A bottom-line tragedy

I lost six friends yesterday. A disaster eliminated them.

Not a natural disaster, mind you, but the kind caused by an accountant’s keystrokes.

Sadder still, someone who didn’t know these people, and maybe didn’t even care to know them, will profit from those keystrokes in the short run.

Yesterday, six news staffers at my workplace — five editors and a photographer — were expunged from the payroll of Lee Enterprises’s largest property and St. Louis’s principal news source. Out the door with these six and the few belongings they had also went about 50 years’ worth of institutional memory and irreplaceable expertise, to say nothing of the collegiality and professionalism they brought to work every day.

They were expunged about a month after Lee Enterprises deferred paying into pension plans for 2011 while handing the CEO and CFO performance bonuses totaling at least $1 million, and about two weeks after the company tamped down rumors that layoffs were pending. 

Discussion abounds over whether these matters led directly to what happened Tuesday. At the least, the timing is atrocious. Regardless, the events have combined to frighten those employees remaining. The ax has fallen close enough, repeatedly now over the past few years, for the remainder to feel a breeze from it. 

Among the people still filling chairs Tuesday, the mood was quiet, somber. Funereal maybe fits better. But nobody slaked their duties or relented during the inevitable march toward deadline. Our readers still needed their news Wednesday morning, no matter who was left to gather and present it.

And journalists — the really good ones I’ve known, anyway; certainly, the six who were shown the door Tuesday — tend not to soften while the world around them hardens. Public service comes first; that’s what being a journalist is all about. It’s a difficult, demanding profession that satisfies maybe one out of every two customers, and leaves the one customer often miffed. This is a hazard of striving to serve everyone equally, without fear or favor.

Because they routinely and willingly face that hazard, journalists also tend to be resilient. I have little doubt that the six former colleagues of mine will find new courses in life, ones that may afford them more prosperity and happiness. The thing is, nobody I know in journalism — and I’ve had ink-stained fingers almost 30 years now — pursued it for money or fame; so many other professions better satisfy those needs. They instead felt called to it, drawn to it, as if journalism sated them in some deep-seated way far more than just a career could.

More keep coming, fortunately, as the fine, aspiring journalists I have worked with at local universities attest. I wonder now, however, how many of these motivated, energetic students will be able to look back through 30 years of news gathering and public service, or even 30 months, when the institutions that were designed to support them in their pursuit crumble before anyone just jumping aboard gains adequate footing.

Yes, I realize journalism must adapt with the times and technology. I’ve heard the sermons, both weak and strong, and believe me when I say I’m among the converted. Perhaps we are indeed entering a “golden age” of journalism, with mobile technology and widespread electronic information access, that the static institutions associated with “mainstream” media had to be moved or removed to reach.

Still, something worsens when a medium plunders itself, and the newspaper subscriber from Florissant, Mo., who rang me up at work one evening a few weeks ago illustrated it. She called a random newspaper department number, she said, hoping to bypass the general voicemail that intercepts and, yes, discourages many outside callers, and got me on the line to complain about an article in print that glared with a grammatical error.

The error was in a part of the newspaper unrelated to mine. Nevertheless, now that she had me on the phone, she wanted to vent to somebody — anybody.

“This is shameful,” she said. “This is awful. How can you sleep knowing you put out a product like this? And you know, it just keeps getting worse.”

I assured her that, no, sometimes I don’t sleep.

“Ma’am,” I said. “I agree, it shouldn’t have happened, and I apologize. It certainly wasn’t the result of laziness or anything like that.”

“What was it then?”

“Well, I’m not sure, but ...” and I whisked her through a summary of the layoffs and cutbacks going on at the newspaper, explaining that these were happening while content management had expanded to include Web, mobile and other platforms, and social media.

“Basically, we’re doing much more with fewer people,” I concluded.

There was a silence of a few seconds at the other end, followed by, “Oh. Well, now I understand. Nobody’s ever taken the time to explain it to me. Thank you.”

She hung up sounding apologetic, but I doubt my explanation will salve her for long. 

The six people who were laid off Tuesday were among the vanguard of a watch attending to details that this reader, and many others also concerned with accuracy, consider crucial. They understand that credibility lies not just in the act of journalism, but also in the pursuit of perfection while performing it. Yes, errors do occur; however, the overall goal of getting details down properly and precisely should not be minimized, even as journalism leaps off the page and into the “cloud” — even as executives sift for ways to cut costs en route to that cloud.

