Reporter’s notebook: It’s hard to say goodbye

It’s my regret to say I’m leaving the Mountain View Voice after four years as a reporter. I’ve treasured my time chronicling local news, and it saddens me to depart when there’s so many story threads that remain incomplete. But realizing I am no longer a young man, I see little choice.

It’s a bittersweet experience: On the one hand, I can move to a higher-paying career and maybe my family gets more security. Maybe I won’t be haunted at night by questions like: Can my family ever own a home? Will my daughter get into a good school? Can I save for retirement?

But I can’t shake the disappointment in myself and my profession. I deeply love covering local news, and this career has nurtured my curiosity and passion. My newsroom colleagues are an inspiring group. While they often act like jaded know-it-alls, they also know the meaning of sacrifice and integrity for the greater good. They are smart, creative and hard-working, but they are suffering from an existential crisis.

Why is this such a wretched time for American journalism? The demands have never been greater, while the rewards get slimmer with each passing year.

Today, it seems the best-case scenario for a newspaper is to get bought up by some benevolent billionaire because hope is hard to find. It isn’t coming from our area’s vaunted tech companies that are responsible for undermining the publishing industry. These companies highlight the millions of dollars they are dedicating to journalism, but this is never free money. I have yet to see a journalist’s salary underwritten by Google, and what aid they do provide is always premised on promoting their platform and products. (Wasted money, in my case — I’m already writing this using Google Docs.)

If fair and accurate information is the diet of democracy, then we are at risk of a famine. It’s already happening in subtle ways. It’s simply harder to get calls returned from city and county sources. New government data portals that claim to offer transparency are routinely shrouding information. Some cities and agencies now simply ignore public requests for information, where before they at least had the courtesy to scare you with fees and delays. (Mountain View’s city clerk is a heroic exception.)

The local news business has every temptation right now to regress into a vapid shell, producing nothing but fluff. I’m confident that Mountain View and a handful of other cities will remain safe islands of robust news coverage. But what worries me is the areas that lack our affluence and clout. Scores of other cities across California and the U.S. are fast becoming part of a growing news desert. One in five newspapers has folded in the last 15 years, and hundreds more have become “ghost papers” with no original reporting.

In the Silicon Valley spirit, some people see the news business like any other industry that can benefit from disruption, like a fire that clears out deadwood to regenerate a forest. I don’t share this view. I see newspapers as more like coral reef that forms the baseline for an ecosystem. Once it’s gone, it doesn’t bounce back, and its loss triggers an unpredictable chain reaction.

When I dwell on these thoughts, what cheers me up is my experience in Mountain View. People here actually read the news, talk about it and give feedback. They disagree, profusely, but they also engage in local civics to a degree that I’ve never seen before.

I’m also uplifted by my Voice colleagues. Kevin Forestieri, perhaps the most dedicated reporter I’ve ever met, will be taking over city coverage. And our editor, Andrea Gemmet, always has a steady hand on the tiller.

Most reassuring for me is when I visited the Mountain View High School student newspaper, the Oracle, last summer. I expected apathy, but instead I was greeted by a packed class of more than 40 students interested in a journalism career.

It was inspiring. I just wish I knew what advice to give them.

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