Editors influence but don’t control, can’t control even how small newsrooms work. More so than in other fields, this job is very much herding cats. The harder you try, the crappier the result. It’s practically an equation. M = C squared. (M for managing, and C for, well, crap.) This is no military service, elementary school, police department, court, hospital, publicly traded corporation, dentist office, PR firm or McDonald’s. God no. Big papers at their peak kind of forgot this simple fact, along with their tiny brethren trying to emulate them. I think much our trouble as an industry stems from that, actually. The best and poorest quality of journalism as a discipline concerns this directly. The practice took a distinctively professional turn with the overwhelming majority of reporters and editors coming from college, many with degrees in the thing. This elevated the work generally, but best practices became groupthink along the way.    The essential problem is that journalism itself is an antithesis of professions. There is no credentialing, tests to pass in order to practice, no codes subject to overview, no bar, board of review, no law governing or deciding what is journalism and what is decidedly not journalism. Some conventions, sure, but no real rules despite what your favorite professor declared. With our degrees, though, we talk like priests about owning truth. And this is true enough with the methodology of the pursuit, much like science and its adherence to the scientific method. We practice the palest form of that, aiming to tell true stories accurate to primary sources of factual assertions. Alas, the complete truth is often unattainable between documents that can’t be accessed, sources who can’t or won’t talk, reliance on the perspectives of those who can and do, and the perception and skill of the reporter. Beyond this, journalistic entities take on a wide spectrum of approaches between watchdog and booster, community bulletin board and sensational, shallower and deeper, what-focused and why-focused, along with the differences between small town and metropolitan and on to national/international media, never mind the tilts red and blue in political coverage. Also, the base assumptions of the 25% of Americans who earn college degrees of any kind and the rest of us. I will throw in here the fact that 75%-80% of the reporting and editing positions in 2002 are gone now. This means much of what we disparage about “journalism today” is actually the emotionally charged, eyeball-seeking, fact-light work of influencers, pundits, propagandists and “opinion journalists,” whatever that is but epitomized by Bari Weiss, now chief of CBS News. Seeking the plain truth among this set has become one of several considerations and not the most important. That, and for various reasons the American public has gone stupid, less able to recognize what news is and even less interested in junk like facts, evidence, accuracy, context. Or maybe my natural skepticism has soured into full cynicism. In any case, I work for that perhaps diminishing sliver that does think critically, seeks to understand its community, prizes verified evidence, takes real interest in local issues and how we might collectively better negotiate them free of hot gossip. I know this makes me peculiar, even eccentric. I mean, I read books, logging 100 in 2025, having long ago dropped social media other than light monitoring for work along with most television.   I can’t see the point to trying to reach people addled by social media through the platforms that have addled them with real journalism. Might was well scrape a healthy dinner plate straight into the toilet and flush. That literate, civically interested sliver is a self-selected elite, perhaps, but that’s who I think about when I write and aim to reach in our work. I know the news media industry broadly remains obsessed with metrics, which feeds a mania to tap into the ethos of social media, mistaking meth for nutrition. But it’s noisy out there. I understand the zeal to make every posting viral, even if that is basically meaningless and meaningless to why we’re here. Only so many people naturally are interested in what we, KPCW and Town Lift have to report. For them, we’re an oasis in a nation blistering into news deserts. I guess I see a disease of disinterest in reality spreading rapidly. Mental health as a result has degraded. Cognitive abilities have degraded. Political wisdom has degraded perhaps most of all, and at every level. My interest in contributing to that is, well, zero. So I lean more toward life and capturing what it’s like to live here versus somewhere else. Government coverage and investigative work have their places, but one tends toward dullness and the other relentlessly gotcha and depressing when overdone. The kids getting their cars ready for a demolition derby, the husband and wife adventurers, the retiree turning to fine breadmaking, that’s more the stuff. What’s special, what’s wretched, why are we here and not somewhere else even as we moan about traffic that’s not so bad outside commuting time, exaggerate some developments and ignore others, bear with a higher cost of living and talk about how we need to make this community more accessible yet protest vehemently the most obvious steps to do so? Among issues, where does the city’s 5-acre site in Bonanza Park fit? Some residents are intensely interested, others wonder what the fuss is all about, visitors naturally are oblivious and second-home owners confused if they think about it at all. Yet this concerns Park City’s future more than maybe anyone realizes. You can tell by the quality of the critics’ arguments — it’s their time now, after all — something about the state of knowledge today. I take heart at some of it, and note those who clearly have paid little attention and cringe while they proudly voice their utter ignorance. Clearly, our work here is not done. But I’m not discouraged. Distribution year over year has increased by nearly 25%, revenue by 10%-20% so far. These are side indicators to the news effort. The loud know-nothings will always be a drag on a community. But that sliver, I’ll call it a valuable vein of ore, shows a lot of promise. The best sign might be the critics who know what they are talking about. I see that, too, and even dare to hope.   Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745. The post Journalism Matters: All the news that fits in an addled world appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less