Tag: Newspaper Industry

ODE TO A HERO WHO JUST HAPPENS TO BE MY WIFE

Melissa Nelson is retiring this week as director of collective bargaining for The NewsGuild-CWA, the union representing media employees and other workers. In the infamous words of Joe Biden – as cleansed by the AP – that’s a big f—ing deal. So big, in fact, that this space is giving a temporary pass to the inanity and profanity of national politics, in order to pay tribute to a genuine hero.

So as to avoid being Sean Hannityized, let me disclose a potential conflict of interest: I have a spousal relationship with Melissa. But I also spent 31 years working for the same union, and copiously followed her amazing journey, drawing more and more awe with every step she took. In other words, I’m an expert witness. This is my testimony:

When I met her, Melissa was an advertising artist at the Hearst paper in Albany, NY. The labor movement really needs to build a monument to the Hearst Corporation. If that outfit hadn’t paid its women artists considerably less than their male counterparts, the NewsGuild would be without one of its greatest legends. Worse, I would still be single. Fortunately, the injustice of pay inequity ignited a passion in Melissa that propelled her into the calling of union activism. It was an all-consuming tour of duty that went from rank-and-file agitator, to local president, to full-time Guild staffer in Philadelphia, to directing the national union’s collective bargaining operation in Washington, DC.

That last sentence, particularly for those who don’t know her, is opaquely encyclopedic. Every union has activists and staff. What Melissa brought to the table was a unique package of style, substance, class, and grace, all served with a special sauce of forceful and respectful advocacy.

Melissa Nelson teaches new Guild leaders about collective bargaining.

To me, Melissa’s breakout moment came about 25 years ago. This is when I knew for sure that she was destined to play a key leadership role in the union. It started as an ordinary exchange at the bargaining table. She was making a pitch for one of our proposals. A boorish, over-testosteroned management guy, accustomed to the centuries-old rooster game of one-upmanship through interruption, tried to cut her off. Melissa was in mid-sentence when he flashed a sneering smirk and said, “Well, that isn’t true . . . “ Without skipping a beat, Melissa leaned across the table to face her adversary. In a quiet, calm-but stern voice, she said, “No, no, no. Do not interrupt me. I wasn’t finished. You need to listen to what I am saying, and then it will be your turn to talk.”

I braced myself for a major explosion. I had verbally dueled with this troll many times and knew he was not easily quieted. There was a momentary silence, the two of them leaning deeply into their respective sides of the table, just staring at each other. Finally, the management guy spoke, using a tone that reflected a meekness and contrition I’d have sworn was not in him: “I’m sorry, Melissa, please continue.” Damn! I later asked the troll about the exchange. He called it a “flashback to elementary school”, adding that he almost said, “Yes, teacher.” It was an amazing moment.

The anecdote perfectly captures Melissa and her rare and immensely effective communication style, one that is firm, assertive and honest, yet delivered totally free of threat or hostility. The volume is low, the tone pleasant, and the verbiage tight and succinct. The result is a message laced with respect, thus inviting respect in return. When it comes to managing conflict, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Melissa has spent decades using that style to make life better for so many people: victims of sexual harassment, unequal pay, unjust discipline, discrimination and mistreatment; employees in search of better pay and working conditions, dignity and respect. Her voice, so carefully crafted in her estimable manner, has carried with it all the voices of the workers she represents.

But that’s not all, not by a long shot. Melissa’s real gift – her legacy – to this union is her uncanny ability to connect with members, local leaders and staff in a way that amps them up, makes them stronger, better, more confident. She has spent years perpetually plugged into the lives of Guild activists from coast to coast. She knows their strengths and weaknesses, the content of their contracts, their management’s every quirk and idiosyncrasy. She also knows the names and ages of their children, their family vacation plans and how their parents are doing. To her, leadership is, at its core, relational.

