For some time concerned citizens have been lamenting the decline of the nation's newspapers. The root cause of the decline is simple: advertisers are finding other ways to reach their customers, and are buying fewer newspaper ad pages. Newspapers balance their budgets by cutting their editorial and reporting staff and printing fewer news pages. Subscribers find less of interest in the shrunken publications and cancel their subscriptions (or, in the case of younger readers, never start). The newspaper now reaches fewer readers and is even less desirable to the remaining advertisers, who consequently advertise less, and the circle goes around again.
Then came the Willamette Week story on the $7 million that eight local governments spend each year on public relations staff (often former reporters) to get their messages out to the public, employing 94 people at an average salary of $74,000/year for this task. That's a lot of people engaged in getting out what is basically public information anyway, and it's harder for them to get their stories into the Oregonian, because the Oregonian isn't printing as many news pages as it used to.
On top of this, our recent college graduates can't find jobs in the state, partly because of our own economic troubles and partly because, like college graduates everywhere, they don't have any work experience.
Out of this combination of ideas comes the Laquedem Government-Journalism fellowship program. Instead of the fleet of flackery on which these eight agencies spend their $7 million, they will each hire one supervisor at, let's say, $125,000/year. That's $1 million. With the remaining $6 million they hire 200 graduates of Oregon's public colleges at $30,000/year each, to be government-journalism fellows. Each one will spend 4 days a week working on the agency's communications and advertising, and one day a week working on reporting for the Oregonian, the Tribune, the Skanner, the Examiner, WIllamette Week, the Daily Journal of Commerce, or any other local newspaper that would like their services. Each would be expected to contribute one article a week to their assigned newspaper that did not relate to their government employer. To reduce the possibility that their day job would influence their reporting, the fellowships would last for fixed three-year terms, and they could be fired only if their government employer and their newspaper agreed.
The benefits: a ready employment market appears for graduates of Oregon colleges. The local newspapers get an added staff to bolster their news reporting and attract their subscribers and advertisers back. The agencies get about the same amount of work without any extra cost. The interns become more politically aware as a result of their government work and their investigative reporting, and they get real-world work experience and a modest salary. Our colleges have a selling point to attract students. And our local governments wouldn't be any worse for knowing that two hundred of our brightest twentysomethings were looking over their collective shoulders.