Daily newspapers in the North American West have an obligation to explain the large-scale changes in population, economy and environment that are transforming the character of the region and its communities.
The North American West is struggling with profound changes spurred by growth and development. A transformation is under way, and the target of its relentless pressure is the landscape itself, the West’s natural environment. Judged by sheer magnitude alone, this phenomenon deserves far more public attention and public discussion than it now receives. Yet the vast majority of the West’s 285 daily newspapers overlook the larger pattern. They neglect the whole. Instead, most Western dailies cover just the parts, narrowly and sporadically, in response to specific events, as if these were isolated and unrelated. What’s missing so often is the needed sense of context, significance and relevance. Throughout the West, journalists should yearn to produce news coverage that is clearer and deeper, more insightful and more engaging. Better news coverage, in turn, should help more Western citizens and communities build awareness of growth-driven change. And this heightened public awareness should contribute to healthier and more productive discussions about the West’s future–not only the perplexing challenges, but also the exciting opportunities. At least that’s our theory. In practice, however, journalism isn’t doing its part for the West nearly as well as it could and should. The rationale of this report starts with a simple belief: Daily newspapers throughout the North American West have a journalistic duty to serve their communities. This duty goes beyond merely creating a passive record of growth-driven changes as they occur. Western dailies should also describe and explain the significance of these changes, examine their causes and evaluate their consequences. Just as important, the efforts to describe, explain, examine and evaluate should be made while changes are still unfolding, before they are over. Most Western dailies have the financial means, if not the will, to do this job. A large majority of these newspapers consistently make a healthy profit. Few would dispute that a greater share of the profit could be invested in developing capacities to gather the news. Yet by keeping so much of the profit for the owners, most Western dailies also keep their newsrooms weary and starved of resources. As a consequence, many are failing to keep citizens and communities sufficiently alerted and informed about the region’s sweeping transformation. This central message, explained and expanded in the chapters to follow, is the product of many hundreds of interviews, extensive study of research literature and a systematic reading of all 285 Western daily newspapers by a team of independent journalists.The scope of this assessment has been ambitious. To our team’s knowledge, no one else has undertaken such a comprehensive review of daily-newspaper reporting on growth, development, natural resources and the environment in the North American West. The task has taken us more than two years. We have come away both inspired and disheartened. We found several valid approaches to coverage and numerous examples of commendable journalism. We encountered dozens of outstanding reporters and dedicated editors. At the same time, our interviews and our extensive reading of the newspapers convinced us that no reporting assignment in the West is more challenging, stressful or frustrating than the environment beat. Becoming proficient in the subject matter takes not months but years. Explaining environment issues responsibly can require an understanding of business and economics, laws and regulations, history and politics, biology and chemistry, geology and hydrology, forests and fisheries, farming and mining. It also can require humility, respectful listening and an appreciation for community values and expectations. Standards for this kind of reporting ought to be high. Yet we found many more examples of mediocre and superficial work than good work. We found abundant evidence of minimal reporting effort. Most widespread was the evidence of inadequate newsroom staffing, insufficient time for reporting, scarce opportunity for training and arbitrarily limited space for complicated news stories. Many people also told us about skimpy budgets for travel to gather news, about prolonged vacancies on important beats and about high levels of staff frustration. In citing these conditions, we don’t contend that most Western dailies used to be better than they are now. To the contrary, we believe many dailies in the West are better now than they used to be. What we do claim is that the current performance of most Western dailies still needs to improve a lot. The major challenge isn’t to restore former standards or levels of performance. Instead, the great need is to raise newsroom expectations and levels of effort to match the present magnitude of what is happening to the West. In reviewing their current approaches to covering growth, development and the environment, we found that most Western dailies simply aren’t keeping up with the pace, scale, intensity and ramifications of profound change. Here are some measures of the pervasiveness of newsroom constraints, as described to us by more than 150 managing editors and other senior supervisors at Western dailies: Our research also revealed several other indicators of deficiency:
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Among
the Western dailies that do have at least one reporter covering
the environment part of the time, that journalist is typically expected
to cover at least one additional major beat.