Somehow, without the use of a single algorithm, Melissa has spent the past decade using all of that instinctively processed data to guide, mentor and advise an entire national union, one person at a time. We’re in the middle of dinner, and someone from Kenosha calls in a panic over contract negotiations. Or a bankruptcy in Boston. Or more massive layoffs in Denver. Or the sale of the paper in Akron. And in each case, I smile with wonder and pride as Melissa calmly and confidently listens, reassures, offers needed information and counsel, and then guides the caller to land the plane safely. Each time that happens, the union grows a little stronger because the folks on the other end of those phone calls are learning and building confidence, secure in the knowledge that they are not alone.

This has not happened without taking a toll on Melissa. The stress has been enormous, and its chief cause has been the exponential increase in the demand for help, and an insufficient number of hours in a day to provide it. As a result, her voicemail and email inboxes are perpetually jammed by cries for help. How do you triage all that? Is a layoff more critical than a bankruptcy? Which do you take first, the pay cuts call or the pension freeze? This has been her life. And despite the stress, it has brought her enormous satisfaction from knowing that she has made a difference.

Through it all, Melissa never once unplugged – not from her phone, her email, or any other form of engagement. She is constitutionally incapable of disconnecting. She knew that most of the people reaching out to her had workloads every bit as hectic as her own. They were counting on her. There is no way she wouldn’t be there for them. That’s because Melissa saw her work, not as a job, but as part of a movement. For the movement to succeed, leaders need to keep on moving. And that’s just what she did. As a result, she can retire now fully assured that the movement she nourished with every ounce of energy she had will keep right on moving. After all, those movers learned from the best.

JOURNALISM’S FUNERAL MARCH LED BY CORPORATE VULTURES

Eons ago, I covered the Minnesota Legislature for the St. Cloud Daily Times. It was approximately 1970, and I was paid $1.45 an hour, the then prevailing minimum wage. Thanks to my parents, I was able to pay for my Greyhound Bus trips to and from the Capitol in St. Paul. The newspaper had been in the hands of a local family for decades. The publisher was a miserly old Dickensian character who deeply resented having to shell out money for a news operation. One day, I was chatting with a coworker who sold ads for the paper when Scrooge staggered up to us, moderately anesthetized by a long martini lunch. He slapped the ad guy on the back and slurred, “asset”. He poked me in the chest and said, “liability”. That was pretty much his business plan.

Little did I know then that those were the good old days of journalism. Owning a newspaper was a license to print money. Advertisers had few viable alternatives for marketing their wares back then. The formula was simple: subscribers read the papers for the news and then stumbled onto the ads. The result was newspaper profit margins ranging from 30-something to 40-something percent. Scrooge wouldn’t pay my expenses to cover the legislature because that would diminish his profits. Besides, he knew he could get the work on the cheap because I wanted the experience and the story clips to get a better job on a larger paper. As a result of this capital-labor symbiosis, he got rich, I got hired by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and more importantly, people in St. Cloud got to read about what their legislative representatives were up to.

Those days are so gone. The once idealistic, if naïve, illusion that for-profit journalism is a calling, a search for the truth, a check on those in power, has been brutally shattered by sheer, unbridled greed. It’s capitalism run amuck. Yes, the Internet knocked newspapers for a loop. Ad revenue plummeted. Pages, stories and jobs were eliminated. But for the most part, these media companies struggled to survive, to reinvent news delivery on multiple platforms, to find some way to make their product – journalism – relevant and vital.

Then the hedge funds took over. Newspapers across the country have been gobbled up by vulture capitalist companies for the sole purpose of sucking all remaining value out of them, and then letting these once vital community assets die or go bankrupt. Their business objective is the direct opposite of viability. They just want to pick the bones, sell off the real estate, fire upwards of 90 percent of the journalists. It’s the same thing that happened to Toys R Us. The gigantic toy retailer was hurting from online competition, but was still profitable when purchased by a vulture fund. Rather than scaling back and finding a way to keep the operation going, the new owner simply bled it until it was no more, at a significant profit for its shareholders. Since 2004, Julie Reynolds writes in the Nation, “speculators have brought and sucked dry an estimated 679 hometown newspapers that reached a combined audience of 12.8 million people.”

