Sunday shift

Must be the Columbus Day holiday weekend stand-in or something. No papers this morning. Maybe they're breaking us in gently for a time when we won't be walking out to get the paper anymore.

I tend to be just like my horses. Break my routine, and it takes me a while to adjust.

This morning, for example, the dogs had left a Folgers coffee can along the lane. Every single horse had to slow down to a stop to check out the new item on their morning trail. The past couple of weeks I've varied their return trip from the pasture, sometimes taking them straight to the barnyard rather than to the pasture next to the yard.

Each time, I felt a tug at the rope. I looked to the side, and whatever horse I was leading was trying to lead me over to the usual field rather than going with me to the barnyard. Though momentary, the veer-off to the right told me that I was upsetting someone's apple cart by inflicting a change in preconceived plans.

With horses, the routine of going to one pasture or another is seasonal. With us humans, however, going out to get the newspaper, and reading it at a certain time of day is, in many cases, almost lifelong.

It was a big shift back in my young adulthood when our afternoon daily, the Spokane Chronicle, died out, and we had to start read the paper in the morning. I actually quit my daily need to read for a while, relying on the evening TV news. At the time, it was too difficult to cram reading a newspaper into with my hectic morning schedule of running off to drill team or just plain getting to school with the chickens.

Eventually, however, I broke into the morning need for news and just got up earlier to allow time for the papers.

Now, that I've gotten that chain of events in cement, they have to pull things like this morning and yesterday morning, and they upset my apple cart, just like I do with my horses. Not fair.

And, in all seriousness, a lot of what we're seeing in journalism is not fair these days. It goes far beyond the late paper delivery. It extends to the hatchet job of news staffs around the country because of economic conditions and because of the transformation of a reading public from print news to electronic news.

And, that's what's really scary.

Our Sunday papers did finally arrive this morning while I was typing the first few paragraphs of this posting. I took time out from typing to read. I read a story---could be the last I ever read in the Spokesman---by Erica Curless, who took a sabbatical from her regular reporting beat to learn about equine massage in Colorado.

Erica's story about her new vocation appeared in the business section, where normally hers are on the front page or within the Northwest news sections. Erica has been a government reporter and occasional feature writer on the Spokesman staff for a number of years.

Now, she's headed off a new direction to make horses feel better so they can perform better, and she was one of the recent statistics when the paper cut its staff the second time in a year.

We, the readers, will be at a loss because the paper no longer offers her skilled reporting of indiscretions, injustices, unethical behavior, governmental decisions, etc. The paper has pared back its staff in a big way, meaning that fewer reporters will now take up the gap of providing us professionally prepared news with professionally trained, well-schooled editors overseeing and scrupulously checking the products we read.

We're heading off from the morning paper to the Internet to learn the truth about our world, and that's getting really scary. This morning, the Spokesman ombudsman pointed out the downside of having our local, regional news coming to us via part-time stringers. Nothing wrong with this, except knowing that a pared-back reporting staff and a pared-back editing staff will likely miss a lot more glaring errors of fact, style, and language.

Add to that the willingness of readers who turn to the Internet to gobble up their "truth," passing it along via email, blogs or websites where other hungry readers have no idea if it's made up, inaccurate or true, and, in many cases, don't care as long as the information feeds their own notions.

The vicious circle of murky (at best) information, often circulated by unscrupulous, anonymous authors, completely unchecked, explodes into a feeding frenzy, and, sadly a percentage of the public who will not check beyond their noses for accuracy, begins to conduct itself in strange ways, based on half-truths, out-and-out lies, and myths.

I remember years ago when I had to cover a story in the Spokesman about a little girl who was accidentally shot and killed by her brother. First, I reported the incident, working every source imaginable to learn the victim's name before the evening deadline. I probably made 60 calls during that afternoon and evening. I learned the name in time for it to appear on the front page of the next morning's paper.

That was not an enjoyable story, to say the least. I remember hardly sleeping that night because of my deep concern that all my details were accurate. In those days, we followed the rule of verifying every fact and even triple checking some. I still felt nervous.

The next day, after the story broke, the editors asked me to interview the little girl's mother. I could hardly imagine myself doing this so soon after such a horrible tragedy, and I balked, suggesting they get someone with more experience to do that. They had faith in the fact that I could do it, and, in persuading me, they made a point to me that I've never forgotten.

When events like this happen, the rumor mills go into overdrive, they told me. It is the responsibility of the media to sift out fact from fiction and, in so doing, the newspaper performs a vital function to bring a sense of reason and calm back to an emotional community.

This is why I feel sad about what's happening in our journalistic circles. The bean counters who keep the papers solvent drive the decisions to cut staff. In their minds, it's dollars and cents that make the difference.

That's where I differ. As I watch the news in all media today, I believe more than ever that skilled journalists are a commodity that we cannot measure in dollars and cents. Truth and the confidence in what we are reading are too important to hit the chopping block.