Local news takes on the Supreme Court. Will it win?

In broadcasting, one mundane but essential task is to check your sound level. It involves speaking into the microphone at approximately the volume you intend to use when you're on the air, while eyeballing a little meter in front of you to adjust your mic level. 

An analog meter features a graduated scale, soft to loud, with a pointy indicator that bounces with your sound level. The scale is mostly black, but it has a section in red on the far right end. The idea is to keep the pointer bouncing mostly in the black, with occasional peaks in the red zone. If the pointer swings all the way to the right and stays there, your mic is way too loud. The technical term is "pegging the needle."

As it happens, it's also an apt description for a ruling that came out of the Supreme Court this week. 

Stolen from Facebook | Creator unknown

No, not that one; that was last week. This week's travesty came in the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. You can read a pdf of the ruling here. But basically, the majority opinion, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, reverses a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision. The appellate court had held the Bremerton, WA, school district was correct to discipline its high school football coach, Joseph Kennedy, in 2015 for staging public prayers at midfield after the team's football games. The Supreme Court says the disciplinary action violated Kennedy's First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

The problem with the ruling is that Justice Gorsuch gets nearly all of the facts wrong. This column by Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times explains how Kennedy wasn't engaging in "a brief, quiet, personal religious observance," as Justice Gorsuch claims. In fact, Kennedy had made a big deal out of praying at the 50-yard line -- and he'd been incorporating prayer into team workouts as a motivational tool all season. Players weren't required to participate in the postgame prayer rallies, but of course eventually all the players did, at least partly due to fear that Coach wouldn't let them play as much if they didn't participate. (Y'all have been to high school, right? We all know how that works.) Eventually, Kennedy held a news conference before the school's homecoming game, announcing he would give his post-season prayer. He got a lot of press out of it -- Good Morning America even interviewed him -- and as a result, it wasn't just the players out there with him after that game; more than 500 spectators left the bleachers and jumped fences to join them on the field for his 15-second "quiet, personal religious observance."

The general opinion is that the court reinvented the facts here in order to have an excuse to overturn Lemon v. Kurtzman. In that 1971 opinion, the court laid out a three-pronged test to determine whether something violates the First Amendment's "establishment of religion" clause. We do not have a state religion in the United States, and it's unconstitutional for a public employee to promote a particular religion as if we do. In an objective reading of the facts, that's what Kennedy did -- he promoted Christianity, hard, with his very public prayer meetings. But the conservatives on the current court wanted to strike down Lemon, and Kennedy's case was a handy vehicle.

That's scary for those of us in America who aren't Christian. But that point has been made elsewhere. My point is different.

I've opined here before that local journalism matters. Six years ago, I wrote about how just ten companies control a frightening percentage of the news and information business. Three years ago, I cited figures indicating that one in five local newspapers ceased publication between 2004 and 2018; that decline has continued since then. 

Why do I keep making a big deal about local journalism? Because without it -- without local newspapers like the Seattle Times -- there would be no way, when public figures on the national stage lie, for us to learn the truth. 

Support your local independent journalists, guys. They're going to become more and more vital as we bring our country back from the brink.

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The rise of the citizen journalist.

Roberto Ferrari | Flickr | CC 2.0

I am never going to turn this into a blog about politics; teh intarwebz are already chock-full of 'em. But one thing I've noticed this week -- amidst all the social media accounts of the horrific events in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, and Dallas -- is how citizen journalism is playing a larger and larger role in informing us.

Most of you know that I used to be a broadcast journalist. I got out of the business in the late 1990s for a number of reasons, but a big chunk of it involved the changes I was seeing in the industry. The line between news and entertainment was blurring, as news organizations began chasing ratings instead of telling viewers/listeners/readers what they needed to know. At the same time, the lines between objective reporting and commentary had also become less clear.

And the industry was consolidating. When I began working in broadcasting in the early '80s, there was a whole host of network-level radio news outlets: CBS, ABC, NBC, Mutual News, NPR, the Associated Press, United Press International, and I'm probably forgetting some. By the time I got out, UPI was toast. Westwood One had bought NBC Radio News and Mutual News, combined them into one shop, then combined that with CBS Radio News (which is how I lost my last radio job -- the Mutual/NBC newsroom in Washington, DC, was shut down when the networks were consolidated at the CBS studios in New York).

Along with the consolidations came new scrutiny of the bottom line. In the name of maximizing shareholder profits, news staffs were trimmed to the bone, and surviving staffers -- just like survivors of downsizings everywhere -- were expected to do more with less.

One way news operations did that was to develop the concept of citizen journalism: this idea that a regular Joe with a phone could call his local newspaper or broadcast station and report on a fire or whatever in his neighborhood. It seemed like a win/win for the corporate bean counters: the paper and/or the station would get the story without having to pay a reporter to go out and get it. So what if Joe wasn't a trained journalist?

Then came YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook -- places where people were encouraged to share photos and videos of things that interested them. At the same time, smartphones began to proliferate, to the point where nearly everyone had a video camera in his or her pocket. And an interesting thing happened: almost by accident, social media stepped into the real-news void the bean counters had created.