As tragic as the Toys R Us implosion was for the 31,000 workers who lost their jobs without a dime in severance pay, the dismantling of community newspapers moves the needle to an even higher level of evil. Consumers can still obtain their favorite Hasbro action figures. Former newspaper subscribers, however, have nowhere else to go to find out what is going on with their local school board, city council or municipal leaders.

When I worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the 1970s and early 1980s, there were well over 200 journalists on staff. That number now stands at 25 and falling, thanks to its current owner, Alden Capital, a private equity firm that acquired Digital First Media (DFM), now the second largest newspaper company in the country. This outfit has zero interest in journalism. In fact, it makes money by dismantling whatever journalism was left. DFM is leaving its footprint of news annihilation across the land. Once clearly one of the ten best newspapers in the country, the San Jose Mercury News has gone from a news staff of 400 to 40. Denver once had 600 journalists reporting the news at two papers. Only one remains, The Post, and Alden, true to its 90 percent reduction rule, has taken the newsroom count to around 60. The same thing is happening all over, from the Orange County (CA) Register to the Boston Herald.

These newspapers are being gutted, drained of all remaining value. Despite the fact that Alden’s media properties are operating on profit margins as high as 20-some percent, there is no pretense of maintaining ongoing viability. The strategy is simply one of managing decimation in a way that maximizes profits until death arrives.

Think for a moment of all the local news stories that have mattered to us over the years: city building inspectors on the take; school administrators doctoring test scores, police corruption, school busses that fail safety inspections, sexual harassment at City Hall. The list is endless. Those are the stories that come from reporters sitting through endless meetings, cultivating sources, pouring through public records that ordinary citizens don’t have the time to look at.

Killing a newspaper is not like killing a toy store. “Democracy,” as the Washington Post motto has it, “dies in darkness.” It’s a death brought on not only by authoritarian tyrants, but also by the sheer immorality of unregulated capitalism. Life in a civilized society demands that we weigh conflicting rights and values in order to remain true to our core principles. Surely, there must be a way in which the interests of corporate billionaires can be tempered just enough to prevent the premeditated slaughter of the public’s right to know. We need to find that way before the darkness consumes us.

AND NOW THE LATEST IN SPORTS: TWEETS THAT ROAR

Sports in general, and motorsport racing in particular, have never occupied much of my cranial real estate. Yet, I spent a good hunk of Memorial Day weekend thinking about both. It all started when Denver Post sports columnist Terry Frei fired off a thoughtless tweet saying he was “very uncomfortable” with a Japanese driver, Takuma Sato, winning the Indy 500.

As the Twittersphere erupted, complete with Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima references, Frei launched what has become the normal protocol for this kind of social media foot-in-mouth disorder: a series of inelegant apologies, one of which included a plug for his latest book. Then, as this formulaic minuet played out, front office honchos from the Denver Post went into full somber-and-righteous mode to declare the offending tweet “disrespectful and unacceptable”. “(It) doesn’t represent what we believe nor what we stand for,” so sayeth the corporate executives in a prepared statement. They also fired Frei, a move that is not always part of this post tweet-gone-bad ritual.

So, besides the fact that Sato can drive really fast, what do we know so far? Number 1: Frei’s tweet was an outrageous thought that should never have left his brain, outside the confidentiality of a therapist’s office. Number 2: the Denver Post’s reaction was the epitome of disingenuousness. The newspaper is owned by a hedge fund that “stands” for only one thing: sucking as much money as it can out of its properties. This company has financially benefited from Frei’s verbal edginess as a four-time winner of the Colorado sportswriter of the year award. If the Indy 500 tweet was linked to his role as a Post columnist, then his editors had every right, if not an obligation, to see it before it went out, just as they read and edited his columns prior to publication. In practice, however, most newspapers encourage or require their writers to tweet and use other social media platforms as a way of plugging the brand and drawing eyeballs to their content. The owners waive their right of advance approval to take full advantage of the spontaneity that is social media. To encourage controversial writing that attracts readers makes sense. Firing the guy when his controversy crosses a line that was never drawn for him does not.

