‘Do you have an Ace rewards card?’

This is how journalism died. One person by one person. Drip by drip. Until you wake up and your local paper either doesn’t exist, went strictly digital or in our case is so thin and devoid of news as to be not much more than a leaflet filled with canned news from wire services or Westchester County, miles away from where we live and work. There was once a time when the Poughkeepsie Journal was a vibrant and proud and award-winning local newspaper. I worked there for more than 20 years and my weekly running column still appears in there most weeks. But the paper has become a shell of its former self. Where once there were hundreds of people working in a regal old building in downtown Poughkeepsie, now the “Poughkeepsie Journal Building” – still regal and still downtown -- houses multiple other businesses and organizations. The actual “newspaper” part of the building is now confined to a small segment of the third floor. Most of the employees have been shuttered. There are only a handful remaining.

Which leads me to the local hardware store. I went in there this morning to get some bathroom lightbulb fixtures, about as mundane a task as you can imagine. After a fruitless trip to the Big Box Store across from Marist – endless, confusing options, no one to help – instead I traveled to the smaller, locally owned store. Immediately, I was greeted by an old Journal colleague, a proud old journalist who did the necessary, granular, important work of community journalism. He covered local town government – zoning board meetings, planning board meetings, town council meetings. And he was EXCITED to do it. His enthusiasm showed in his work, and his work was extremely important. Until it was deemed not to be so important and he was let go about five years ago, just like most of the rest of us. Instead of asking piercing questions about town government – the whole concept of checks and balances on which a big part of the First Amendment is based – the only question I got from him on Tuesday morning was this: “Do you have an Ace rewards card?” At that moment, my mind was flooded with sadness. Not so much for this older guy, who remains as enthusiastic at the counter of the hardware store as he was at the endless meetings. But for small, community journalism, the casualty of the 21^st century. Our world is a lesser place without it. My old colleague told me he feels that way. He said that many local political positions are filled with unopposed candidates, because the community is far less informed about what’s going on. Why? Because no one is covering it, no one is writing about it.

Hey. Scream all you want about the biased media. You might be accurate, when it comes to cable networks and some large newspaper editorial pages. But among all that screaming and hollering, among all the “enemy of the state” talk, and how the “media is biased” and “you can’t find the truth anywhere,” and “fake news” and “deep state” and all of it … somewhere in that cacophony of anti-journalism rhetoric, somewhere in there, community journalism died a slow – but also in a way sudden – death. Go ahead. Go on Twitter and find out the scores of local basketball game. Go on Facebook and see updates from “groups” about this and that. You can still find the information out there. But my old colleague, the one who was asking for my Ace rewards card, he was among the legions of smart, incisive men and women with whom I worked, folks who carried on a centuries-old tradition upon which our country was founded. Not having him challenge public officials – even low-level ones on a local level – has had a negative impact on our society. Yes, I’ve written about this before and yes, you might be weary of seeing these occasional (perhaps whiny?) posts. But this was my life, this was our life. And as I purchased my lightbulbs from a guy who used to proudly carry his reporter’s notebook in his back pocket and wear his press pass lanyard, I couldn’t help but feel melancholy about the once-bedrock industry of community journalism that is mostly gone.