Gatekeeping backlash

It’s been striking to me how personally some people can take our time and space limitations in producing a newspaper.

If we don’t publish their thing when they want it published and the way they want it published, they somehow manage to see that as a personal attack.

Responses have ranged from giving up submitting anything to us in the future, calling or visiting us to complain about it, canceling their subscription, or taking every opportunity they can to criticize the newspaper on social media as having failed to meet the needs of the community.

Yikes.

During my journalism studies I researched the evolution of newspapers and media as gatekeepers, the backlash to that role, and the ways it has affected public perception of news media today. Now I’m living it!

Originally, making hard decisions about prioritizing what’s important and newsworthy may have been seen as a noble public service. You’re going to weed through all this information and tell me some of what I need to know? Awesome, thank you!

Now, there’s a constant danger that it will be seen as an act of smug superiority, passing judgment on the things they care about, or advancing an agenda they don’t agree with. You’re not making room in your events calendar for my thing? You can’t send a reporter to my thing? You can’t offer free advertising for my good cause? You must not care about small businesses / God / my sports team / the community / puppies and kittens.

At best it can create a negative association with the basic act of deciding what to print or publish. At worst it can push people toward becoming anti-journalism crusaders who somehow feel they need to take down an evil institution that’s trying to control what they think.

We try to counter this skepticism with as much transparency as we can offer about how we gather information, prioritize stories, allocate staff resources, and decide what to publish. If someone asks questions or complains, I try to spend as much time with them as I can talking through why we’ve done something a certain way. We publish transparency reports, finances, details of our process and thinking and more. We make ourselves available to groups and organizations that want us to come speak to them about how we work. Except for salary information and a few other details, we’re a pretty open book.

But unless someone is really trying to understand our process in a good faith attempt to collaborate with us more effectively, it can be tough for them to shift their narrative. In some cases attempts at transparency can just give them more fodder for deepening a mistrust of our process.

I have to say, it’s kind of exhausting.

Even though the majority of the feedback and response we get to what we do is positive or neutral, having a small-but-vocal and ever changing group of people questioning our news judgments, our motives, our care for the community, and our commitment to doing the right thing is just rough.

Sometimes it’s even folks who have ostensibly said they understand and value how increasingly rare it is to have a truly local community newspaper covering the area, but then when their thing doesn’t get the coverage they want just the way they want, they drop us like we’re hot.

They have every right to do it and we have every responsibility to seek out suggestions for improving our process and coverage. But for me figuring out — or just accepting — this dynamic has definitely been one of the more challenging parts of the work.