I published my first work of local journalism in, like, five? years last week. Maybe fewer, it’s easy to lose track.
It was a story inspired by a Facebook public post on the Laurel Delaware Town Watch group. I’ve always avoided mining social media outrage for stories, and not only because it feels cheap and easy. The primary problem is that once the Facebook discussion starts, people lock in their positions and double down on their opinions.
But ever since the murder of Cpl. Keith Heacook here in Delmar, I’ve been kicking around the notion of getting back to covering local news. One thing Delmar and Laurel have in common is that they’re practically worthless, news coverage speaking. They lack the ad support to justify full-time coverage.
Town news, such as it is, is relegated to Facebook gossip and the occasional blog by malcontents like me.
After Heacook’s death, the local TV apparatus came to town, asked everyone what they thought of the entire situation, and cut it up into a story. The reporting wasn’t bad, per se, only naive.
Having not covered the town for a few years, I wouldn’t have done much better except that I’d been following the dispute between the police and the town in the months prior to the murder.
I had seen the police going door to door telling residents that the town wouldn’t pay for enough police and refused to offer the kinds of salaries that would attract even a fresh police academy graduate.
Before Heacook’s death, I was amused that the anti-Defund the Police crowd was also living in abject terror that they might be asked to provide our local police with marginally safe working conditions. It was a lot less funny later.
A few weeks ago, when I heard that a new, community-supported news organization was starting up, I reached out. It was a kind of put-up or shut-up moment for me.
I’ve spent the past few weeks reaching out to some of my former town contacts and knocking the blogger cobwebs from my head. Blogging is fun and easy but if you’re going to do journalism you have to tread lightly on moralizing, let alone editorializing. That’s why the editor is so critical. It’s their job to make sure the reporters are serving the community, not lecturing at it.
And so that’s how I found myself committing to keeping a professional eye on Laurel and Delmar. I won’t be doing spot news, running out to crashes and fires, or republishing press releases.
Instead, I’ll be writing big-picture stories that bring a little objective coherence to the din. If I do my job well enough, I might even help people de-wedge themselves from whatever Facebook hills they were willing to die on by offering perspective.
If you know or are someone in non-beach Sussex County, Del. please consider taking out a free subscription to The Delaware Independent. If you find it valuable enough to become a paid sponsor after a few weeks, that would be cool.
For my part, I hope to make it valuable enough that my neighbors think it’s worth a couple bucks a month. If not, no sweat because this is something I’m probably doing to keep doing as long as I feel I’m being useful.
I won’t be writing a lot of town meeting stories, but I will be Tweeting relevant updates from my DelmarvaTweets account if you’d like to give me a follow there. Either way, I’m excited to be back at it, though I promise to have more conspiracy-related news next week after having been on a Lizard conspiracy podcast.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
Podcasts and Stories
Day Drinking on Delmarva
On this week’s episode, I talk a lot about what I’ve written above but also about the pleasure of getting to write nearly all the time. Todd was out and about at the Starboard and also had some insights about getting to do what you love.
You can hear the podcast wherever you listen, or you can subscribe to that newsletter here:
Heavy reading
If you’re in a book club and looking for something to read, you seriously should consider Great Minds Don’t Think Alike. It’s a collection of some of the planet’s most interesting thinkers taking on massive questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be a human being, etc.
The book is actually a collection of presentations and dialogues, but as long as you’re comfortable with that, you’ll get a kick out of it.
That’s the short version of the review I published this week on Medium.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.”