But there is something bigger going on here, namely an epidemic of sportswriters stumbling into the Twitter penalty box. A former football writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer incurred the wrath of his employer when he tweeted that the owner of the Browns is a “pathetic figure”. An ESPN sportscaster was disciplined for a tweet that described his competitors at a Boston television station as “2 washed-up athletes and a 60-yr-old fat guy with no neck.” An Associated Press sportswriter who tweeted about horrible refereeing in an NBA game got into trouble with his employer after the referee filed a law suit. A Chicago Sun Times sports reporter had to delete his Twitter account after his lifetime collection of sexist tweets went viral. A New York Post sportswriter was fired for an inauguration day tweet that said simply: “9.11.2001. 1.20.2017”, apparently an assertion that the Trump presidency was as much a threat to this country as the Twin Towers and Pentagon bombings.

Before social media, sports reporters rarely encountered disciplinary action. As a union rep in this industry, the only sports discipline case I had was a hockey writer who, while at work, bet (and lost) $500 on whether the groundhog would see its shadow on February 2. (The poor chump swore he thought the no-gambling rule was limited to games he covered.) For the most part, sportswriters were in their own little world, far below management’s radar. The other huge difference between then and now is that many sports journalists of old distinguished themselves as top notch writers. Not limited to whatever unfinished and unvarnished thought might be floating in their heads, these literary giants were able to convert a mundane soccer match into compelling prose. I had never read a sports story before taking my first journalism class. I turned in a tepid, mechanical account of a student government meeting and my professor handed me a volume of selected sports articles. I told him I had no interest in sports. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “These are master story tellers. A good story is more than a recitation of facts.” For example:

• Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times) covering a 1960s Rose Bowl game involving an Iowa team: “There were thousands of people in calico and John Deer caps in their Winnebagos with their pacemakers and potato salad, looking for Bob Hope.”
• Shirley Povich (Washington Post) reporting on a New York Yankees pitcher tossing a perfect game in the 1956 World Series: “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larson today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.”
• Red Smith (New York Times) describing an unlikely home run that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Yes, those were the days, my friends. It was a calmer time, before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, a time when journalists faced only two tasks: getting it right and writing it well. In our brave, new, real time world, they are now expected to let loose with every embryotic half-baked thought that enters their heads. And pray that it doesn’t offend the suits who sign their paychecks. That leaves them with only one recourse, and I hope they take it: THINK – long and hard – before you tweet!

THE NEW JOURNALISM: ONE STEP OVER THE LINE OF DETACHMENT

The country’s new political climate has jarred some journalists into rethinking the whole ethical construct of impartiality. This introspection is long overdue. For many years, most media organizations have insisted that newsroom employees refrain from any political activity beyond private thoughts in order to guard against even an appearance of bias.

That meant, of course, that news staffers could not publicly voice political opinions, attend protest marches or campaign for candidates. Many news managements were such strict constructionists on this rule that they, in effect, demanded their charges take a vow of intellectual celibacy. If you think that is an exaggeration, I’d be glad to introduce you to two reporters who were once suspended for attending a Bruce Springsteen concert.

The principle behind this non-involvement ethic is rational and understandable. It’s execution, however, has been the subject of intense debate among journalists since the days of the linotype machine. There is general agreement that reporters need psychic and emotional distance between themselves and their scope of coverage. If you report on city hall, you can’t manage the mayor’s re-election campaign. Such a conflict skews interests and damages credibility. So how about a hockey writer who puts a school board candidate’s campaign sign on her lawn? No problem? Believe me, journalists have been disciplined for far less. It’s always been a question of where to draw the line. Thanks to the politics of Donald Trump, that line seems to be moving a bit.

