When it comes to information, you get what you pay for | MARK HUGHES COBB
When you spit "There's no local news in The Tuscaloosa News!" to my face, you're insulting me.
Horribly. To my face. In case that wasn't clear.
You may never notice how sad − possibly even mildly infuriated, though I'm too old now to crank it up to 11, Hulk style notwithstanding − your callous behavior makes me, possibly because after the past 20 years as a frequently-working, sometimes-professional actor, I can sometimes sorta-kinda control my face.
Not as much as I've controlled using the same mug shot for years, but you get the idea. I'm malleable, and heaping words atop feelings too dreadful to rise toward the surface of the earth. Lovecraftian sublimation.
If I have not spat back at you an ill-considered opinion about how you've utterly wasted your last 35 years, perhaps I'm a fair to middling actor. Or perhaps I know that sinking to "I know you are, but what am I?" makes me feel even duller, as if I were still the 35-years-younger dude who started work here.
Maybe I have better sense than to think I could disparage you, to your face, about how you spend the majority of your waking life, and get away with it. I was certainly raised better than that, so thank my family, and maybe actor training, that you haven't seen how your harsh condemnations make me feel. How your cruel dismissals lacerate like claws.
Or maybe I'm choosing to try and dissuade you from such a gloomy, acquiescent mindset, on the chance you're a thoughtful person, someone who might reconsider a vague notion, look at it again from a more precisely calibrated angle. I might consider you capable of pondering the exigencies of our Internet-interwoven existence, and taking a stark look at the world as it is, not as you and I and many others wish it would be.
Just look, I might be saying, in so many words, at what a lovely, fact-adverse society this free (And worth every penny!) flow of online misinformation hath wrought.
Every time someone failed to check an actual newspaper for information, and instead clicked on a freebie aggregator or gossip/innuendo/echo chamber publication, that drained the business, which lead to owners cutting costs, reductions in size and scope as money-saving efforts, rather than re-investing toward creating a better, more valued product, but hey, what do I know, after 35 years?
And of course dim economies in which a handful of tech billionaires hoard mountains of gold, and local businesses struggle to keep lights on, don't contribute to a healthy market, thus slashing the newspaper advertising revenue stream, more lucrative than paid quarters and dollars from readers.
Which all leads − ta-dah! − to fewer journalists. That formula is not rocket surgery.
You want everything free? You get what you pay for. We've heard that all our lives, yeah? Do we get it yet?
A new hero, anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, created in January of this year "The Vimes Index," tracking prices of staple foods to demonstrate economic injustices, how inflation and rising grocery charges slam the poor back into the dirt. Check out Monroe on Twitter under @Bootstrap Cook. You'll be fired with indignation, perhaps even enough to do something about it, Reg.
Monroe named that for Terry Pratchett's character Sam Vimes, a once defeated cop, struggling with alcohol and existential despair for his city, who through grit, associations with those who believed in him, love and other fine matters, rises to become commander of the Watch, which on Pratchett's Discworld is, well, the watchmen. Police, who under Sam's unbending morality become crucial to the functioning of society, not through violence, weaponry, or implied terror, but by what he calls good old-fashioned policing, shaking hands with doorknobs, strolling cobbled streets (which Sam can "read" better through thin-soled boots), protecting and serving.
At one point he's asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?," roughly "Who watches the watchmen?" That's me, he says. Ah, but who watches him? “I do that, too. All the time,” said Vimes. “Believe me.”
He marries well, to Lady Sybil, who persists in believing everyone, including her Sam, is at heart a good egg, though perhaps grown somewhat stale in a tarnished cup. She believes so hard, folks become better, not dreaming of disappointing the good-hearted woman. So even though he grew up rough, as a street monster, Sam gets rich.
He sees how families such as Sybil's maintain their wealth: They buy lasting quality, while the poor nab raggedy stuff that wears out so often, they spend excessively, all the while wearing crappy boots:
"... the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
Another view, from 19th century English poet John Ruskin:
“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that’s all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do."
