I recently read concerns by Windy Sinton of Florence in a letter titled “Coverage of Holyoke could go beyond crime,” (Feb. 3) about the Gazette’s coverage of crime in the city of Holyoke.
I am a resident of Holyoke, and I think newspapers have a responsibility to cover crime in inner-city areas. Whitewashing a city and making it seem like there is not poverty and all the pain and suffering that goes along with poverty serves no one.
I would argue that instead of critiquing the Gazette’s coverage of crime in our city, people in Florence, like Ms. Sinton, should consider moving to Holyoke. If they are truly concerned about our city, and inner cities as a whole, they should choose to invest their tax dollars in inner cities.
Comments like this are a red herring that makes people who live in towns like Florence feel insightful about what ails inner cities, while they are a major cause of segregating people in these inner-city communities, especially ones that white, middle class people fled (and pulled their children out of the public schools) and continue to overlook.
With that being said, I think crime needs to be covered differently. Newspapers need to spend more time looking at the causes of crime in high poverty areas, like a disinvestment in public education; the middle class voters in Holyoke recently overwhelmingly voted not to build new schools for our children.
Journalists want to cover these things. Yet, local newspapers have been gutted. Most people no longer have subscriptions to newspapers. Few businesses take out ads in newspapers. And this type of coverage requires people (more than one or two reporters covering a city of Holyoke’s size and complexity) who have the skills and knowledge (it’s not as simple as you might think) to write these types of in-depth pieces.
It needs journalists, full-time journalists, who get things like health insurance.
Sincerely,
Patrick O’Connor
Holyoke