Balcom Agency

Yesterday I ran into yet another reporter friend who's been laid off recently -- she's one of the most affable and talented women I've met from the Dallas Morning News. I ache for her and all the others who have committed years of their lives to journalism. Those with pink slips must be wondering if they've gotten their last paycheck as a reporter.  We're witnessing right now the mass bludgeoning of a noble profession (when practiced ethically and responsibly -- and forget the blowhard commentators on TV -- I'm not talking about them). 

I'm talking about the folks that stay until midnight at School Board meetings for the final vote on budgets. The professionals who  dig deep to make sure that budget doesn't include junkets to Florida by school superintendents and their lovers (yes -- that was me back in 1989 as an educator reporter for the Roanoke Times & World-News.) I'm talking about Watergate.  About the mistreatment of injured vets at Walter Reed Hospital. Closer to home, the revelations at JPS of substandard care. We wouldn't know about all these things & countless other abuses of the public trust were it not for well-trained, hard-working, tenacious journalists.

I shudder to think what's going to happen in towns and cities across the U.S. if there's no solid core of well-trained journalists in each community. I'm enough of a Calvinist to believe that every person has potential to cross over to the dark side. Those in power face the strongest temptation.

Here in Fort Worth we need to keep the Star-Telegram alive and thriving. If not, I'm hoping and praying that a major philanthropist steps forward. Perhaps laid-off editors and journalists can band together like they did in St. Louis and start a local online news site: http://www.stlbeacon.org/. 

I spoke several months ago to one of the Beacon's editors. "Sam Zell was right when he said the business model that used to support print and broadcast doesn't work anymore," she said in a speech early last year. "Citizen journalists are incredibly valuable in enriching this diet. But they can't entirely substitute for a press corps which gets trained and paid to ask tough questions and feels obliged to represent all sides fairly. We started the Beacon because we care about taking the best of traditional journalism forward while melding it with the best that New Media has to offer."

A question for Fort Worth: do we care about this?