Implying to our readers and our newest journalists that precision is negligible serves neither constituency, and in the end won’t serve the bottom line, either.

The color of mercy

David rests after his fall on the Tucker Boulevard bridge in downtown St. Louis.

 

I met him when he was face down on the sidewalk. It was Sunday, around noon. His head was in his hands; a thin line of blood trailed over two of his fingers. Sweat glinted atop his balding head.

Beside him, a scuffed Pullman suitcase lay on its side. Tied to the handle was a portable radio. When I arrived, the radio’s tinny speakers were conveying the announcer’s warning about that afternoon’s unseasonable heat.

“Sir,” I called down to him. “You OK? You need help?”

He raised his head to look at me. Beneath his right eye was a fresh, leaking abrasion the size of a quarter. Another abrasion half that size and leaking as well was gouged into the space between his nose and lip. A third, less worrisome scrape was visible on the left side of his forehead at the hairline. David’s eyes were glazed and his face runny with perspiration.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said clearly. “I’m just resting a moment.” Then he put his head back down.

Where he lay was at the approach to one of two walkways running along either side of the Tucker Boulevard bridge, between Spruce Street and Choteau Avenue. The walkways are bracketed by an aluminum railing on one side and a low concrete wall on the other, the latter serving as barricade between pedestrians and vehicles. Each walkway is narrow enough that people going opposite directions must twist their torsos slightly to keep from brushing shoulders.

He was sprawled at one angle, the suitcase at another. There was no way to pass without stepping over him, yet the barrier was high enough that car traffic would not notice.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” I shouted. “You don’t look it.”

He raised his head. “No, no, I’m good, I’m good. I just gotta catch my breath a little here, thought I’d just lay a minute.”

“You sure this is the best place to do it?”

He looked around and over his shoulder. A long, sticky strand of blood and sweat clung like a spider’s web between his cheek and wrist.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said, after a few seconds sizing up his situation. “I’ll just try sitting up over here.”

He rolled over slowly and rose up onto his knees, then turned and plopped down into a sitting position with his back against the concrete divider. His outer garments consisted of a dirty yellow University of Missouri hoodie and faded brown pants tucked into the tops of lace-up boots, the toes of which were rubbed white from wear. He said later that under those clothes were three other layers. The forecast that Sunday called for clear skies and 90-degree temperatures.

Sitting atop the divider near David’s head was a 32-ounce soda cup and a folded jacket. He reached into a pocket of his hoodie and withdrew a blue rag. He began wiping his face. That’s when he told me his name: David.

“I was sitting there, resting,” David said, pointing to where the jacket was. “I had just taken my jacket off and I guess I just went out and fell over.”

After two vigorous passes with the rag, he stopped at looked up at me.

“Do I have something on my face? Under my eye here?”

“Yes,” I said. “Looks like you scraped it when you went down.”

He wiped the spot again and looked at the rag. “Anyplace else?”

“Yes. Under your nose.”

He wiped, looked and nodded.

“Yeah, I feel it. I feel something, anyway. But it doesn’t look like it’s bleeding much.”

Near my feet was the hand-sized puddle of sweat and blood he had just come up out of.

“It could be worse,” David went on. “I guess I fell and hit that railing there and went down. Don’t remember it, though. Just remember taking my coat off and sitting there a moment, then I woke up and I was on the ground.”

“Do you feel like you’re hurt anywhere else?”

“Nah, this is it,” he said, wiping his face again.

“Still, I’m going to call for some help,” I said.

The nice weather had lured me out for a walk. I was four blocks from home, having come up the opposite end of the Tucker Boulevard bridge. Along the way, four people passed me — three men and a woman — all smiling, all giving cheerful greetings as they went by. When I reached David, blocking the sidewalk as he was, it became clear these smiling, cheerful people had stepped over him, ignored him.

As David sat, I dialed 9-1-1. The dispatcher picked up after one ring. She asked where I was and the condition of the injured man and I told her — about a block and a half from the main headquarters of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and a firehouse. I figured help was maybe five minutes away.

Then the dispatcher asked what I considered an unusual question.

“Is the person white or African American?”

“African American,” I answered.

There was a pause, then. “OK, we’ll get someone there right away.”

When I hung up, David had reached for the soda cup and started drinking from it. He took small sips, then stared off through the bridge railing.

