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Farewell, readers - and treasure your Times

By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published January 15, 2006

I applied to two Florida newspapers for summer employment while I was in college. The St. Petersburg Times replied. The other didn't. That was 51 years ago. Other than a short hiatus with a television station that prided itself on serious news, my entire career - from which I am now retiring - has been spent here.

That was an uncommon tenure in so portable a profession, and there may be some who wonder why I stayed so long. To tell the truth, there were occasions involving denied opportunities when I was angry enough to leave. But I was addicted to a steady paycheck and had to face the fact that there were precious few better places to practice journalism.

	Martin Dyckman through the years.

Here, management's bottom line is the quality of the newspaper, not the profits reported to Wall Street. The only stockholder is an educational trust controlled by the editor of the Times. That was Nelson Poynter's legacy to his newspaper, his community and his profession.

The difference that makes is illustrated by a poignant story told at the funeral of the Miami Herald's great reporter and editor, my friend Gene Miller. He once asked the late John S. Knight why he didn't take the Herald public so that employees could buy stock. Knight's answer: In a tight year, it would be his decision, not Wall Street's, whether to extract profits from the newspaper.

But the Herald eventually did become part of a public corporation, Knight-Ridder, which is now facing a forced sale to satisfy avaricious investors. However that comes out, it won't depend, as Poynter's decisions did, on what is best for the newspapers' readers and their communities.

You may - and should - take occasional issue with the Times' editorial and news judgments. But there will never be grounds to doubt the independence behind them.

There was a proud example prior to the 1987 session in which the Legislature was to consider taxing advertising along with other exempt services. Mindful of our many editorials that called for investing more money in Florida's future, Gene Patterson, Poynter's successor as editor and president, authorized us to say that our own bread and butter should not be spared. Writing that editorial was one of the golden moments of my career.

Most other Florida papers opposed the tax indignantly, along with the real estate lobby and the other usual special interests. Florida's last, best chance at tax reform was quickly repealed.

In my last column, I wrote of my fear that American democracy may not survive the malignancies of political gerrymandering and special interest campaign finance.

There are two other dangers of equal if not greater gravity: the decline of independent media and the public's diminishing interest in reading anything more complicated than a fast-food menu or TV guide.

Those morbid possibilities bring to mind Thomas Jefferson's oft-quoted 1787 letter from France in which he remarked that "(W)ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

But without the next sentence, rarely quoted today, the maxim is out of context.

"But I should mean," Jefferson continued, "that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."

It wasn't that Jefferson thought well of the newspapers of his time but that he cared even less for government. Much of the press eventually treated him roughly. Even so, he wrote three years before his death that "The only security of all is a free press."

That is still true. But the evening newspaper is virtually extinct and now, some say, 24-hour cable news and the Internet threaten to dispose of the morning press. Our total demise may be an exaggerated fear, but the overall danger is real.

The Internet is, without doubt, an enormous instrument of popular democracy. But it is not and never will be a substitute for newspapers that are responsible to their readers and have the resources to finance serious investigative journalism.

With the Washington Post behind them, a couple of kids named Woodward and Bernstein were able to number the days of an outlaw presidency. Had they been just bloggers, Watergate would be just another mailing address.

The newspaper you hold in your hands is an irreplaceable treasure. Please, please, never let it go.

[Last modified January 15, 2006, 09:20:04]