A week ago, as the Gazette wrapped up a story about a group of University of Massachusetts Amherst students suing to try and stop an Israel-Palestine panel talk this weekend, one of the people we interviewed called the newsroom.
He had two messages. First, that we left off his first name in the article online. (It happens sometimes in the editing process, which we fixed in time for print). Second, he commended the newspaper for dedicating the resources to fairly cover such a story at a time when other news outlets might not touch it.
This kind of interaction is one many Gazette reporters and editors routinely have that serve as a reminder that what we do — gathering news, serving as a community watchdog, and providing a robust forum for reader engagement on this page, to name a few examples — still resonates with readers. It still matters.
Today is an important day in the news business. Twenty-six years ago, the United Nations declared May 3 as World Press Freedom Day. The day is a chance to examine issues facing our industry, and also to recognize how fortunate we are to do the job we do in a safe environment with readers who value and support us.
There’s no secret that it has been a rough few years in the newspaper business. The Gazette is not immune. Ad revenue has dropped, and the newsroom does more with less. But we’re still here, covering important stories — big and small, serious and funny — and doing what our paper’s first leader, William Butler, spelled out as important more than 232 years ago.
“In a country like this, where our national character and happiness is entirely dependent upon a general diffusion of knowledge among the people, the extensive advantages of periodical publications cannot be too often explained or too highly estimated,” Butler wrote on Sept. 6, 1786 — in the first edition of the Hampshire Gazette, which is the oldest newspaper in Massachusetts.
Today is a day for remembering why journalists do what they do and the important function journalism provides to our democracy. According to the UN, the day is used to celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom; assess the state of press freedom throughout the world; defend the media from attacks on their independence, and pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives doing their jobs.
We’ve heard a lot of noise about “fake news” and how news media is the “enemy of the people” in the last two years, but it’s our job to serve the people. It’s not our job to make politicians and public figures happy, whether that’s the president or, more locally, the mayors and town managers, business leaders, college presidents and others we cover. Good leader — and we have them here in the Valley — understand and welcome the role that the local press plays in their communities, which means asking tough questions.
World Press Freedom Day means different things to different media outlets. Worldwide, the profession is dangerous. In 2018 alone, at least 94 journalists were killed on the job, according to the International Federation of Journalists. That included five Annapolis Capital Gazette reporters killed in their Maryland newsroom by a lone shooter.
Closer to home, smaller newspapers like the Gazette are critical to the communities they serve, even as industry is being beaten by “brutal economic and sometimes even more brutal business practices,” as longtime Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison recently wrote.
She writes: “And still, journalists persist. Real news reporting is the people’s intelligence service, and though it is far from perfect, it operates ideally as a self-correcting mechanism that wrestles with itself over every story, every day. At heart, most journalists patriotically think their work helps the nation live up to its ideals, and to do that, they’re willing to take on a job that they know means they’ll be sometimes unpopular and almost always underpaid.”
It’s been 227 years since Congress passed the First Amendment — five years after the Gazette was founded — protecting religious freedom, free speech and the freedom of the press, among other safeguards. The law couldn’t be more important for our society today.