Helene Cooper covers the Pentagon for the New York Times. She had an intensely personal reaction to Trump’s executive order banning refugees from certain countries. When Helene was a 13-year-old girl in Liberia, a military coup took over the government. One soldier shot her father. Another raped her mother. Over the next frantic weeks, Cooper’s mother did everything she could to get her family out of the country. Eventually, they found safety and a better life in America. The only reason I know that is because Cooper wrote about it in a first-person New York Times account. Days earlier, she wrote the Times’ initial report of Trump’s refugee ban. To be sure, Cooper’s moving, poignant personal story was no partisan political act. Yet, it offered compelling testimony in opposition to the president’s immigration position by a reporter who continues to be able to craft excellent news reports from Washington. The Times moved the line by running Cooper’s personal essay.

Jim Schachter is vice president for news at New York’s public radio station, WYNC. In a recent “On the Media” segment, he described his reaction when he learned his wife and daughters were going to participate in last month’s Women’s March. He told them he would not share their tweets or post their pictures on social media because “. . .you’re going to engage in an act of politics. . .that is anathema to me as a journalist.” The line seemed pretty clear to him. Then, a few days later, Trump issued his restrictions on refugee resettlement. Schachter said his “head was a mess” because his mother and mother-in-law were refugees from Nazi Germany. This wasn’t a “political matter,” he said, “this was a human rights matter.” Then he remembered that his wife and daughters had argued that the Women’s March was also a human right matter. Schachter moved the line.

That line between human involvement and journalistic detachment is apt to keep on moving throughout the Trump years because we are no longer dealing with arcane political issues. It’s one thing to keep your opinions to yourself on tax reform. It’s something else when basic human rights are being shredded.

Another force helping to move the line comes from the newsroom presence of millennials, people of color and those with an LGBT orientation. Many young reporters seem more capable than their elders of elegantly balancing a strong set of beliefs with their journalistic skillsets. They, along with those from marginalized groups, see the fight for equality with the same passion they have for pursuing truth through their journalism.

Shaya Tayefe Mohajer is a former Associated Press reporter and an Iranian-American. She recently wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review criticizing newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, for prohibiting reporters from participating in the Women’s March. While working for the AP, Mohajer said she followed the news service’s edict insisting that reporters “refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in a public forum . . .and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.” Those rules, she noted, were originally written by white men who handed them down to the generations of white men who replaced them, and none of them ever had to worry about the lack of equality. No longer bound by AP’s rule, Mohajer said she went to the Women’s March “not just because I understand inequality to be real and would like to live to see its end, but also because I’m deeply grateful for my right as an American to peaceful protest, and I intend to use it to call for a basic tenet of journalism: fairness.”

The line between advocacy and news reporting should not be removed. A Washington Post political reporter is never going to circle the White House on a lunch break with a sign that says “Trump Sucks”, and then replace it with a notebook and attend the afternoon press briefing. Yet, it’s well past time to modify the line, to relax its rigidity. There has been talk of replacing reporters with robots, but it hasn’t happened yet. Until it does, they need to be treated like real people, complete with real beliefs. And, absent a direct conflict with their job, they should be allowed to stand up for those beliefs. With a government poised for an assault on human rights, speaking truth to power is everyone’s job, even if it means an end to the illusion of journalism’s intellectual celibacy.

A REPORTER’S CHALLENGE: HOW TO COVER TRUMP’S WAR ON TRUTH

Journalists are psychically wired to, at all costs, avoid being part of the stories they report. That’s why covering the Trump administration must be agonizing for them. The president has called reporters the “most dishonest people in the world” and says he is in a “running war” with them. His chief strategist and alter ego, Stephen Bannon, referred to the press corps as the “opposition party” and said it should “keep its mouth shut.” It’s enough to make a reporter feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, to borrow an old Tom Lehrer simile.

Trump’s choice of the word “war” to describe his relationship with the news media is, in a way, apt. Truth and war have always had a relationship. It’s been said that the first casualty of war is truth. In this case, truth is what started the war in the first place.

Much – on some days most – of what President Trump says is false, wholly lacking even a casual resemblance to objective truth. Reporters write and produce stories about the president’s lies, setting the record straight with clear documentation. Seems straightforward enough, right? The problem is the unavoidable optics: an unbiased news media repeatedly calling the president of the United States a liar. The White House response, of course, is always a doubling-down on the lie along with the obligatory attack on the “totally dishonest” news media. It’s now a continuous loop. Trump lies. The media call him on it and report the facts. Trump blasts the reporters and then tells more lies. Rinse and repeat.

