by Susan J. Demas
July 1, 2009

Sadly, I’ve never experienced an actual “Stop the presses!” moment.

As we make that excruciating transition to online publishing, that lingo will be lost as well. There’s something far less climactic (and far less costly) about pushing a button on a computer keyboard to accommodate breaking news past deadline. (Actually, the very idea of deadlines has become somewhat quaint in the 24-hour news cycle, as reporters are always on call).

Anyway, the closest I came to that kind of drama was during the fiscal 2005 budget crisis when I was working for a small Livingston County daily. The edict came down on Thursday from CEO Phil Power that all of his Michigan papers — down to his weekly shoppers — were to chuck everything and do a special package on the local impact of deep budget cuts.

Power — who has since sold HomeTown Communications and now heads up a think-and-do tank, the Center for Michigan — was naturally specific in what he wanted. Papers were to report on and explain the state’s structural budget deficit. We also were to outline why General Fund budget cuts were so painful, because certain areas couldn’t be touched — Medicaid, because we’d lose federal money, and Corrections, because there was no political will to turn the bad guys loose.

Anyone who knows Phil knows he has strong opinions and a vision for this state. He was a demanding boss, but it was terribly refreshing to work for someone who was born and bred in Michigan and had a stake in its future.

For the Livingston Daily Press & Argus, which didn’t publish on Saturday and barely had any staff working weekends, we essentially had a day and a half to pull together some very complicated stories. It also meant dumping the Sunday feature on something like the best place in town to get a burger, which was not exactly a tragedy.

Coming from the second-largest paper in Iowa, I wasn’t a newbie at covering budget issues. The Hawkeye State had experienced its fair share, especially during the recession following 9/11. I’d pounded out stories that wrote themselves on the local drug clinic and food bank suffering at a time when people needed them the most. But I had primarily concentrated on Middle East and women’s issues because they were a niche that more experienced reporters weren’t interested in (imagine that in Iowa) and those were the halcyon days when newspapers could afford reporters to cover more than murders and the occasional City Council meeting.

But when I was assigned to write the story on how 16 townships were dealing with revenue sharing cuts, I realized I needed a crash course in the Wolverine State’s budget. Luckily, I knew I could call the invaluable Citizens Research Council of Michigan. And their dozens of reports on the budget and structural deficit (that seem to be cheerfully ignored by our lawmakers year after year) are posted online for all to see.

For someone who had been a Michigander for all of a few months, it was an eye-opening experience to detail the local layoffs, office-hours closings and shuttered road projects. The basics I learned about the budget in 36 hours have helped me in every job I’ve ever had since. And I was so blown away by the depth of Michigan’s crisis that I scribbled a second story comparing our budget deficit to that of other states.

Back then, there weren’t many papers with a circulation of 15,000 that put together such an in-depth package on something as thorny and unsexy as a state drowning in red ink. Come to think of it, I don’t recall The Detroit News or Free Press going there, either.

But five short years later, the idea of any news outlets doing that kind of coverage is laughable. The big papers will run a few 15-inch stories (even online, where space is limitless) on budget cuts and do big, sensationalized covers if there’s a tax hike, complete with screaming headlines that we’re all gonna die for paying an extra cent on dog grooming. TV reporters will do sob stories on laid-off cops and disabled kids turned away from the doctor, or cheap non-stories about government waste at the new state police headquarters (I’m looking at you, Steve Wilson). And small newspapers are pumping all their resources into online features (send in your pics of your cutest pets!) until their corporate masters inevitably shut them down.

Today’s budget coverage — or more precisely, the lack thereof — demonstrates the sad state of journalism in Michigan today.

First Gentleman Dan Mulhern wrote me a few weeks ago in response to a column I wrote comparing Michigan’s budget crisis to that of other states (sound familiar?). Mr. Mulhern, who was extremely gracious, given some of the columns I’ve written about his wife, bemoaned that no other media were breaking down the budget and putting it in context.

“With the demise of papers and of a core culture — in favor of Springsteen’s ‘57 channels and nothin’s on’ — it will be interesting to see how we ever get a level of citizen education,” he remarked.

Which should be the primary function of the media, of course. But that started to get lost decades ago when companies became obsessed with turning big profits. And these days, when papers are losing money at the rate of the state Treasury (ironic parallel alert!), educating the public ranks dead last on the priority list for most.

I know many of my Capitol press corps colleagues are sick of sparring with editors to write those detailed budget stories. People only want to read about the death of Wacko Jacko, don’t you know. Keep fighting. We can’t make people care, but we can try to make them just a little bit more informed.

Susan J. Demas is a 2006 Knight Foundation Fellow in nonprofits journalism and a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service.