Please take a moment to stop and think. Wire services and collaborative work have been a part of journalism since Ogg incised "Enki dream fire. Ithax steal" on quartzite, then drumbeat that scoop to the next cave. Yes, we publish other cities' reporters in our newspaper. We always have done so. Part of the mission of any newspaper in this world of dwindling newspapers is to collate as much as possible into our pages.
Not everything stems from Tuscaloosa. Shocking, truly.
We also print crosswords, comics, sudoku, syndicated columns, and many other things that we, in Tuscaloosa, didn't write or create. But we provide that, plus local, regional and international news, as part of a package printed and delivered to your home for what, $2 a day? And it's even cheaper online, though what you gain in videos, photo galleries, immediacy and such you lose in comics and Dear Abby, which we contractually can't share there.
Tell me what else of value you can buy for $2 a day. Maybe Hot Wheels. But even I don't roll Hot Wheels every day, don't get Hot Wheels delivered to my lawn, don't rely on Hot Wheels to help keep our community healthily informed.
There is no one more aware than me that we don't have as many Tuscaloosa-based journalists as we once had − when the NYTimes Regional Media Group built this $30 million, 90,000 square foot building for us back near the turn of the century, we filled every nook, cranny and hallway with employees, machinery, files, archives, and activities − because I am, you know, still here.
Still writing, still working, every day (if you think we take weekends and vacations without feeling constantly on call, I've got swampl…, er, beachfront in Florida for sale), for the past 35 years.
If you still wish to call me not local, to my face or otherwise, tell you what: Assemble your most capable team of Tuscaloosa-knowledgeable folks. I'll take you all on in a local info/trivia contest. There certainly must be things, history from here I don't (yet) know, but I'll promise you I can talk most folks into the soil about the people, the art, the spirit, the growth, the pitfalls, the comedies, the tragedies, the accomplishments; can recount for you tales and impressions and anecdotes from the so-called ordinary to the often truly extraordinary lives; covering vast swaths and folds of fields, lakes, rivers, and roads, through generations of time, all about and around this place, my home.
You do not need to tell me, of all people, about The Tuscaloosa News.
You have frustrations? So do I. We do not share the exact same concerns, because mine are also about those who won't read what we locals ARE writing, choosing instead to whine and count Montgomery bylines, as if to Ah-HA! a pale argument.
If you have concerns, please do something positive with them, something that might have an effect, change things for the better. Maybe try supporting, rather than slamming and damning, this still-local business, one that's been here decades, nearly a pair of centuries before Druid City fixtures you think of as iconic.
The Tuscaloosa News was founded in 1910. In 1915, it bought an older newspaper, The Tuscaloosa Times-Gazette, which itself had been consolidated from two earlier papers, the -- you guessed it -- Tuscaloosa Times and Tuscaloosa Gazette. For five years it was The Tuscaloosa News and Times-Gazette; in 1920, the Times-Gazette got dropped, and we went back to the simple News.
Those, in turn, had grown from consolidation and purchase of more venerable papers, such as The Tuscaloosa Chronicle, The Alabama Sentinel, Alabama State Intelligencer, The Flag of the Nation, The Tuscaloosa Observer, The Reconstructionist and The Republican Banner. The Chronicle grew from The American Mirror, which I think also published for awhile as The Tuscaloosa Mirror, though I couldn't find verification for that.
The American Mirror was founded in 1818, a year before Tuscaloosa became a city, and Alabama became a state.
So yes, this local business traces its origins from well before the Moon Winx, Taco Casa, Bama Theatre, or Krispy Kreme. Farther back than the University of Alabama. A couple of Pulitzers, countless Associated Press and Alabama Press Association awards, and 200 years of watching the watchmen (and women) service later, we're still here.
You do support local business, yes? Or is that just more slip-of-the-lip service?
Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: When it comes to information, you get what you pay for | MARK HUGHES COBB
