All in a day’s work

All in a day’s work

For the past two years, the staff of The Vindicator has been awarded a general excellence award in an annual competition with its like-sized Buckeye State peers.

It’s a process that judges newspaper work in about 30 categories, such as photos, sports, design, graphics, online, breaking news, investigative reporting, business writing, etc.

We put up our best work of the year in those categories, and if enough of our work earns first, second or third places, we win the “General Excellence” award.

We find out in May.

But this week, the work toward that goal swamped our office, and especially staffers Sarah Foor, Tom Wills and Robert McFerren. This “second week of January” ritual is an annual passage for us. It’s exhausting in many ways and a fun stress in other ways.

It is also a poignant reminder of the great work and service that comes from our address to thousands of addresses in five counties.

It’s something that is easily forgotten in the everyday, by-the-hour cycle that is the news business.

In the newsroom, we easily overlook it because we’re always trying to survive the day – 365 days a year.

In the community, it’s an even more fickle issue. It’s easy to undervalue a product such as media that comes out each day.

Further, audiences are tough. Critical judgment generally comes out first. So when you come out every day, by the time positivity can rise up, your next edition or broadcast is out, and the judgment cycle starts anew.

To look at 12 entire months in one sitting, it’s a reminder of the impact of the Valley’s best local journalism. Here’s how 2015 looked to us via the contest process:

Mill Creek Lake closures

Mill Creek MetroParks has been a gem in our region for 125 years in the heart of Youngstown. Three lakes have been a centerpiece of the park for more than a century – boating, fishing, waterfowl, etc. They never have been closed off to the public. Until 2015.

Our reporting in 2015 created great context and perspective as the community grappled with sudden environmental issues. We uncovered – and republished – a two-newspaper-page essay by the park’s founder, Volney Rogers, warning about the dangers of running city sewers through the park, which was published previously in The Vindicator’s “These 100 Years” book.

We were quick to point out that today’s government leaders were not to blame. But we made sure to report how they can work harder to provide an end to the madness.

Youngstown schools dilemma

Youngstown city schools have endured struggles similar to many urban systems in Ohio and America.

In 2015, local leaders, the state Legislature and Gov. John Kasich stepped in with drastic measures to put the district under the control of a commission and an appointed CEO.

Many local school and government leaders cried foul, saying this decision was simply a Republican-led conspiracy to strip away local school powers.

Our extensive work yielded news that various officials would otherwise dodge.

Heroin plague

Our nation cannot elude the long shadows of heroin abuse, and our region is no different.

While it’s been a problem for years, 2015 was different.

This was the year we started to see families include in their loved ones’ obituaries that their lives were ended by heroin. We also had users beg for jail time. And we saw people die within a day or two of getting out of jail.

We took this lead and developed a series of tough-but-true portraits of the human cost of heroin abuse.

The significant narrative we wove in 2015 winds through so many other critical issues for the Valley:

The Oakhill indictments, Ron Gerberry’s resignation, Warren native Kelly McCracken and her U.S. Supreme Court quest for gay-marriage rights, Republican and political newcomer Ralph Meacham’s dramatic first day as county auditor in an otherwise Democratic landscape, the tragic fatal fire on Powers Way that spun into a real-time murder mystery involving a sex-assault victim, Youngstown’s new speed- camera ticketing program and so much more.

That’s just some of our significant coverage. There’s more. And our day-in, day-out list of impactful reporting is vital and impressive even without rising to contest-level work.

We raised our prices for the paper recently. Price hikes are not popular. But funding journalism as noted above is not cheap.

The advertising that has subsidized journalism for two centuries is now fragmented in hundreds of different directions that did not exist just 10 years ago.

Just last week, the Philadelphia newspaper industry was converted by its owner into a nonprofit foundation as a way to find a new model to provide for local journalism.

Downtown Youngstown resident/architect Ron Faniro gleefully re-enacted for me this week his recent flustered moment with our price hike. His morning “must” ritual for years has been: Order his coffee and his roll at his next-door coffee shop; then go out and plunk his two quarters into our machine for a paper. His day is not off to a good start if these do not happen.

Then one day, his two quarters did not work. He put them in again, and again, and again ... still no paper. Then he noticed the sign asking for a third quarter.

Media friend George Farris had his own price-hike demonstration for me:

He wrote an “angry” letter about the price hike, exercising all his media skill to poke at us. At the end of the letter, he let me off the hook.

He said the same thing that Faniro said:

Local journalism is a vital resource and needs to be funded in some way. Our new prices are still a great deal for the role that we serve for the Valley.

Thanks, guys.

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.