Lessening our kerfuffle

Winning a championship is difficult. Repeating as champs is even more so.

Someone smart pointed that out once.

This past week at The Vindicator, several of us spent a ton of time reviewing our best work of 2014 in hopes of retaining our “Best Ohio Newspaper” award.

It’s fatiguing, but rewarding. It’s rewarding in that 12 months of headlines allows a great measure of our community — who our Valley is, what we’ve done, what we’ve overcome, etc.

Two items stuck out as we compiled our best of 2014:

If Vegas laid odds on Youngstown State University, and you bet big one year ago that the three lead faces of the university in 2015 would be Jim Tressel, Martin Abraham and Bo Pelini, you’d be retired today on the winnings.

One year ago next month, Randy Dunn announced he would leave YSU’s presidency even before he’d found all the toilets in the mansion.

It was a stunning event.

Quickly, people ran to the streets with chants of “Only in Youngstown” and “More proof we are a doomed city” and other “screwed again” victim mantras.

And yet here we are a year later.

The three amigos named above have yet to earn bronze statues and have an enormous task ahead of them. But they’ve provided valid confidence and certain cachet in less than 12 months’ time.

Tressel will appear at The Vindicator on Wednesday to sit in on Vindy Talk Radio, and I will be eager to hear the latest from him.

To be sure, the three of them are not completely popular nor completely perfect. But same as a daily edition of The Vindy, a campus environment at best yields a 60 percent approval rating for its bosses, I would guess.

So though the best success from them still is several years away and never will ever be 100 percent, they immediately changed the YSU dialogue.

I find it funny that nine months ago, as the Tressel presidential push was being pilloried, one argument was “and if he becomes president, what of the NCAA and his baggage from Ohio State? What will they do to YSU sports?”

And not 12 months later, Tressel’s at the coin toss of the first national college football playoff title game and in the coaching hall of fame.

Summing up all of that:

It’s human to often create our own kerfuffle.

And in Youngstown, we tend to be pretty good at it. That’s what I tell folks when they ask me after eight years of living here what I think of the place.

Nothing is more wrong here than in countless other places.

Our poorest problems and our most professional or political scandals dot America.

Here’s what the past 12 months of YSU can teach us, should we want to learn:

Bad things are a common norm in any society, Check in on the Romans for perspective. Do we choose as a community to run or to dig in?

In three YSU hires in 2014, I think enough people chose to dig in.

On another issue — that being the Mahoning County auditor’s race — I’m proud that we dug in in the newsroom.

Established candidates with formidable machines would call it a miracle to win an election in 86 days. What the county Republicans and Ralph Meacham pulled off surpasses even the Vegas-YSU odds noted above.

Lots of factors had to align for Meacham’s stunning win, and I’m proud that the factors include our team’s work.

Providing substantive and contextual content is not easy, cheap or popular.

Our endorsement process, our stories, our online talk radio and our opinion pieces served to be the gritty, undeniable texture that was ballast against the slick sheen of political TV ads.

Creating a deep and durable vehicle for Mike Sciortino to finally answer to, and for a political nobody like Meacham to be showcased, contributed significantly to an Election Day stunner.

No other media can or will do this. In another era, newspapers could do more of it.

We’re not as robust as we once were.

Yet we can be at times.

And I’m glad it came together for the citizens this fall.

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.