgin. Tom and his wife were members of the same home-school association my wife and I joined at that time.

So from the start, I got some warm glimpses of this bear of a man as he interacted with his family and other members of this home-school group.

If he seemed a little aloof or stand-offish at first, I took no offense. It was a trait I had come to expect among police officers. I believe it reflects varying levels of reality in their profession:

The person met during a Saturday social event might be the same one the officer arrests the following Friday for DUI or beating his wife or peddling drugs.
While many people claim to respect cops, it often is a respect born of fear and with little warmth. If you doubt me, consider the butterflies that erupted in your stomach the last time a police officer followed you as you were driving or pulled you over.

These are among the reasons why cops frequently have, as a circle of friends, other cops and their families instead of civilians. It’s hard to build friendships when there is a level of fear on one side and concern on the other that a “friend” one day might try to call in a favor over a speeding ticket or other infraction.

I feel fortunate that in my early years as a reporter, I learned to lose my fear of police. Nearly every cop I’ve known has been a decent person with a good heart, intent on making the world a better place.

Tom Linder, it seems to me, has been that and more.

Over the years, as I have bumped into him from time to time, I always have made a point of saying hello. It was during these brief encounters that I started thinking of Tom as a hero — where I witnessed the genuine warmth and kindness he exhibited toward others, whether he was in uniform or not.

It’s true that a hero may come in with guns blazing and save the day, but true heroes also are people who make a difference, I think, and who do so not for the glory or because it might raise their own esteem in the eyes of others. They do so simply because it is a part of their nature. It is who they are.

As an example I hold that is typical of those occasions I saw this hero in Tom, I recall one night some years ago when I had stopped at the Jewel on Larkin Avenue before heading home from work at The Courier News in Elgin. It was a miserable, chilly night with a steady rain, and it must have been close to 2 a.m., perhaps later. I made my purchase, and as I headed toward the exit, I could see a police officer just outside.

As the automatic door opened in front of me, I recognized Sgt. Linder. He was standing there, rain dripping from his visor and police raincoat, and was loading a couple of cakes into the back of an SUV. His doing so allowed the woman who had bought the cakes to stay dry inside her vehicle.

I stepped up to help out, only to learn that the cake I had picked up to hand to him was in fact one he had bought to take home for a family birthday or some such event. But we said hello and chatted for a few moments as the woman drove off.

His act of chivalry was touching, but what struck me even more was the kindness with which he treated this woman he clearly did not know.

It was this kindness, his heart that I saw Tom Linder demonstrate consistently each brief instance I encountered him over the past 17 years. It obviously left an impression.

There are heroes among us. Some show up every so often on the evening news. More often, however, they walk in our midst, largely unnoticed unless we pause just long enough to notice them at work.

Tom Linder is one of those heroes. He’s a retired cop, and he and his family are experiencing a rough stretch at the moment. They could use some prayer.

Heart does matter in journalism

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:52:00 +0000

(Image by Stock.xchng vi)

It is indeed a changing world.

On May 7, I ran across an item in Jim Romenesko’s media blog about the airing of recorded 911 calls. In his blog, Romenesko linked me to the item he was referencing — a piece by Tribune columnist Eric Zorn.

In his May 4 Change of Subject blog, Zorn laid out some very convincing arguments against the use of 911 recordings, specifically mentioning the use of the recording of Julia Hudson when she called police upon discovering her mother’s body in what turned out to be a triple murder in October 2008.

The media gained access to that tape after petitioning for its release to the public during the William Balfour murder trial, Zorn wrote. Balfour was being tried for the murders of three members of the Hudson family.

Zorn questioned whether the media, including his own employer, should have aired “what amounts to an audio snapshot taken at the worst, most devastating moment of this poor woman’s life?” I admire how ably he cuts right to the heart of the matter.

He notes that 911 calls are part of the public record, which means that are accessible to and can be used by the media.

But, just as the Jurassic Park character Dr. Ian Malcolm argues that simply having the ability to clone does not mean scientists should conjure up long-extinct dinosaurs, Zorn argues that the media’s access to 911 recordings “doesn’t mean we should” air or post them.

There was a time as a reporter and during my early years as an editor when I would have argued aggressively against Zorn’s view. Such recordings present the reader/listener with a human side of the tragedy that often gets lost in the often sterile, just-the-facts kind of details that are relayed by law enforcement. Even quotes by police officers or detectives frequently seem to lose something as they fall back on their own jargon. Perhaps that is their profession’s way of trying to maintain detachment from the horror they witness all too often.

I also would have argued that those recordings must be public to ensure greater transparency, for instance, when something goes wrong during an emergency call. I still would make that argument. But note that my logic here does not necessarily extend to actually airing or posting such recordings, nor would I make the argument that they should never be aired, printed or posted online. There might be some very compelling reasons to do so, although I think such circumstances would be rare.