When congressional Republicans shut down official broadcasts of the sit-in at the Capitol last month, the protesting Democrats turned to Twitter to get the word out. When Alton Sterling was killed by police in Baton Rouge last week, it was a group called Stop the Killing that filmed the incident and uploaded it to social media. Then, when Minneapolis police shot and killed Philando Castile, his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, uploaded her video of the aftermath to Facebook. And Facebook was the venue again for live videos of the shooting incident in Dallas that left five officers dead.

What I find interesting is that in most of these incidents, it's not bystanders doing the filming; it's the people directly involved. It's the people I, as a reporter, would have interviewed after the fact: "What did you see? How did you feel?" Without the reporter, there's no buffer. What we're getting now is visceral and raw, and in real time. First person, present tense.

This is corporate media's worst nightmare. Not only do many people now view them as untrustworthy -- a direct result, by the way, of recasting news as commentary/infotainment -- but now their customers don't need them at all. The critics will wring their hands over whether social media ought to be entrusted with the sacred task of deciding what's news -- it's already begun -- but it's too late for that. They're not going to be able to stuff this djinni back in the bottle. And they have only themselves to blame.

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These moments of bloggy commentating have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

How trad publishing is like broadcast news.

Yes, all right, I'm posting a day late this week. I was out of town last week, attempting to wrap up some stuff at my mother's old house (which I may blog about at some point, once I can write about it without needing to throttle someone -- look for that post in about twenty years, I think); with stop-and-go traffic, my daughter Kitty and I didn't get home until 10:00 last night. And I still had laundry to do. So the blog post got pushed to today.  Sorry about that.

To help us all calm down, here's a picture I took on one of our first days at my mom's house. People tend to think of Indiana as nothing but corn and cows -- okay, and the Indy 500 -- but a sliver of the northwestern corner of the state has frontage on Lake Michigan, and that's the part of Indiana that I'm from.  Kitty and I took a break from sorting stuff at Mom's one night and walked down to the lake to see the sunset. I got this shot with the camera on my phone as the sun was just touching the water.

Some folks are getting amazing shots from the lakefront near the Michigan City lighthouse of buildings in the Chicago Loop. (Chicago is 35 miles from Michigan City if you go straight across the lake.) Alas, either it was too hazy or my camera wasn't good enough -- we could see the buildings as shadows on the horizon, but I couldn't get them in a shot.  Ah well.

Anyway...calm thoughts and cleansing breaths.  And then we can get all riled up again.

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Last week, I wrote about how many women of a certain age are going the indie author route, and speculated as to why that was so. Kathryn Treat asked me in the comments what my own reasons were for going indie at this time of my life, and as my response to her lengthened, I realized I ought to just do a post on it.

To understand my reasoning, it helps to know a little bit about the business of broadcasting.  And the first thing you need to know is that almost nobody you hear or see on your local news broadcast is getting a fabulous salary.  The money is concentrated in the hands of the owners (which today probably consists of the shareholders of a large corporation), the sales staff, and a few stars.  In radio, that usually means the guys you hear during morning and afternoon drive-time, which are the most lucrative dayparts for advertising sales.  In TV news, it would likely be the anchors.  Behind these folks are the reporters, editors, producers, videographers and writers, as well as office staffers who never make it on the air, and trust me when I say that they are not making much. During salary negotiations for my current day job as a legal secretary at a big DC law firm, HR asked me how much I'd made when I worked as a tape editor at Mutual/NBC Radio News. I screwed up my courage and was honest with them, even though I was worried they would refuse to match it.  Not only did they match it, but on my first anniversary I received a 13 percent raise -- to bring me up to the market average for legal secretaries. Yes, that's right, folks! You can make more as a secretary than you can in the glamorous world of network radio.

The word "glamorous" is key.  Station owners are able to keep salaries low because of the coolness factor of working in broadcasting. In essence, you're getting paid partly in prestige. And if you complain about the size of your paycheck, management may well remind you that if you no longer want your job, there are hundreds of people out there who would take it in a heartbeat -- because it's so cool to work in radio.

Contrast that, if you will, with the world of traditional publishing.  Who's making all the money? The stockholders, of course, and the C-level managers (CEO, CFO, etc.), and the big stars who get lucky and sell tons of books.  But midlist authors are equivalent to the reporters, videographers and writers in a broadcast newsroom: they provide the bulk of the content, but they're getting paid partly in prestige.  And just like in broadcasting, traditional publishers have a slush pile full of eager wannabes to pick from when a midlist author gets cranky about her pathetic royalty checks.

Once I figured that out, my interest in chasing a traditional publishing contract waned rapidly.

And too, my kids are grown, and I'm about six years from early retirement.  I have the time now to write, and many of the skills (it turns out) to make a go of self-publishing.  And so here we are.

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Before I stop, I'm pleased to announce that the first chapter of Seized is included in First Chapters.  This book is a compilation of the first chapters of 22 books by indie authors.  Some of us are bestsellers, some are award winners, and all of us have been Indies Unlimited minions at one time or another. 

Several of the books represented here have been Rursday Reads. If you've been wondering whether to give one a try, now's your chance to check out a meatier sample than you would get with the "look inside" feature.  And it's only 99 cents. Such a deal!

One more thing: Annealed goes free at Amazon this week from Thursday through Saturday. If you haven't yet collected the set, now might be a good time. Just sayin'.

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These moments of comparative blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.