“This is my problem here,” he said. “I shoulda gotten water, not this stuff. I know better, too.”

Streams of cars rushed by as the lights at Spruce and Choteau turned red to green and back again. David talked in a low voice, so hearing him over the traffic was difficult. But in the quiet between green lights, he volunteered a few things about himself.

David came from North St. Louis and began his working life, making machine parts across the river in Illinois, right after leaving school. He milled gears for decades, retiring three years ago and moving into an apartment off Ninth Street downtown.

Then, he said, he got bored. With no wife or family, his days amounted to just sitting around, and his faith assured him that was no way to live. He needed a challenge to stay active and alert. He was healthy, just past 60, and motivated.

“So, I gave it up,” he said.

“Gave what up?”

“The apartment,” he said. “I gave it up. Figured there was someone else who needed it. This,” and he pointed to the sidewalk, “livin’ on the streets, was something I always wanted to try, an experiment, so I figured I’d do it.”

That was two years ago. And how’s the “experiment” going?

“Ah, it’s not so bad,” he said, shrugging. “Could be worse. I’ve seen others worse off.”

Now, David lives out of the big suitcase. It’s filled with clothes, books, odds and ends he kept from the apartment, which he says he doesn’t want back. He bought the radio from a thrift shop a week earlier.

“Keeps me company,” he said.

Money dribbles in from retirement checks that go to a post office box downtown. He’s careful with his funds, rarely splurges, but this time decided to buy a soda from a gas station just down the street from where he fell.

“Shouldn’t a done that. I’m fasting, you know,” he said, and drained his cup. “Fast every week from Friday to Sunday. Better to just have water. Saw this and, well ... you know.”

David was feeling faint before reaching the Tucker Boulevard bridge. He was en route to St. Vincent DePaul Parish, where they serve meals to the homeless. He breaks his fast each Sunday there, tries to be in line when the doors open at 10 a.m. so it’s easier to get a seat.

Now he’s worried. He takes pride in his health and said he had never fainted before, four layers of clothes or no. I asked why so many layers on such a hot day.

“You stay clean that way. Can’t get a bath all the time, but you gotta stay clean to stay healthy,” he explained. “The more you wear, the more it protects you. I don’t always know where I’m going to be sleeping.”

I nodded and looked at the clock on my phone. Fifteen minutes had passed since I called 9-1-1. I called again. I tweeted again.

“Look, we’re busy,” a different dispatcher explained. “We’ll get there as soon as we can.”

I hung up, looked at David and shrugged. “They say they they’re busy.”

“Well, I ain’t going anywhere. I need to rest.” He settled in against the barrier and turned his head to stare up the slope of the bridge. It’s a long incline, and he was still several blocks away from St. Vincent. “I shoulda broke down and got some breakfast this morning.”

And I should have walked over to the firehouse long before this. We talked a few minutes more, as I wanted to see David improving, and he appeared to be. Finally, I told him, “Look, I’m not waiting any more. You sit right here and I’m going to go down to the station.”

He waved a hand in acknowledgement as I jogged off.

Engine House No. 2 houses a pumper and a paramedic unit. When I arrived at the entrance and peeked through the window, both were gone. I headed over toward another door, behind which I heard what sounded like a television, and was about to knock when, as if on cue, the station’s paramedic truck turned a corner and pulled up behind me. One of the paramedics got out to stop traffic while the driver guide the truck back into the garage. I went over to tell her about David and pointed to where he was.

“Did you get a 9-1-1 call about this?” I asked.

“No, didn’t hear about it,” she said.

But after I alerted her, she whistled to the driver, climbed back aboard the truck and it veered off in David’s direction. I jogged part way back up the block in time to see the truck turned around and parked by David, who now was on his knees looking over the concrete barrier. He saw me and waved. I waved back as the paramedics disembarked.

Then I continued on my walk, turning over in my head all that happened over the past 34 minutes.

Where I live near downtown St. Louis, the disenfranchised are neighbors. Homeless and home owners attend the same churches and shop the same stores, as they have for years. The numbers in either group have risen and fallen with the economy, but the groups themselves are constants. Lately, it seems there are just as many whites as blacks occupying either of them.

There also are businesses and services among us, big and small, suffering scars from the slings and arrows of our outrageous economy. Jobs have disappeared, services have been cut, and uncertainty has increased. The home owners in my neighborhood, I am sure, have looked at the homeless lately and worried if they might soon join them.