There are a number of factors that would explain why my once-hardline stance on this issue has softened with the passage of time. Unfortunately, they all revolve around personal experience.

As a reporter at a fairly small-town paper, I wrote about the brutal murder of the son of a Wyoming legislator and rancher whose family I had come to know and respect. Several years later, in 1990, I wrote about the kidnapping, savage rape and murder of a 17-year-old girl from Rawlins, Wyo., whose mother and father I came to know after their lives had been hopelessly, horribly mangled by their daughter’s killer.

Some years after that, while living in Fort Collins, Colo., I was witness to the immediate aftermath of a shooting in the parking lot of the church my wife and I and our children attended. Hours later, after police had taken the statements of every one of us, I went home still wearing clothing stained with the blood of a good friend I had held until the ambulance arrived. He survived that murderous day; the gunman died in surgery, hours after he had shot his ex-wife to death and then got into a shootout with my friend, a cop.

While I returned home without a mark on my body, my soul had wounds that eventually would scar over. But in those first months afterward, I got just a glimpse of how crippling post-traumatic stress can be. My family and I had not suffered a single, physical wound that day, yet we had become the lesser victims of a crazed gunman.

For the first time in my life, I had gained a depth of understanding I’d not known before about what it is to be a victim. The compassion I had felt before toward the families of those I wrote about suddenly came into perspective and seemed woefully inadequate. Part of me questioned whether I had had any compassion at all.

Those experiences served to reshape the way I thought and felt about victims of crime or other tragedies, made me more sensitive to their needs. The death of the girl, in particular, helped me to understand that sometimes, at least for some family members, it helps to get out as much information about the crime as possible. I remember at one point my boss questioning me, asking whether we should include as much detail as I had used about the sexual assault and murder. I had shown great discretion, however, and showed him that. In the end, he agreed most, if not all of the details I had written should run.

The girl’s mother and father, at one point during the months of coverage, actually thanked me for providing the level of detail I had. I think that for them, my coverage served to head off awkward conversations with friends, neighbors or acquaintances. Even more, I think they simply wanted the world to know the horror their baby had suffered at the hands of a man most viewed as a monster.

But my boss was right to bring up the idea of discretion. There needs to be a thoughtful consideration of whether the information advances the story, helps the reader to gain a clearer understanding rather than simply satisfying some morbid or salacious curiosity.

Perhaps what most solidified my thinking on this issue came several years later, as I listened to a 911 recording while making the long drive from work in Cheyenne, Wyo., to my home in Fort Collins, Colo. It was an hour-long drive, and Denver radio station KOA had a talk show, After Midnight, hosted by Rick Barber. Over the past week, as I sorted through Zorn’s column and my own experiences, I learned Barber’s show was canceled in January, which is a shame. He had the 1 to 5 a.m. slot, and as I remember, he was balanced and thoughtful in his approach to the topics he and his listeners discussed each night. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was tolerant of opposing views and was generally patient, even with the oddball or occasional bigot who called in from time to time.

For some reason, on this night, however, Barber chose to play a 911 recording in which a woman called police while she was being attacked in her home. During the course of her call, the attacker strangled her — if I remember correctly, he used the cord from the very phone she was using to call for help.

I no longer recall the point Barber was making the night he played that recording. Perhaps he chose to discuss the tape because some media outlet already had aired the poor woman’s screams, choking and gagging as she died. I do know that while listening, my eyes watered up to the point that I had to pull over for a minute or two to clear my vision.

No one should have heard that woman’s final screams and cries of fear, the words she could not utter as that cord was yanked around her throat and tightened mercilessly to choke the life out of her. Death is an incredibly intimate, personal thing as it is. It is all the worse when it arrives violently. As I heard that recording air, I felt like an eavesdropper expecting some juicy tidbit but finding horror instead.

In his column, Zorn agrees that journalists should continue to have access to 911 recordings like this. But he also lays out a very good argument that this access comes with responsibility. “And responsibility demands discretion.”

I agree. Yes, there may be times when recordings such as these are needed to convey the full weight of a story. But shock value should not be construed as that need, nor should the argument that we should because we can.

New levels of discouragement

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:06:00 +0000

Throughout this ordeal of prolonged underemployment, I have tried to remain pragmatic but positive, knowing full well that the job market is tight, that it is trending more heavily toward freelance work, which I neither trust as stable, nor want to continue for any significant length of time. Never in my adult life have I desired to be self-employed.

Never. Not once.

I was thrust into it by necessity and through no fault of my own: I did not choose to quit a good job, nor did I choose to do something to get me fired. I was laid off.

I have neither the desire nor the skill to run my own business, nor do I want to do so. I take not even the slightest joy in doing so, and, in fact, I am not certain I can find a word the even comes close to describing the depth of my loathing and hatred for having to do so. I am not a pitchman for the product I sell because, quite frankly, there does not seem to be a lot of demand for my skills and knowledge. Yet at the moment, it is my lot in life to make a living in this way, and I am failing miserably.

