The fire station was just a block away from my home. Once a month or so, sirens and horns would wake me up in the middle of the night.
If the calamity continued, I knew the trucks were going to someone else’s neighborhood, and I would go back to sleep. I also knew, in those days, that if anything important was on fire, I could read about it in the South Bend Tribune the next afternoon.
This was during the early 1980s, when I was a reporter. Part of my job was to share coverage of the police, fire and ambulance beats in the Tribune’s Mishawaka office.
Between 7 and 8 a.m. two or three days a week, that meant making three stops – at the police, fire and emergency medical services departments.
It was tedious work but only took about an hour. At the police station, reports filed by officers during the day and overnight were kept in a metal tray for us. We examined each report, even if we weren’t likely to write about it.
We wrote about traffic accidents only if there was an injury, arrest or major property damage. Still, we were vigilant. If one of the vehicles involved was an antique farm tractor or if one of the drivers was 10 years old, it was newsy enough to be worth a little write-up.
The same was true of incident reports written by patrol officers. We didn’t write about every car break-in or tipped-over trash can. But if a half-dozen cars in a neighborhood were damaged, it was something readers should know.
At the central fire station and EMS headquarters, we would check the log books. We printed lists of every call, destination and action, even if they were all false alarms. The theory then was that if a siren woke you up at 3 a.m., or if a barricade prevented you from getting to work on time, as a city taxpayer, you had a right to know what was happening.
The police beat was just a small part of my job. I also went to board meetings for the city parks, the town of Osceola and Penn-Harris-Madison schools. I typed up local obituaries, wrote about sports for three local high schools and generally made myself available for any story that broke.
Mishawaka had its own section in the Tribune in those days. Our news staff – five reporters and two editors — had at least two pages to fill every day and sometimes as many as six. It wasn’t unusual for any of the reporters to have two or three bylined stories on a single day.
Little of this was glamorous, and these were not stories that changed the world. Our challenge, in the simplest terms, was to keep readers as informed as they wanted to be. If you cared about trash service in Osceola, I would tell you about it in the Tribune. If you didn’t care, you could turn the page and read something else.
In the South Bend office, we had dozens of writers specializing in politics, city and county government, schools, the courts and local business. Our sports staff was unsurpassed in its knowledge of Notre Dame athletics but also reported on 80-some high schools in our region.
You had even more options. We had a news staff similar to ours in Mishawaka working in Niles along with one- or two-person bureaus in places like LaPorte, Plymouth, Elkhart, Goshen and Benton Harbor. We had correspondents phoning stories in from as far away as Kendallville, Rochester and Rensselaer and Three Rivers.
In our heyday, we were delivered to 95 percent of the homes in St. Joseph County. Whether you were the richest person in town or the poorest, you got the same information. If someone tried to stir up trouble with a lie about a person or event in the community, you knew better because you saw the true story in the Tribune.
Obviously, this is not the case anymore.
The newspaper here and others throughout America have been in decline for 20 years. It’s popular to blame this all on the way the internet changed our culture. Our excuse was that the public wouldn’t buy a paper if similar information is free on the internet.
There were other reasons for the decline. Newspaper leaders were short-sighted and sleep-walked through our industry’s worst crisis. We were owned by businessmen, not journalists, and many of them were more interested in counting their money instead of building up our communities.
And if you’re into conspiracy theories, it has made good political sense for schemers to buy and destroy local newspapers. If you want to keep your voters scared, angry and ignorant, you’re better off shielding them from the truth.
Yep, and the decline in newspaper readership has been followed by the rise of politicians who spew hatred and disinformation.
Among other things, responsible local newspapers would have cooled down the rhetoric. Our accounts were not printed unless they were researched, fact-checked and determined to be balanced in sourcing.
Clearly, things are different now. On social media sites claiming to provide local news, I read so many negative comments that simply aren’t true. People say they can’t visit the downtown ballpark, attend weekend festivals or drive down streets like Western Avenue and Sample Street because there are shootings every night.
By those accounts, our local schools are terrible. City and county leaders are corrupt. We are unsafe in our homes and workplaces.
None of these statements are supported by facts.
In my view, this era of destructive rabble-rousing will continue until someone figures out how to make sure our community has what the Tribune used to provide – verified information that is delivered quickly to everyone.
Throughout our community, discussions have begun about how we can “save local news.” I spent 33 years as a writer and editor. I wouldn’t be surprised if the last dollars I spend on this Earth will be for a newspaper. Still, I have to say, a printed newspaper of the sort we had is no longer a likely option.
No hero will ride in with millions of dollars to buy out the current owners, bring in new presses and hire hundreds of people to produce, print and deliver newspapers to every home.
I don’t have a detailed plan, but I’ll tell you one simple thing that would make this community better: Create a web page where people can see the daily log of police calls.
If you check the South Bend Police Department web page (South Bend Police Department | South Bend Police Department (southbendin.gov), the intention was there. The Helpful Links tab includes a SBPD Daily Log, which apparently has never been used.
Why would anyone want to see the police logs? Here is an example: On Sunday, my wife and I saw a city police car with lights flashing outside the County-City Building. Was there trouble with the voting for city elections there? Did candidates get into a fight? Maybe someone stole a bicycle. Maybe a pedestrian tripped over a crack in the sidewalk.
We have no way of knowing why, but a police car was needed on Election Sunday, and that makes me nervous.
It would take an information specialist less than an hour a day to go through the daily log, remove any calls that require confidentiality and send it to a community web page that ideally would include logs from other police and fire agencies within the county as well.
I’m dreaming a little here, but it wouldn’t be too large a stretch then to include public meeting minutes from city and county councils, school boards, library boards and other elected bodies. This would be a huge start toward re-establishing trust throughout the community.
Fear-mongers and racists claim on social media that they are dodging bullets every night on the West Side. The city police have proof that this is untrue. Better information will make our officers safer when they are called to our neighborhoods. We will be less likely to answer a knock at the door with loaded guns in our hands.
We lost more than stories when our local newspaper abandoned us. We lost trust in the people around us.
Nowadays, when sirens sound at night, we never find out where they’re going and why. We wake up wondering, and it’s harder to go back to sleep.