If the previous paragraph had been written a year ago as a story line summary for a potential political novel, any literary agent would have said, “Don’t waste my time.” Facts, after all, speak for themselves. How preposterous to think a president would continue to lie after being proven wrong. How crazy to assume that anyone would still believe him. That kind of rational, real world thinking went out the window last November when America elected as its 45th president a man who broke all campaign fact-checking records for uttering completely untruthful statements. Turns out he was just getting started. The first few weeks of his presidency has produced a steady stream of totally false utterances.

This has created, awkwardly, a new normalcy for journalists. Prior to Trump, it was unheard of for a news outlet to routinely contradict a president’s assertions. Politicians, of course, have frequently accused each other of lying, but reporters operated above such partisan fray, presenting the facts and the arguments of both sides, and letting their readers or viewers draw their own conclusions. Those were the days, of course, when reasonable people would offer credible alternative spins on the same set of facts. This White House has introduced us to “alternative facts,” representations that are simply wrong. That has led to, as Dan Barry of the New York Times noted recently, straight news stories that use adverbs like “falsely” or “wrongly” in framing what President Trump said. Other news outlets have frequently peppered their Trump reporting with these phrases: “with no evidence,” “won’t provide proof,” “unverified claims,” or “repeating debunked claims.” This has never happened before in the history of political journalism.

The uniqueness that is Donald Trump forced the news media to make a Hobson’s choice: just report what Trump says and let others call it a lie, or label clearly false presidential statements as inaccurate and stand accused of being the “opposition party.” Most major news outlets made the right choice. If Trump says, as a recent New York Times headline put it, “Up is Down,” reporters now routinely include a notation in their story that, in this case, up is actually up and that the president’s declaration that up is down is false. For example, the Chicago Tribune reported that Trump was wrong when he said two people were shot and killed during former president Obama’s farewell address in that city. According to police records, there were no shootings that evening. The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Trump’s comment that the city’s murder rate was “terribly increasing,” and then reported that he was absolutely wrong and that the murder rate has steadily declined over the past decade. The Washington Post, which developed an app that quickly fact-checks the president’s Twitter messages, identified 24 false or misleading statements Trump made during his first seven days in office.

As a former reporter, I totally get how difficult this transition must have been for journalists. These are people deeply committed to fairly and accurately reporting the news, free from any taint of partisanship. Trump, however, demands a game change. There has never been a president with such a propensity to make things up on the spot, believe them, and then keep repeating them. In a world like that, reporting a president’s statements that you know to be false, without labeling them as such, removes all semblance of truth-telling from journalism.

One encouraging sign in this bizarre “alternative facts” era is that many people have a hunger for the truth. Most major news operations have experienced dramatic increases in subscribers and viewers since the election. This is counter to the normal cycle of news consumption which typically peaks immediately after an election and then tapers off. Yet, the Columbia Journalism Review reports that the New York Times has been signing up to 10,000 new subscribers a day since the election. The Washington Post’s readership has increased significantly. The Los Angeles Times has had a 60 percent subscription increase. Similarly, cable and network news programs are experiencing record ratings. The moral of the story is simple. It is not easy being a news reporter in Donald Trump’s America, but for those of us who want to know the truth, there is no more important job right now.

PUSSIES, POETRY AND A BLANK FROM THE PAST

There is a fascinating fracas in the heartland. It’s stirring the nostalgic juices of all of us ink-stained geezers, who periodically look up from our laptops and long for that rancid smell of crusty old newsrooms, complete with pica poles, glue pots and hungover editors in green shaded visors, an unfiltered cigarette hanging from their lips. From a production standpoint, today’s journalism is barely recognizable to anyone who got their first byline in the ‘60s or ‘70s. The printed page is on a death watch. Digital rules. Video trumps words. Content is designed for a smart phone screen. Nobody yells “Stop the presses!” anymore.