I am not expressing self-pity. This is an honest self-assessment from a husband and father who knows what he earns is not paying the bills, and from a journalist, a writer, an editor who loves his craft. That love, which includes a passion for community journalism, as well as my appreciation for Mike Bailey and the gang at BocaJump, and the northwest suburban Patch.com crew, are some of the keys that have been helping me hold it together.

Perhaps it is a good thing, at the moment, that I am not a very good pitchman. For the past several weeks, I have been chasing leads that have not panned out or, alternatively, I have been dealing with canceled appointments and waiting for phone calls or emails that are not returned for stories I know are there.

I also have been taking classes since January with the goal of obtaining certification in a software suite that is important for website design and development. As I approach my final month of training, I feel apprehensive, knowing I have five tests ahead of me and that I have had little time to practice.

The U.S. Postal Service is not helping my cause at all, either: The student version of the Adobe software I ordered should have been in my hands within the first few days of April. But the Postal Service lost it, and the company I ordered from won’t ship me a new set until the package is returned. Nearly a full month has slipped by while the software package sat in a bin or on a shelf somewhere in Chicago. Two redelivery requests went unheeded, probably, I was told, because they could not find the package. But on Friday, the tracking number for it finally showed movement, as the software presumably moved from Chicago to Des Moines, Iowa, before bouncing to Franklin Park and then back to Des Moines. I’m not quite sure what to make of that except that it seems ominous — the company I ordered it from, and the place where the package originated, is in Texas. I suppose it could end up anywhere at this point. Perhaps it will end up near my niece in Alaska.

During this period of new software training, I have slowed down in my job search — something I actually was encouraged to do at the outset so I would focus on the training. Instead of sending out resumes for five or more jobs a week, I’ve become more selective, choosing only those positions that seem to be the best match for my skills, my background. But I’ve also tried to be flexible, sending out resumes to employers looking for content writers or editors outside of journalism, copywriters. My heart’s desire, however, is to remain in the news industry.

To this point, staying positive, being able to find humor and ultimately falling back on my faith has helped stave off the black dog that has hounded me through this trial. I’ve held onto the glass half-full approach, too, because I want to be an encouragement to those who read my work from time to time. While I often write about the industry, one of the driving motivations behind my starting this blog was to let others know they are not alone in the emotional turmoil that accompanies a layoff. By sharing my thoughts, my feelings, my hopes and my fears, I sought to help others understand these are fairly normal aspects of this kind of life change.

So I’ve tried to be utterly open and honest in this blog, touching not only on the high points, because there have been those, but also, at times, on discouragement and depression, because to ignore the negative would be deceptive.

Over the past month, I’ve plumbed new depths of discouragement; larger and darker, the black dog has waited eagerly, its wagging tail signaling its joy, not mine.

So here is another tip for those in straits similar to mine: Find a support system you can rely upon and trust personally and completely. I’ve heard how important this is but in recent months I have come to understand it is something I have lacked. What should be my closest personal relationship on this earth is all but dead; there is love, for my part, but no comfort or counsel there.

The friends I most trust are scattered across the country; that distance is a handicap, as is not seeing them regularly. Instead of getting a daily sampling of Ted as his mood and tone vary from week to week, I find myself reluctant to write for fear I'll become a black hole to them, sucking the life out of them because of my spiritual and emotional need. I’d rather they get a more well-rounded (I’d say balanced, but these friends might just disagree) sampling of Ted.

Email/Facebook responses fall a little flat — the encouragement they send is always good. But sometimes a guy just needs a hug from, or a time of prayer with a friend he can trust completely. You can’t do that from 100 miles or so, let alone 1,000.

Labor law protections diminishing

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:08:00 +0000

Increasing use of freelancers aids business more than workers

(Image by Stock.xchng vi)

When news came out Monday that the Tribune was laying off a score of its suburban TribLocal reporters and editors in favor of outsourcing the work to another company, it caught me unawares and left me disappointed, but it failed to shock me.

The Trib seemed to have invested a lot in its TribLocal venture to cover suburban news. Its hiring of reporters and editors to provide that coverage was a hopeful sign in an industry that in recent years frequently inspires Dante’s “Abandon all hope ye who enter” this profession. Don’t get me wrong, I still am excited about the possibilities digital media brings to news storytelling, but my optimism about re-entering the industry full-time has plunged to depths I never expected when I was laid off in December 2010.

My first exposure to the Trib story came via a Facebook post by noted media blogger Jim Romenesko. Then came one of several email news roundups I receive each day from Crain’s Chicago Business, in which one of the headlines promised more details of the Tribune’s decision to outsource its local suburban reporting to Journatic LLC, a Chicago-based company in which the Trib reportedly is invested. So I followed the links and read.

According to Crain’s, Journatic’s agreement with the Tribune ends its contract to provide real estate coverage to the company that laid me off nearly 17 months ago.

