Op-Ed Columns

So, I guess I’ll talk about my career. Not as a totem to be looked up to in awed fascination (an appealing picture but my wife will be there), more as a framework to make some points about the craft.

Luckily, when the distant thunder of Brown v. Board of Education burst into the civil rights storms of the 1960s, I covered two sensible Southern governors in North Carolina who contained the fear and anger that fed demagogues like George Wallace elsewhere in the South.

In Washington, I was covering Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department during the 1965 March on Washington. I was struck more by the civil rights anthem, which I heard for the first time, than by Dr. King’s speech. I came away convinced: They are not afraid. They will overcome.

Useful, exciting experiences, but they did not prepare me for my role as editor of the family newspaper. Views that were conventional in North Carolina and Washington were radical in George Wallace’s Alabama. We were, for a time, strangers in my own hometown.

I was certain I knew what was right and what was bound to happen, and so I attacked the story with plenty of indignation, if not a surplus of forbearance or wisdom. It was a helluva story:

We had a Freedom Rider bus burned, a Ku Klux Klan rally downtown, ministers attacked by a mob on their way to integrate the library, racist rallies on the courthouse steps and a “nightrider” murder. We covered the good, the bad and the ugly, and at times there were hard feelings between the Chamber of Commerce and a few local merchants.

Standing up for justice

We did some old-fashioned crusading, and I don’t have any apologies to make. There’s no objective view of racial murders or denial of basic rights. Things turned out OK because, in the end, we reported a success story: Local black and white leaders did the right thing.

Maybe unbridled indignation helped, but that’s not the equipment to take to every story. For instance, Anniston was blessed with 7 percent of the nation’s supply of nerve agent, and the Army wanted to incinerate the stuff in a billion-dollar furnace that’s still burning.

I didn’t know enough physics and chemistry to make an independent judgment, and we weren’t willing to take the word of the generals and colonels who told us how safe incineration is. We didn’t support burning until we’d interviewed the chairman of a National Science Foundation expert panel who said that it was the best of bad alternatives.

By now, you should have gotten the point of the speech: When faced with evil, go after it with unrelenting passion, but if something’s complex, and you don’t understand it, bring in or find outside, independent experts.

That’s eventually what we did when we found that a branch of Monsanto was dumping PCBs that were mutating fish in local streams, and in our search for solutions for inner-city schools about to go under.

These were all pretty big stories. The New York Times covered the nightrider murderer’s trial and the PCB story, but we’d written 100 stories about both issues before The Times came and after they left town.

We hop on the Big Story. That lights our fire. But what do we write about in the long, long dead periods between Big Stories? How well do we cover that enormous story that gives context to every aberrant Big Story, the one news beat without a name?

How well do we cover normality?

For instance, what is the yearly sum of the contributions of local churches in health care, clothing, food, flood and hurricane relief, prison ministries, etc.? In the millions, I’d bet. That’s normality, and it’s big.

When I’ve been in a town for a few days and haven’t gotten a scent of the local culture, I know it’s not a very good paper. They don’t know how to cover the story that frames everything else — normality.

We do some of our very best work when we clothe a tough or complex story in the simple uniform of normality. George Smith told how morale rose and anxiety over integration eased at a rural high school when new black football players helped the team to a winning season.

And I often cite Basil Penny’s moving biography of the family’s mule, Kate. In 700 words about an irascible, beloved farm animal he charted 50 years of Southern economic change. The last line was: “They came and dragged Kate away with a tractor.”

Keeping it local

“Historically, it was geography that shaped America’s news outlets,” said Hodding Carter III, son of a Greenville, Miss., publishing family and formerly Knight Foundation president. “But community journalism makes up little of what journalists, as a group, talk about. Big Journalism takes the stage, its heroes and scoundrels rising or falling to great fanfare. Who speaks for the journalism of Main Street?”

We do, and we think we have something to teach the Big Journalism media who seem to have lost connection with the people they serve. With our partners, the University of Alabama and the Knight Foundation, this fall we’ll become something unique in the field of journalism, the nation’s first “teaching newspaper.”

Our free-tuition master’s candidates, supported by a living stipend, will work and study in The Star’s newsroom, live and go to church in the community. They’ll be present if we have to confront the DA over a subpoena or when the call goes out “all hands on deck” for an emergency.

They’ll be learning and writing about life as it’s lived — not out of a textbook. If there’s one thing experience tells me the teaching newspaper should teach, it is this: Get it straight; get it whole … and above all, give a damn!