Newspapers can be our friends

Note the articles on schools and on the revitalization of the South Street Commercial District.

Today's New York Times reports that McClatchy Newspapers, a reasonably decent owner of newspapers, is purchasing Knight-Ridder Newspapers, the nation's second largest newspaper chain.

Anyone that knows me knows how much of a newspaper reader I am. I am no blogger ragging on the MSM or "Mainstream Media", although I am critical--I rely on the daily newspapers to learn about what's going on around the city and region. I complement the work of such, and admittedly sometimes lead the coverage somewhat.

Local television news, for the most part, is about mayhem (murders, fires, accidents), sports, and weather. The amount of content covered in a 30 minute television news broadcast would take up less than one printed page of the Washington Post.

Local TV news rarely covers nitty-gritty issues that really matter, the issues that impact the quality of life in a community or region. I think that these 24 hour local cable networks (like NewsChannel 8) have the opportunity to do a lot more than traditional news, and sometimes they do. NY1 in New York City covers local land use and development issues much more frequently than do comparable outlets in our region. (Imagine, there is one person assigned by NewsChannel 8 to cover all of DC, and the position turns over constantly. I can't even tell you who has the beat...).

Newspaper readership is intimately tied to civic involvement, and "rebuilding place" or urban-ness in a suburban-oriented society is built upon newspaper coverage (print and online). Of course, the big metropolitan newspapers like the Washington Post can't cover all the events of the region. Fortunately, in this region, there are a fair number of community newspapers, both in the city proper as well as the suburbs, that provide much more micro-level coverage.

I bring this up because the same Times article about McClatchy-Knight Ridder mentions the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, and posits that the PDN could be shut down entirely. The PI has one of the best urban design writers in the county, Inga Saffron, and beat reporters who do a great job covering a variety of issues in the city. They have a special locally zoned editorial page in their Metro section four days/week, and the paper runs every-so-often special sections on particular areas in their service region, called Where We Live, which is a more inside or at least in-depth look at towns and neighborhoods in the Philadelphia Region.


The PDN, a tabloid, for its size does some of the best feature reporting about urban design issues, of any newspaper in the country. Their "Rethinking Philadelphia" initiative is truly pathbreaking. They have the "Urban Warrior" column which focuses on shedding light on and correcting local problems. On Tuesdays, they run an op-ed column by Mark Hughes, a professor at Penn, about local issues. (Plus, in 2003, they ran an op-ed and a letter from me...)

"This just in," the Inquirer website reports that "McClatchy aims to sell Inquirer, Daily News, 10 other papers."

Bringing this home, by and large, the Washington Post does a decent job, even if I think that Ben Forgey's architecture writing is completely divorced from urban design and placemaking, and the coverage on revitalization is a little breathless, that this or that X will revitalize a community (such as the coverage of the Department of Homeland Security moving to the St. Elizabeth's campus in Southeast DC, or even today's article about the "Boomtown" area by Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

Yes, Eric Weiss' article on St. Elizabeth's campus on Saturday referred to DC OP official "Rosa Lynn" rather than Rosalynn Frazier, likely the person he talked to, but still, today's paper has two relevant and important local stories on the front page...

Considering their limited resources, the Washington Times does some decent coverage, particularly around emergency services, although Deborah Simmons, who writes an ostensibly DC focused op-ed every Friday, doesn't seem to focus on DC too often. When the issue is seemingly "conservative" such as privacy issues (closed circuit cameras, red light cameras, eminent domain) or charter schools and vouchers, they are more likely to cover DC issues.

And now we have the Examiner, and to some extent the Express, to provide additional coverage of local issues (the Express doesn't generate much original content but hopefully that could change). Today's Examiner announces that the DC correspondent, Karen DeWitt, is leaving, and there was no notice of a replacement.

Buy and read newspapers... civic life and beauty depends on it. (Just make sure you recycle.)

Index Keywords: civic-engagement