Here’s the rub: Journatic has offshore data-journalists who electronically gather all kinds of information that is specific to local communities, according to a Thursday post by Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon. He interviewed Journatic founder Brian Timpone, who told Beaujon that Journatic seeks to automate the process of compiling the data it gathers into stories.

He admits it’s not Pulitzer-quality material, but it is community news, from schools to police, that the company produces at a very low cost. That part of the company’s operation appears to me to be brilliant.

But Journatic does need some local workers, and is hiring people like me for less than half of what some of us were getting paid just two years ago; further, Journatic is making the same, perfectly legal end run around our nation’s labor laws that many newspaper companies and other corporations are doing these days.

By hiring contractors instead of full-time employees, the employer avoids paying into Social Security and providing perks like health insurance. Further, at least in Illinois, companies don’t have to pay unemployment insurance for contractors. All this comes at a huge savings for employers.

But workers are left holding the bag — having to provide their own health coverage, no longer assured of steady hours or steady income, and lacking some of the legal protections enjoyed by full-time employees. Finally, laid-off workers can collect unemployment benefits, as small as they are. Freelancers/contractors, however, are restricted in that. Technically, they don’t get laid off, they lose or end their contract.

To be fair, some freelancers I have come to know over the years relish their independence, but many others chose that route with hopes of getting a foot in the door toward full-time work as an employee, not as a contractor.

As I continue to descend through what continues to be one of the worst, most challenging periods of my life, I finding myself questioning the state of this country. In a nation that is supposed to espouse individual freedoms, and despite all the laws and regulations pertaining to corporate America, why does it seem that big business ultimately gets more breaks, more deals than the little guys do? Even labor laws seem to have lost their luster in recent years. Is it just me, or does it seem as if we are becoming the land of the free market and the home of the slave laborers?

The growing use of freelancers/contractors appears to me to erode the laws geared toward protecting workers, and I do not believe that is good for our nation.

Sadly, it is legal, and politicians will defend it as necessary for the nation as a result of the Great Recession. In tough times, we all have to bite the bullet, you know — some of us, apparently, more than others.

When truth is merely relative

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 03:07:00 +0000

Trib's Facts ‘obit’ highlights huge dilemma

(Image by Stock.xchng vi)

The eloquently written obituary admired a lifetime of achievement that ultimately was doomed to fail in a modern culture which appears to value the loudest, most insistent voices over mere details such as fact or truth.

The obituary published online Thursday was written by Chicago Tribune reporter Rex W. Huppke about the life and times of Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012.

The impetus for Huppke’s sad report was the claim by U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House are communists. That, Huppke writes, was the fatal blow to Facts.

His satirical lament for the death of Facts is all too familiar and well-worth reading. Many journalists have been lamenting what appears to be the nation’s loss of interest in truth, which all too frequently is being replaced with point of view, or opinion, no matter how outrageous or how much that viewpoint disregards Facts and truth.

I suppose part of the reason for the decline is related to the resurgence of moral relativism in the 20^th century. In essence, moral relativism holds that there are no moral or ethical absolutes, that truth is subject to interpretation. In other words, what is morally or ethically true for you may not be so for me, because truth, or fact, is based on interpretation, and interpretation is colored by the individual’s perceptions through the lens of life experiences.

The conclusion? All opinions are equally valid and should be tolerated
That is a precious sentiment in a nation that holds dear the right to freedom of expression, but it also is a deadly threat to Facts, to truth, as can be seen readily in our nation’s partisan bickering. Each party claims to hold THE truth in terms of leading the nation, yet each party twists, maims and dismembers Facts to “prove” its own truth. Yet, if truth be told, each party is wholly without a clue in regard to Facts and truth, because each is morally corrupt and rudderless.

But I digress.

The relevance of this to journalism has been growing for decades but has been becoming abundantly clear in the past 15 years. If the decline in newspaper readership and the increasing popularity of politically biased “news” providers and bloggers more interested in selling viewpoint than truth is any indication, then readers today are more inclined to shop for information sources that validate their own world view, regardless of Facts or truth.

I find that disturbing, to say the least, as someone who has dedicated most of his adult life to a career that puts such a high value on truth and objectivity. But the implications are alarming for a newspaper industry that is struggling to find its footing — and a new business model — in the digital world.

News organizations are businesses, after all, and some like Fox and MSNBC already have found success in promoting a partisan view that appeals to their viewers.

But the price is high — disregard for what constitutes Facts, loosely defining truth and absolute scorn for objectivity guts the standards to which journalism, generally, aspires.

Some would argue, rightly, that no one can be truly objective because everyone has a world view, and that, therefore, journalism is incapable of objectivity. Certainly not every journalist succeeds every time in setting aside his or her personal viewpoint while reporting a story. But that is the goal, and in the past, editors have been there at several different levels to ensure that goal is met.

