I want to take you on an odd train of thought, so stick with me. I get mythological as things go on, but what follows is a true story. Names have been changed to protect nobody.
I recently covered a meeting where someone in the audience opined “But no one reads the paper anymore!” When reporting on news of Pierce County, I try to keep myself neutral and unbiased. I'm there to observe and record, not get involved, but my expression must have changed in some way, because I noticed someone looking my way as they suppressed a laugh. At the very least my eyebrows went up and the corner of my mouth had twitched.
The comment was the tail end of a statement implying policies and decisions slip by local citizens because things are purposefully kept quiet, as if our local government is a work of piecemeal subterfuge; keeping things spread out so the big picture is obscured, no one drawing attention to what goes on, no one putting it all together until things are too late— and just maybe it is in the paper, “but nobody reads the paper anymore!”
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, they almost solved their own problem. They don't read the paper.
But you, dear reader, do read the paper. You are reading these words right now. Odds are good you'll read the rest of the words in these pages. Whether you read your local paper in whole or in part, it places you in elite company, a distinguished and mysterious order.
You're a nobody.
After all, nobody reads the paper anymore. But don't fret. I can think of a fairly famous nobody legendary for his cleverness; Odysseus. Odysseus is the central character of the Odyssey, including the most recent film version by Christopher Nolan, which everyone online has already debated to death.
Point is, as the story goes, Odysseus introduced himself to the cyclops Polyphemus as 'Nobody'. Later, Odysseus blinds the giant’s single eye, to save his men from being killed and eaten. Polyphemus's neighbors ask what all the screaming and wailing is about. “Who hurt you, Polyphemus?” Polyphemus can only tell them, “Nobody hurt me!” So the other cyclopes leave Polyphemus to his misery.
Queue up a bluesy rendition of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.”
What I’m trying to say is if you think nobody reads the paper, maybe your singularity of vision blinds you to things of which us nobodies are already well aware. It also begs the question, where is that cyclopean eye looking if not at the paper?
In social media groups focused on local matters I often see people dissatisfied with this or that, and said dissatisfaction is coupled with something like “Why weren't we made aware of this?” The answer is, more often than you might think, it was already in the local paper.
Chatting with a friend, I’m told they had no idea such and such was happening. My bemused reply? I wrote about it in the paper weeks, even months ago.
You can't rely on the television newscasters either. They swoop in like harpies for the big stories; wildfires, murder, anything salacious or dramatic. They soon flap away just as quickly. They care precisely zero about our community, our day to day lives and struggles. They don't have any personal stake in what happens after the next big headline lures them away.
Local news follows the mundane nuts and bolts stuff like budgets and local ordinances. Problem is, some of the local cyclopes don't care about any of that until it becomes an opportunity to air grievances or imply someone tried to hoodwink them.
The nobodies care though, but who listens to them when there's a big, blustering cyclops to pay attention to?
Unlike the bluster online, we back up our stories with sources and data—or we'd get sued right out our sandals and horsehair crest helmets. Researching and carefully writing something takes more time than the push-button answers you get from the latest A.I. oracle. Worse yet, if only the nobodies read the paper while the cyclopes stay glued to screens, we have less money for less staff, so we wind up having to do more with less. And where do you think those A.I. oracles like Google and ChatGPT are scraping the data for their answers on local news questions—from us!
It's a vicious circle. If you want quality local news, you have to read and support it. If you don't, we aren't there to feed the data-scraping harpies and A.I. oracles everyone is so in love with. Without us, the great oracles’ answers get even more unreliable, because the boots on the ground, the process-based news they rely upon and discard as another free resource, is gone.
What then? Is the cyclops going to save us?
Anyway, for all the nobodies out there still reading this, I see and appreciate you. In a way, even if we differ politically, spiritually or philosophically, we are still brothers and sisters.
Keep reading. Somebody has got to.
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