But I wonder now, for the first time, what the people providing services around here see. When I called 9-1-1 for David, the question of color came up without my provocation. And it was the only physical attribute specifically requested. Height, weight, physical build, type of injury — none of these apparently mattered.

As far as I’m concerned, skin tone shouldn’t either. Maybe David wasn’t as frustrated by waiting as I was because he knew already that it did.

 

You just don't get it, do you?

Journalism is defined by its institutions. And journalists, whether they like it or not, are defined by them, too.

The public sees newspapers such as the New York Times as faceless, ink-stained atomatons decorated with florid fonts but lacking personality until a reporter or photographer or editor steps out of one, and then that person becomes “The Institution.”

Which is why most journalists — the credible ones, anyway — take pains to separate their selves from their institutions on personal matters. Because journalists by themselves gather and disseminate information, intent on doing those things without fear or favor. The institutions, on the other hand, may have an agenda, at the least a bottom line.

This came to mind after seeing a piece in GOOD full of chagrin over people’s particular Twitter habits. GOOD, an online reporting platform self-described as “pushing the world forward,” had a writer insisting twitterers stop including in their biographical detail the words “retweets are not endorsements,” on the grounds it was ridiculous and unnecessary. 

“It’s become downright tedious to click through someone’s Twitter profile and read, ‘Retweets are not endorsements,’” wrote Cord Jefferson, who has the title “senior editor” listed under his name at GOOD. “If it were just one or two people with the warning, or if Twitter were some kind of newfangled technology, it might make sense.

“Rather than eroding the comity of Twitter by assuming that others are too ignorant to understand what is at this point a very foundational rule of the network,” he writes later in his conclusion, “let’s assume people are smarter than that. And in the event that someone doesn’t understand, let’s agree to explain to that person, without codifying it in our bios, that here on Twitter, retweets aren’t endorsements.”

Yes, that would be a lovely world to live in, wouldn’t it? Email to me the address and I’ll book a trip.

But here on Earth, despite our best efforts, not every human reads exactly what writers intended. Journalists, though always struggling to highlight context in their reporting, realize one thing: Context, unfortunately, is often in the eye of the beholder.

This was clear long before the Internet was born. The responsible journalist is a champion of proper context in their stories — every worthy writer should be. I’m surprised that Jefferson, in his capacity, thinks that’s unnecessary. People read unintended things into words and phrases, and they always will. My job in journalism for decades was to write clearly and concisely to minimize misunderstanding, because I knew eradicating it was impossible.

For example, even with “RTs aren’t endorsements” on my own Twitter bio, which also states clearly my journalistic affiliations, hangers-on to the Occupy St. Louis exchange on Twitter last fall accused me of kowtowing to, or endorsing the actions of, both the protesters and the police while retweeting accounts from various news sources about a protest. In their rancor, the factions also demanded a subscription boycott of my newspaper, assured that my retweets were evidence of a larger media conspiracy favoring one side or the other. Regardless, the aggrieved were convinced of their veracity and, I gathered from the spam bombs they hurled at me, unwilling to entertain other options.

Furthermore, Jefferson transposes his ideal of Twitter with the reality of it. Imagine stepping into a room where hundreds of people are talking at once — some to one or two other people, some to themselves. Occasionally, one person shouts and the conversations in a portion of the room are diverted, but those resume soon enough. More people enter the room; some leave. But nobody has full grasp of every conversation going on. A lack of intelligence and awareness isn’t to blame; the collective noise was too distracting.

That describes Twitter. The network’s “foundational rules” as Jefferson labels them apply only to civility; they are not in place to guide civic awareness and understanding. And in any wide-open, far-reaching conversation bookended by distractions, part of what we say is bound to be misconstrued.

But probably the one niggling detail of Jefferson’s plea that I found most disconcerting was the phrase “downright tedious to click through” regarding his having to read “retweets aren’t endorsements.”

Tedious, eh? Three words? Is he so time-challenged now that reading three words eats huge gobs of his day? Never mind that Jefferson didn’t have to actually “click through” them — I mean, who clicks on each word they read? A three-word disclaimer does not take longer to digest than a sandwich. Or, “Moby Dick.” Or, thinking through an argument before giving voice to it. In a world where context is king, and social media lacks so much of it, every little bit — even three words — toward understanding is a huge help.

Oh, and by the way. Just because I mentioned GOOD and Cord Jefferson here doesn’t mean I endorse them.