But it certainly is a goal whose standard has become more difficult to reach. That’s largely because the layoffs which have shaken the industry to its core, particularly since 2007, .have removed a layer of experienced editing as cuts were made to newspaper copy and design desks. Combine those cuts with increased workloads and you have a recipe for system failure — not at one, but at most newspaper companies.

It could worsen, particularly if journalism as a business guides itself toward models like Fox and MSNBC, where Facts and truth take a back seat to viewpoint.

But then perhaps we will have to live with that. If, as Huppke points out, Facts is dead, then truth can’t be far behind.

Making local news relevant again

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Amid all the talk of pay walls, the decline of newspapers, and what the industry needs to do to save itself, many seem to overlook the idea of media relevance. They may give the idea lip service in the greater discussion of rebuilding revenues, but it seems to me that such discussions miss the point.

Granted, revenue losses have crippled the industry and continue to be the focal point and the reason that so many, like me, have lost careers they loved, callings they may never be able to respond to again.

I do not need to rehash the reasons for that decline in this post; I have written about my perspective on this before — in these posts, among others:

But the desperation for revenue is intense, and it is understandable that recapturing those lost dollars has become the priority. Indeed, it is a driving factor in newspapers launching pay walls, even though early attempts to charge users for access to news websites largely failed; newspapers then abandoned the idea. Pay walls are the equivalent of subscriptions to an online service, and over the past seven months or so, there has been an avalanche of newspapers implementing pay walls in a desperate bid for financial redemption.

But there are industry experts who argue against them. Some, like John Paton at Digital First, have focused on other alternatives and are proving there are business models out there on which content providers may be able to thrive.

Myself? I do not believe pay walls will be the panacea some seek, and generally, I oppose the idea as an obstacle to users. As an editor, one of my many responsibilities was to remove or fix those things that readers were likely to stumble over — misspelled words, poor grammar or punctuation, poor sentence construction. The idea was to make each sentence and paragraph as clear and as readable as possible while applying the basic rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation. The simpler and more concise the story structure — assuming the story was compelling to begin with — the more likely the reader would be to stick with and not abandon it.

Internet use is similar. The expression “surfing the ’Net” arose from the ability of Internet users to seamlessly and fluidly move at will from website to website. Throwing in a pay wall, or tollbooth, if you will, interrupts that free-flowing movement. It is the equivalent of installing speed bumps, but on the information superhighway rather than in a parking lot.

Instead, I believe newspapers — they’re being called content providers these days — need to return to their roots and begin providing what they’ve largely abandoned over the past 30 or 40 years.

When newspapers were family- or locally owned organizations, they had a community presence — and often a continuity of leadership — that their corporate successors failed miserably at providing. Local or family ownership often reflects pride in the product, in the quality of the journalism.

Family operations also looked further into the future than the next quarter’s bottom line, in stark contrast to the lack of foresight for which corporations are known. No, a family-run shop often looked to the next decade and beyond, hoping to preserve a legacy of growth and profitability for the next generation.

There was a richer relational aspect to the family-run or locally owned newspaper, I think, than has been offered by today’s corporate owners. There are many levels to that, but a family that is rooted in the community has more at stake than a corporation whose ownership is scattered across the country and among diverse investors looking more for an immediate return on their buck than a lasting legacy in the community in which they conduct business.

Certainly there are corporate exceptions, and certainly there are advantages to corporate ownership of local papers. The past three decades, however, as well as the economic downtown in 2007-08 certainly cast a harsh spotlight on corporate weaknesses in this regard.

What I have been pointing to are aspects of relevance that corporations largely have failed to grasp. I also have strong doubts that absentee owners are capable of adequately assessing the needs of the communities they serve. Generally speaking, from what I’ve seen personally and have read about over the years is that corporations too often take a one-size-fits-all approach for the sake of expediency and efficiency. Perhaps that approach works in some larger markets, but it may cause stumbling in smaller markets.

For example, some newspapers now are publishing press releases nearly verbatim, with little or no editing and without considering the ramifications of allowing organizations to publish their own “spin” via press release in a publication that at one time represented such journalistic standards as impartiality. Those press releases reflect poorly on the publication and its professionals.

Another element also is relational. Steve Buttry, in his blog The Buttry Diary, devotes many posts to the use of social media by journalists to build community engagement. He is writing about the heart of relationship between a news provider and its readers — communicating both in terms of leading discussions and listening/responding to the community.

Newspapers once were considered leaders in community discussion, offering their editorial pages as a forum on issues, where the papers themselves took stands on issues.

Further, reporters and editors were expected to know their communities. A journalist was just as likely to pick up a news tip while in the local coffee shop as he/she was to pick one up at city hall or while answering the phone at his/her desk. Perhaps a part of that was that journalists lived in the communities in which they worked.

But social media — Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, among many more — offer an opportunity to build and converse with a larger portion of the community than ever before. Those conversations can guide local news coverage better than the journalist’s best guess. When your readers have a say about the local news or events that interest them most, then the publication has made a relational move that increases its relevance to its readers.

