Letter to the Editor: Hometown press doesn’t take duty lightly
Lee Raynor, the storied former editor of The Free Press, could be, let’s just say, taxing to work for. Admittedly sometimes, I was also a challenge, and we didn’t always see eye to eye. Or eye to toe. Or eye to “hey, I think she’s in the back room.”
One of the things she did say, however, that I remember all these years later is “there’s no good news or bad news. There’s just news.”
She was absolutely right, and that’s a great philosophy to have, but it’s a harder philosophy to live out when you live among the people you write about every day. These days the first thing everyone wants to do is “blame the media,” and perhaps the national media organizations have set themselves up for that kind of criticism. But I wish people could see inside the offices of their own local outlet—if the corporate gods have been kind enough to leave an office in their town. No one at your local media outlet, and I say this with confidence, is part of any conspiracy from any wing, tail or beak. The majority of people in that newsroom are just starting out in their careers. They’re not making any money and might even qualify for food stamps if they looked into it. They are constantly being asked to do more and more with less, just like most jobs, and just like most jobs, they will sometimes make mistakes. Imagine if you made a mistake at your job and the whole town, not to mention the internet, could see it.
But we stick with it, sometimes sacrificing family, health and finances, because we love it and we come to love the communities we cover, whether we lived there all our lives or got our start there. I was not a Kinston native. I think the first time I heard “Contentnea Creek” I made the volunteer firefighter say it six times and I still wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about. But by the time I left North Carolina after those first five years, I knew Lenoir County from one end to the other, including among many things, a mental map of exactly which roads and areas are going to flood first.
When I came back to North Carolina to work in Kinston a second time, it was in part because the place was as much a home to me as anywhere else I’d lived. It wasn’t long before that connection to home was tested, when former Sheriff W.E. Billy Smith resigned and then shortly after died of cancer. He is buried in his church cemetery in Deep Run, after a small, sweet ceremony that was nothing grand and I’m sure exactly how he’d have wanted it. It ended with Taps. Taps always gets me, especially if it’s for someone I thought as much for as I did him, and I started to cry. That’s when Smith’s successor, Sheriff Chris Hill, saw me and asked if I was alright, which of course made me cry harder.
That story is not told to make that event about me, although the end is sort of funny. I tell that in the hopes that people realize, those reporters and the dreaded “media” they see out, be it at the Festival on the Neuse, or the county commission meeting, or a car accident or a flood or a tornado or an unnamed disaster or calamity yet to come—they might be media but they do still have souls. You can’t cover some of the stories I’ve covered and see some of the things I’ve seen over the last 20-plus years and not be affected by it. And unlike first responders, the press doesn’t have any real way to debrief or decompress.
In a town like Kinston, your media isn’t a face or a name on a screen. They walk among you. They are at the Food Lion or King’s or your church, or maybe even your kid’s school if they also have a family. When the hurricane comes, it doesn’t skip over their house. They will be firing up the grill and cooking everything in the freezer just like everyone else.
So no one should ever think for a minute that, especially on the local level, information that gets shared is done with any kind of cavalier attitude or ulterior motive. When you celebrate, we celebrate with you. When disaster strikes, we want to be the first to try and help. And when the unimaginable happens, we agonize with you. No one here is untouchable. We are human. It could be any one of us.
Jennifer Shrader
Former Managing Editor of the Kinston Free Press
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