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While everyone is yelling about Bob Woodward, local journalists are struggling to keep up the flood of news every single day surrounding this pandemic. These are obviously insane times and would have been when local newspapers were healthy. Right now, it's impossible.
Right before this all started, we lost our small cities reporter, @a_littman. His position was ever filled. @JackTHeffernan, who is also covering Clark County schools, picked up coverage of the cities. I picked up coverage of the schools in those communities.
And of course, there was never a discussion of how that was going to happen -- how we were going to tweak our approach to education coverage, how we were going to look more broadly at how Clark County's 115,000 children, how one single person was going to do all this.
Now we're in a pandemic, and I could literally write a thousand stories about children and families. I constantly feel like I am failing readers, and frankly, we are. I don't say that to elicit sympathy or rebuke -- but the reality is, anemic newsrooms fail readers.
I'm frustrated. I'm angry. I'm exhausted. Last week I had a woman on the phone yell at me and tell me I'm not good at my job because I'm not adequately covering how special education students have been left out of remote learning. She wasn't wrong! I did one story months ago!
But I've also written, as I tweeted last week, more than 100 stories about this pandemic since March. That's a ton of work for one person, and I'm not alone. All my coworkers are working incredibly hard every day, as is everyone who works in local news.
But when our local newsrooms are suffering under chronic disinvestment while hedge fund managers, conglomerate CEOs and even local owners continue to cling to wealth, this is what happens. Public agencies aren't held accountable. Readers suffer. Workers burn out.
Anyway, thread. Unionize your newsroom, subscribe to your local paper and ask why the hell Bob Woodward sat on tapes while the president lied to sick and dying American people.