Certainly I am not saying all news coverage should be built that way. There always will be a need for the community watchdog-type of reporting about local government, schools, crime. But certainly in each of these categories, the readers should have a voice. To ignore them is to risk losing that relevance.

Relevance, I think, is where you begin building your online revenues. Relevance is what will draw readers back each day to a news website, to look around for the day’s offerings, for news they can use.

Back after two busy weeks and a short break

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:25:00 +0000

Heading into the weekend, my head was ready to explode. I’d had two weeks of lots of Adobe software training — four daylong sessions each week, plus a fair amount of work from my various freelance jobs.

But freelance work tends to come in spurts and, generally, not according to an prearranged schedule. Consequently, I was operating on three, sometimes four hours of sleep a night for much of the past two weeks. Friday night was the first night I got eight hours in bed.

Still, I wanted — actually I felt I needed — some kind of outlet.

Don’t get me wrong — the classroom work was incredible. I’d had three classes on Dreamweaver, a program for creating websites, which is a large part of the reason I’m pursuing the coursework I’m taking. Another day was devoted to Fireworks, another tool in the arsenal of Webmasters and Web designers, and one day was devoted to Internet marking. Three full days were devoted to Flash, an exciting program that can be used to create animations, among other things, and offered great opportunity for creativity. Abi, the instructor encouraged that within the framework of the class time. There was, after all, a lot of material to cover.

But I was breaking new ground, so when everybody broke for lunch, I stayed behind to polish the projects we had been working on during the morning. Abi appreciated my efforts. She made it easy, however — her teaching was exceptional.

Still, I am an amateur at it (I always want my new skills to be perfect, like yesterday), and demand too much of myself. As much fun as I have learning — we used Flash to create and animate a bug (I turned mine into a firefly during lunch) — but my work was far from polished.

So over the weekend, I needed to catch up on some rest, but I also wanted to work on something creative, something I could finish and feel proud of. It need not be a Picasso, but it needed to be something with polish.

Since I do not yet have the Adobe software I aim to become an expert at, I was somewhat handicapped. But there are alternatives. Instead of Photoshop, there is a free photo-editing software called GIMP. I already knew what I wanted to do, and it would require some of the techniques I’d learned in other programs that share some characteristics with Photoshop.

So I poured myself into designing a fairly simple logo (keep it simple stupid is the layman’s rule for the design standards, “Less is more” and “Form follows function”). The logo was to top a project for BocaJump, one of my several freelance gigs, and was to accompany an interactive map of road construction in Elgin this summer. The map I would take care of later.

Probably the greatest time spent on any project like this is in preparation. First, I had to search to find the parameters, measurement-wise, that I could work within — that actually had me poking around inside the website until I found what I needed to know. The area I had to work within was 600 pixels wide.

Then I had to go searching for the elements I wanted to use in the logo — elements that are within the public domain and not restricted by copyright. After I found what I needed, I went to work. The actual work took just a couple of hours — largely because I was learning new things as I did this, but they were not entirely out of my grasp. Once I was nearly done, I shared it with the folks in charge, tweaked it a couple of times and was ready for Phase 2.

Google Maps is a wonderful tool, and I’ve used it many times before. It comes with its own tools so that you can draw colored lines, colored shapes, add colored pins and add all kinds of information to each so that when someone moves the cursor over one of those markers, information will pop up telling them the information you’ve put in about the marker.

I’ve written several stories already about the construction work planned in Elgin this year, so that was my starting point on the more tedious leg of this phase. I essentially pulled together tidbits of info on each project and saved it on a Word document from which I later would be able to copy and paste as needed into Google Maps.

Then, I had to tackle the websites of the city, Kane County and the Illinois Department of Transportation to make sure I had all (or nearly all) the road projects in the area.

Once I had my list, it was time to get to work within Google Maps, which can be tedious, sometimes annoying, but whose results are functional. Actually, one of the things I realized from this project is that some of the things I’d learned in Dreamweaver and Flash likely would have worked even better than Google Maps. But there’s a learning curve there I have yet to achieve, although perhaps in the coming months …

Regardless, I had most of that done in a matter of hours. For the most part, I had the whole project ready to go Monday, although I would end up not launching the project until Wednesday. I had waited just to go back, after letting the map sit awhile, to be sure I had not missed something or messed something up.

Then, I took a break — several days, in fact. I took care of a couple of things — clogged gutters, caught up on some reading and such — just to clear my head.

Sometimes, you just need to do that. In the process, I realized I had not filed a post to this blog since March 18. So here I am, explaining. My mind is clearer now, and I’ve not got quite such a busy schedule ahead of me for a couple of weeks.

So it’s back to work, back to school, back to blogging. In the end, I hope and pray, it all leads to something, preferably in news, that can support my family and me. But that’s in God’s hands.

For my part, right now, I need to get back on task.