But just when you’ve accepted the fact that this vintage newspaper culture is confined to “The Front Page”, now in a limited Broadway engagement starring Nathan Lane, along comes a throwback to the days of old. It brought back so many memories, only 37 years of twelve-stepping kept me from reaching for a back-pocket flask to toast the moment.

This wonderful oldie-but-goodie appeared in a recent Minneapolis Star-Tribune story about the censorship of a poem titled “A Prayer for P–––––s.” That is exactly the way the newspaper identified the title. Millennials reading that story may have thought it was a word game. The censored poem’s title was a Prayer for a seven letter word starting with “p” and ending with “s”. Hmm. Prayer for Papists? Prayer for Pasties? How about, with apologies to those with allergies, Prayer for Peanuts? No? Then, maybe Prayer for Piggies, Pouters, Psychos or Pushers? Or even Prayer for Pundits, Punters, Pygmies or Phonics?

Of course, those of us old enough to remember the golden days of print journalism knew in a nostalgic instant that the alliterated prayer could only be for. . . drumroll please. . .ready? PUSSIES! The censored poem was “A Prayer for Pussies.” The blanks were a throwback to an era when newspapers strove to protect pure and innocent eyes. Newsrooms were odd places back then. Profanities, dirty words and foul language were part of the constant banter, but there was a sacredness about the printed word and editors made sure that the bad ones never ended up in their paper. Granted, it was news when a senator told a colleague to perform an anatomically challenging act on himself. In print, it came out as “Go f––k yourself.”

Enough of memory lane, let’s get back to pussies. A well-known Minnesota writer and artist, Junauda Petrus, was commissioned by the City of Minneapolis to write a poem to be encircled around one of 12 globe-shaped metal lanterns as part of the redesign of a downtown mall. Seizing on the uniqueness of this political moment, Petrus converted the presidential campaign’s infamous Donald Trump-Billy Bush exchange into an artfully crafted ode to the power of womanhood. She called it “A Prayer for Pussies,” figuring that a country that just elected a president who boasted about grabbing them couldn’t possibly object to praying for them.

Alas, she was wrong. Minneapolis officials decided that, as progressive as their city might be, hanging a “Prayer for Pussies” lantern in front of Macy’s Department Store might be pushing the envelope just a tad. Petrus’ poem was rejected and the resulting censorship flap was the entire basis for the Star-Tribune story. Unfortunately for readers, the piece looked like a Wheel of Fortune game board, waiting for Vanna White to start turning letters. The reporter did a solid job of telling both sides, but the nostalgic ‘60s edits were tantamount to an endorsement of the city’s censorship decision. Take a look, for example, at this otherwise pithy quote from the poet, comparing her art to Trump’s, eh, “locker room” behavior: “If he can feel bold to not only say the word ‘p––––,’ but make it a philosophy to grab for women, I can fricking write a poem that is adding sacredness and having love around the idea of praying for p–––––s.”

It’s 2017, people. The word pussy isn’t going to hurt anyone. A news story based entirely on a controversy over the use of a word needs to spell it out. Without blanks. Still, the flap was amusing and it took me back to my very early years as a reporter on a small town newspaper. During a heated council meeting, a colorful local mayor called the police chief a “goddamn suck hole.” The chief sued the mayor for slander. After lengthy litigation, a judge dismissed the suit on the basis that the term “goddamn suck hole” was so lacking in substantive meaning that it could not rise to the level of slander because nobody knew what it was.

Through it all, the newspaper referred to the alleged slanderous term as “g–––––n s––– h–––.” Many readers actually cut the articles out of the paper, filled in the blanks and mailed them in. Most of them got it wrong. The top vote getter was “goddamn shit head,” which, had it been uttered by the mayor, would have presented the court a more difficult set of facts. Other readers, baffled by all the blanks, called the newspaper and demanded to know the censored term. As a result, a young newsroom receptionist sat for weeks at her desk, telephone in hand, repeating over and over, “goddamn suck hole.” It was a strange ethical system: you could say it, but you couldn’t print it, even though a judge found that it had no meaning.

