Four Quad City advocacy organizations are hosting three eastern Iowa journalists to discuss the state of journalism in America on Friday, May 9th, in Davenport.
The forum is the first in a new Civic Conversations series in the Quad Cities organized by One Human Family (OHF), Progressive Action for the Common Good (PACG), Quad Cities Interfaith (QCI) and Iowa Citizen Action Network (ICAN). They invited former Quad City Times journalist Ed Tibbetts, political correspondent at Iowa Starting Line Zachary Oren Smith, and magazine writer, editor for the University of Iowa and freelance columnist Tory Brecht.
Brecht has worked for the Quad City Times, WQAD, and Iowa City Press-Citizen. He and the other journalists are part of a Substack called the Iowa Writers Collaborative.
“It really started as a pretty casual group of mostly ex-journalists, but people from other writing backgrounds and other walks of life as well that, you know, all kind of write about things that are going on in their communities here in Iowa,” Brecht said in a phone interview with WVIK. “Ed Tibbetts, who is going to be on this panel with me, calls it Iowa's bi-weekly newspaper, which I think is kind of a fun way to think about it.”
Brecht, Tibbetts and Oren Smith all worked for newspapers over the last twenty years. Brecht said the introduction of the internet and 24/7 cable news networks took advertising dollars away from newspapers across the country.
“[W]e entered what I think is a death spiral, really, in terms of losing revenue, which meant you had to cut reporters and editors, which meant the quality of your product was worse, which meant your circulation went down, which meant your revenue and advertising went down, which meant you had to cut reporters and cut editors. You can see there's really no way out of this,” Brecht said.
He points to newspaper owners like Lee and Gannett as another reason for the decline in local journalism.
“[S]ome of these big newspaper chains, they have under-resourced their newsroom so badly that the quality and the really importance of the information that they're giving to their local communities is not even close to what it used to be 10, 20, let alone 30 or more years ago,” Brecht said. “[T]here are legitimate criticisms for the way the local news media ecosystem is formed now. There's not enough people in it. They're not experienced enough. There's not enough editors that have historical background and knowledge. But I also know, and I know a lot of folks that are still there and they're working hard and they're trying to uncover the truth and they're doing the best they can under trying circumstances.”
According to Brecht, the loss of local coverage is putting the strain on citizens to discern what is fact and what is fiction online and in their local governments. He advises those considering journalism to commit if they love storytelling and don’t mind low pay and long hours.
“I think that there are a lot of journalists doing really good work. It's just getting harder to kind of cut through the noise and the static of it,” Brecht said. “And so hopefully we can continue to educate people and keep finding new ways to get good, quality reporting and journalism out in front of people, even if it doesn't look like the newspapers and the TV shows and the radio programs that we grew up with.”
The forum starts at 8 a.m. at Scott Community College Urban Campus, located at 101 West 3rd Street. The organizers are providing breakfast to the attendees. The forum is open to the public.
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