Crashes, consequences, providence and newspapers

noreply@blogger.com (Ted Schnell) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 03:00:00 +0000

(Image by Stock.xchng vi)

The headlights of the approaching vehicle were all wrong.

Frank and I were headed back to the dorm from a state park near Winona, Minn., when I first saw the headlights moving around the curve. But they were jumping up and down erratically, and then they began to spin.

In all, I believe the car rolled over seven times before it landed on its roof.

I do not recall all the details of that fall evening in 1979, except that Frank and I had headed out to a nearby state park on a Friday night to enjoy a beer or two and some talk under the night sky. I am not certain whether the park remains today. Winona and the surrounding area were hard-hit by the Mississippi flood of 1993. For all I know, the floodwaters completely reshaped the area. But back then, the spot we headed to was near the foot of a low-head dam, where we sometimes fished for white bass on the weekends.

But it was a lot colder that night than we had expected. By the time we each finished our first beer, we were quite cold and decided the dorm would be far more comfortable. We got into the station wagon I’d driven and headed back toward the dorm.

Frank and I shared one thing in common that for some reason other students in Aquinas Hall thought was a really big deal. We both had interrupted our college educations. Frank had stepped away for at least several years, I for a little less than a year and a half — but we had come back to get our degrees.

I never really understood why some of our peers found that to be so awesome — one once told me that few people who interrupted their college educations ever finished. That was news to me. As I said, I never thought it was particularly remarkable.

Frank had left for an opportunity to work with the highway patrol — in Minnesota, if I remember correctly. But his dream was to become a conservation policeman, and he found a road to that opportunity at the same college I attended, St. Mary’s, which today is called St. Mary’s University of Winona.

Winona is a college town along the Mississippi River, 46 miles nearly due east of Rochester, home of the famed Mayo Clinic, and about 30 miles northwest of LaCrosse, Wis., which at that time was home to one of the region’s largest liquor stores, not to mention many merry cheeseheads and countless Badgers fans.

The town was home to St. Mary’s, Winona State University and the College of St. Teresa, which closed in 1989. Winona State is toward the center of town, while St. Mary’s is nestled among the bluffs above Winona.

I had taken some time off after my freshman year at Loyola University to get my head together. I went to work at Hoffer Plastics, a factory in South Elgin, Ill., trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

So it was that Frank and I ended up in St. Mary’s Aquinas Hall — a dorm geared primarily toward freshmen and transfer students. I had a year or two on the freshmen, Frank has a year or two on me.

But on this cold fall night, when we thought we just might catch a glimpse of the aurora borealis, Frank and I instead encountered a bloody mess.

When the other car began rolling, I hit the brakes and pulled off onto the shoulder, stopping across the roadway from the wreckage. I could raise no one on the CB radio I had in the car. Since Frank knew the area better than I did, he drove off to the sheriff’s office for help after I got out to render whatever aid I could.

As I ran to the vehicle, a young woman and a guy were pulling another guy from its rear window. He was screaming out repeatedly, “hail Mary, full of grace,” as if it were some kind of mantra.

Shattered glass was spewed all around and crunched under foot. As I drew near, they lifted him to his feet and I could see the skin had peeled off the palm of his right hand. I vividly recall that, in spite of all the blood, I easily could have counted the exposed bones in his palm. Steam wafted up from his blood in the chilly night air as he continued to chant the phrase from a longer prayer that is commonly known among Catholics.

Likely he had been riding with the window open, his hand resting on the roof of the car when it crashed.

The girl was trying to fashion her belt into a tourniquet to stanch his bleeding, and she resisted vehemently when I tried to intervene. I pulled out a clean handkerchief and placed it in her palm, which I then locked over the young man’s bloody hand. “Stay with him and hold this on his hand to stop the bleeding and maybe they can save it,” I told her. “If you use a tourniquet, they’ll probably have to cut it off.”

She seemed to get the message, but as I turned to check the others, I could not be sure.

I began looking over the others, but remarkably, I don’t recall anyone else bleeding or even complaining of pain. A siren blared in the distance.

“Where’s Karen?” asked a voice I did not recognize.

I had no light, but I told the guy who was not bleeding to begin searching the ditch along the side of the road. I ran to the car and got down on my stomach to look inside. It was too dark to make anything out, so I crawled inside, pushing aside an empty pint vodka bottle on the ground next to the car as I did.

Karen — I no longer recall her full name — was still strapped in the driver’s seat, her body awkwardly half-hanging from the seat belts, half-slumping onto the misshapen roof of the wrecked car she had been driving just minutes before.

“Help me.” I could barely hear her weak voice over the sound of the siren, which was growing as the ambulance neared.

“Are you Karen?”

“Yes.”

“Karen, I’m going to stay with you until the ambulance gets here. I do not want to take a chance moving you, so I’ll stay right here.” I put my hand out onto her arm, hoping she found the gesture reassuring.