Of course, we now have an even stranger ethical system. For the next four years, the band will be playing Hail to the Chief for a man who grabs women by their pussies, while a poet who wants to pray for them is forever banned. As we used to say back in the day, that is really f––––d up.

WHERE HAS ALL THE REAL NEWS GONE?

As if we didn’t have enough to feel crappy about on this first Trump Nation Thanksgiving, it now appears that fake news is in and real news is on its way out. Given the populace’s disgust and disdain for the news media, there may not be a lot of tears shed over this development. But there should be. The newspaper industry has been suffering an agonizingly slow death for more than a decade while its chieftains search for an elusive cure, one that would somehow monetize the real news it’s been giving away for next to nothing. So now, insult joins injury, like a bad Monty Python sketch, as a swarm of mischievous entrepreneurs rake in the dough by making stuff up and calling it news.

Let’s sort this out. As the digital world took off 20 years ago, newspaper companies rushed to put their content online. They had a “Field of Dreams” business model: if we build it, the money will come. They’ve been waiting for Godot ever since. The problem is two-fold. First, newspaper online advertising produces a small fraction of what the print product brought in. Secondly, Google and other search engines swooped up the free news content and fed it to readers with lucrative targeted ads. A search on duck hunting will take you to a newspaper story on the sport, along with ads for shotgun shells and decoys. Google gets the ad revenue and the newspaper that produced the story gets zilch.

As a result of all that, both circulation and advertising for the print product has been in freefall. At least 15 newspapers have closed. Many others killed off the print version and publish only online. More than 20,000 journalism jobs have been eliminated. Nineteen newspapers pulled their journalists from covering the federal government. The number of full time newspaper reporters assigned to cover state government fell by 35%. The retrenchment strategy, of course, has had predictable results. With less news and dumbed down content, even more subscribers and advertisers flee.

Meanwhile, teenagers in Macedonia are raking in $3,000 a day by cranking out totally made up stories on old laptops in their parents’ basements. And they are a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to the burgeoning fake news industry. Gone are the days when only the wealthiest of families – the Hearsts, the Sulzbergers, the Bancrofts, the Grahams – could afford to publish a newspaper. It can now be done without money or real news. One of those Macedonian kids, for example, cobbled together a website in less than an hour and published a fake pre-election story about Hillary Clinton endorsing Donald Trump. He then shared it on Facebook. According to BuzzFeed, it generated 480,000 clicks in a one-week period. Those clicks turn into dollar signs thanks to online advertising networks such as Google AdSense.

To throw some perspective on this 480,000-clicks-in-a-week fake news, BuzzFeed also reports that the New York Times real story on Trump declaring a $916 million loss on his 1995 income taxes generated a mere 175,000 Facebook interactions over a one-month period. Making this phenomena even more absurd is the fact that fake news played a very real role in the campaign. The Washington Post reported last week that some of the campaign issues were the invention of Paul Horner, a passionate Trump detractor who makes his living from click bait advertising fed by his totally fabricated news stories. For example, Horner’s fake blurb about a Trump protester being paid $3,500 by the Clinton campaign went viral on social media, bringing in a nice piece of change for him. It also became a talking point for the Trump campaign which retweeted Horner’s post and blasted Clinton for hiring protesters which, of course, never happened. Despite feeling crestfallen to think his antics might have helped elect Trump, Horner has not abandoned his lucrative career. His “breaking news” about President Obama issuing an executive order for the running of a new election gathered 250,000 Facebook shares in one week.

Back in the real news world, major publishers are bracing for yet another massive round of job cuts. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and its national string of Gannett-owned dailies will eliminate hundreds of very real journalism jobs. That would be a travesty at any point in time. Right now, it is a national tragedy because we are about to inaugurate a president who has a pathologically adverse relationship with the truth. It will take much more than a bunch of Macedonian kids and their laptops to protect our democracy. We need real journalism. And we need it now.