Explaining Paucity in Primary Election Coverage

There are few things more seemingly futile than trying to get people interested in local elections, particularly in an off-year, when no presidents or governors are on the ballot.

Double that sense of futility when you're talking about local primaries.

But you won't have to look long to find a Mercury editorial about how important they are; that particularly in the case of school boards, you are electing the people who will impose the largest portion of your property tax bill; the local Democracy is where it all starts.

Since school board candidates can run for both November ballot lines, the primary is often when these most important elections get decided, when the fewest people determine those who will vote on your largest tax bill.

Key to pushing the sisyphean rock up the hill of informing a largely disinterested public are local newspapers.

And they are dying, around the country and around the corner.

Staff cuts limit our ability to get to every election and, when breaking news rears its head, the time available to do election previews gets even shorter.

All of this is by way of long-winded explanation and apology for failing you during this year's primary election cycle.

I don't say this to elicit sympathy, but in anger because you deserve better.

Two years ago, I managed to get every municipal and school board election covered by using a web-based survey program called Survey Monkey to invite candidates to let voters know a little bit about themselves.

I had intended to do that for the primary elections, but multiple shootings, bullying issues, SWAT teams, school closings, threats to cut school music programs and just everyday working to cover municipal meetings combined with some family health issues to erode away the time I had available for that work.

When I looked through the three county election pages, I counted 91 candidate profiles that would be required to adequately and fairly complete that task.

The Mercury's free election website.

We did manage to fulfill what I consider the most basic responsibility and at least let everyone know who is running in our coverage area, and get it posted on our free web site, where basic election information can be found in both map and spreadsheet form.

And stringer extraordinaire Laura Catalano did the heavy lift and profiled all 17 people running in the Owen J. Roberts School Board race.

But there is also a hotly contested race in the Perkiomen Valley School District. And in Lower Frederick, the county Republican committee has waded into a tangled race to fill new seats on the board of supervisors approved by voters last year.

I know about these things, but cannot responsibly report on them without more staff, more time, or a working cloning device. It may sound silly, but this stuff keeps me up at night.

But even in the era of Trump, reality is ultimately unavoidable.

With fewer staffers available to cover those "must-have" stories about shootings, stabbings and all the

other stories people say they hate, but read voraciously, the primary election coverage fell away.

And I feel badly about that because I feel strongly about the local paper's responsibility to cover those things, even if hardly anyone pays attention.

When I'm throwing shade about the importance of local journalism (and I'm doing that a lot these days)  I usually point out that the nation's founders did not enact the First Amendment to ensure our right to cover car crashes. It was, first and foremost, to preserve the ability to independently inform residents about their government, and to provide a platform to criticize it when warranted.

That gets harder and harder to do every day.

If you're an WHYY radio listener, you may have heard me on the radio Friday morning in a story about "ghost newspapers."  The term refers to newspapers that exist mostly just in masthead, but are filled with copy-and-paste press releases from government and local organizations, put there by skeleton staffs scrambling to fill pages when they have no writers.

I try very hard to get the things covered that need to get covered, like elections, but when there are three municipal meetings a night you should cover, the laws of physics dictate you can only make one (although sometimes I can slip into a second one halfway through).

Some things will by necessity, fall through the cracks.

Although the hollowing out of newspaper staff is a national trend, it is being accelerated in this area by hedge fund ownership; the evidence shows that companies like the one that owns The Mercury, are not about keeping the business sustainable.

Hedge funds that own newspapers are more concerned

with assets and profit margins than journalism.

They are about extracting all the value until there's nothing left. Then they move on to the next distressed company and a community is left without a local news source.

It's no accident that The Mercury's landmark building was sold, or nearly every other one owned by Alden Global Capital.

You can read more about that here.

That's what happens when Wall Street gets involved. Profit is the top motive. I understand that and would expect nothing else. I just wonder if Wall Street hedge funds are the best choice to own institutions on which local democracies partially depend.

We can all breath a sigh of relief that Alden just lost its bid to try to take over Gannett, one of the world's largest newspaper publishers, and practice its particular form on journalism on those properties as well.

The front page of Friday's Reading Eagle

But the threat remains locally.

For those on The Mercury's Facebook page who relish pointing to The Reading Eagle as the example of what The Mercury should aspire toward, I have some bad news for you.

MediaNews Group, Alden's latest name change, was the only qualified bidder for that paper as well in it struggles with bankruptcy, a struggle I have survived twice.

It gives me no satisfaction to write that.

Because although I sometimes ground my teeth when The Eagle got a story we didn't (and for the record, that RARELY happened), I have always known they were an excellent newspaper.

And I know Berks County readers will be more poorly informed as a result of this sale, if it goes through. And that's not good for anybody.

Studies have shown having a local newspaper reduces municipal borrowing costs because of a lesser likelihood of corruption going undiscovered.

Other studies show that communities without local newspapers become more politically polarized and less engaged in their local government and fewer people run for office.

That's the last thing we need around here where an army of Facebook complainers threaten to vote out the current Pottstown Borough Council members, only to have all but one of them running unopposed -- again.

Which brings us full circle to local elections.

I intend to at least try to do candidate questionnaires for the November elections, when there are fewer candidates left in the field, I but hesitate to make that promise.

After all, news keeps happening whether I'm working or not.