Even from inside the wrecked car, I could see the flashing red lights of the approaching ambulance. I prayed that she would be OK.

When I heard the crunching sound of the firefighters’ boots on the broken glass and pea gravel near the car, I told Karen, “They’re here now. I need to get out of their way so they can help you.”

I called out to the paramedics as I shinnied backward, then moved aside as they moved in to do their work. I backed away slowly, watching them maneuver in a backboard and other gear. Frank suddenly appeared at my side.

“You all right?”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

We checked first with the officers to see if they needed to take our statements before we left.

I let Frank drive as we headed back to campus. At first, we were quiet, then I began telling him what I’d seen after he left.

From his perspective, it had been a “good” wreck — everyone came out of it alive. He told me that crawling into that car was a brave thing — I very easily could have encountered a corpse, he said. “My,” I observed sardonically, “I find that comforting.”

Frank was a good guy.

When we got back to the dorm, he dropped me off at the door and went to park the car. As I headed inside and walked down the hall toward my room, I wondered why the eyes of my fellow students seemed to pop wide in surprise as I drew near. Once I stepped into the bathroom to clean up, however, I understood.

When I had left the dorm with Frank, I was wearing my favorite white, Western style bullet shirt and white denim pants. Now, they were caked with blood and dirt. Apparently, I had crawled through a pool of gore as I went in search of Karen.

The head resident came running into the bathroom — someone thought maybe I’d been in a bar fight and had been knifed. No, I explained to him, that’s really not my style.

I explained what had happened as I peeled off my shirt and began rinsing it in the sink, wringing the blood out of it as I did. Frank showed up a few minutes later and verified my story. I had begun to suspect the head resident was going to call the police. I had never seen that much blood before and was certain he thought I’d murdered someone.

Frank and I went our separate ways for the rest of the night. As I did, I’m sure he went back to his room to ponder the evening’s course of events over a few beers. But then perhaps he did not — he had seen this kind of thing before as a highway patrolman.

With time, the memories of that night faded until they were all but forgotten.

I am not quite certain what brought them rushing back this past week. This was a very intense week — four full days of classes on Adobe software. In addition, I had had some welcome but time-consuming surprises from each of my three part-time jobs that left me little time for thought, this blog or even sleep, for that matter.

But perhaps it was word earlier in the week that the Chicago Tribune was trimming 15 journalists from its newsroom ranks. I read the article in Crain’s and wondered how many rounds of layoffs the Trib had made in the past five years — certainly not as many as Sun-Times Media had. How could one financially troubled company have fewer casualties than another, when they’d both been a part of the same industrywide crash?

But then, I realized, I might be wrong about that. The eyes of my former co-workers and mine had been so focused on the pain in our midst that I doubt we truly gave more than passing notice to much of what was happening elsewhere. We might have read a story or even have given lip service to the cuts at other newspapers. But we were besieged by round after round of cuts among our own. What was happening at other papers paled in comparison to what we were experiencing.

Perhaps the point of my recalling that night more than three decades ago lies more in the consideration of providence as it pertains to the sad debacle in the newspaper industry.

Alcohol was a factor in the wreck that night, and the people in that car had a hand in determining what had happened. They made poor choices and paid the consequences. Fortunately for them, no one was killed, no innocent victims in another car were involved.

In some ways, it has been similar in the newspaper industry. Some leaders seemed more concerned about maintaining a profitable bottom line than about preserving good journalism or finding a business model that would work in the digital world. If they had been making candy bars instead, they would have diluted the recipe to save a buck, and in doing so would have lost customers of a product that no longer tasted as good. They cut staff, cut quality, and so diluted the recipe — the journalism that once had added such a rich flavor to the communities they served.

Those publishers, if they survive, will do so more by sheer dumb luck than any other reason, much like the four or five people in that wrecked car more than three decades ago. Some of those publishers’ decisions will affect people like many of my former colleagues and myself, people with a passion, if not a calling, to serve the communities in which we live by producing quality, fair and accurate news.

There is nothing fair about this, just as there is nothing fair about a drunken driver whose decision to drive shatters, maims or even kills innocent lives.

But there are some out there who are making responsible decisions. Frank and I went out with the intent of having no more than a beer or two each, just a couple of buddies more intent on good conversation than getting a buzz. We each had one and left.

Likewise, in the news industry today, there are publishers who are adapting to the industry’s paradigm shift. They are trying to anticipate what’s happening in the industry, what might be coming at them around the bend, and planning accordingly.

Certainly, even some of these companies will fail. But some will survive, some may even thrive. When that happens, their work will become the model on which other companies can build, and by providence and hard work, good journalism will re-emerge.

But let’s hope, and pray, that that does not take too long. There is too much at stake, for journalists and nonjournalists alike.

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Missing ‘Time on the Water’

Several men wet their lines in the Fox River near Slade Avenue Park in Elgin, Illinois, as the sun sets on July 9, 2014. | Credit: Ted Schnell

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