Missing The Disappearing American Newspaper

A few sobering notes from a report called “The State of Local News 2025” by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University: Since 2025, the number of daily newspapers in the United States has declined by 40 percent. News deserts, defined as a county in which there is no local news outlet, increased from 150 in 2005 to 210 in 2025.

Well, I don’t live in a news desert, but it is getting dry out there.

Map of news deserts--there are still a lot of local news sources in U.S., but many local outlets like The Gazette are far less robust than they recently were. Map from: 

https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/

In November, The Gazette, my local newspaper, announced that it was being sold—going from an employee-owned local company to the property of something called Adams Multimedia.

And the change comes with cuts to the shrinking Gazette news staff. For example, long-time sports journalists Mike Hlas and JR Ogden wrote farewell columns. I’ll miss then both, but JR in particular, since he was very kind to many students of mine over the years.

As an old news man, of course that makes me a bit sad. Four decades ago, I was working hard as a local journalist in a small town in Missouri. Those were difficult, busy days, but rewarding ones, too. I later became a business journalist covering banking and then a professor at a small university teaching media writing and editing skills. Because of my background, I can’t claim to be neutral about news nor the decline in the newspaper industry.

But I also firmly believe we, the larger “we,” are suffering due to the loss of local news. It does feel like we’re living in a time and culture that celebrates ignorance and doesn’t discern well between fact and nonsense. Our “marketplace of ideas” is too often a cacophony of competing “realities” where everyone is shouting and nobody is listening nor watching the watcher.

Dec. 8 front page of The Gazette.

As the Gazette continues, it feels like it’s a shadow of its old self, an army on a long death march that sadly seems to have the end in sight.

The world turns and changes. Back when I was a reporter for The Boonville Daily News, there wasn’t an internet. Communication scholars were aware of a growing online world and anticipated something that they called the “information appliance,” without necessarily understanding it would be our phones that would come untethered from our desks and walls and start accompanying us everywhere and seducing us with their siren call of social media—and, these days, AI deep fakes.

When our attention shifted to the online world and ad revenue followed our ears and eyeballs, the demise of the local newspaper became an almost inevitable byproduct. But the shift of my local newspaper from local ownership to a Minnesota based regional media chain still hurts. In the 1980s, the newspaper I worked for went from being owned by a small chain to a larger regional company, and the shift was catastrophic—the paper became un-tethered from serving its audience and entered a deep decline.

I would wish that a similar fate doesn’t await The Gazette. The loss of many respected and experienced staff members doesn’t bode well. Then again, yet that doesn’t mean that The Gazette could have continued operating the way it had been. The meta forces at work in the media world are inevitably going to reshape who informs or misinforms us and how.

Nothing is as it was—that’s life. The world turns. We hope that the long arc of history is bending towards a better future, but that is clearly not always the case.

I can’t help the feeling that part of our current cultural, political mess is an extension of The Washington Post’s tagline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Maybe there are glimmers of light in new online media yet to emerge but it’s feeling very twilight out there, and that makes me melancholy.

Cue Joni:

 

 

Is Cedar Rapids Fading into a News Desert?

Front page of Jan. 31 edition.

On Jan. 14, the Gazette, the daily newspaper of Cedar Rapids, announced that it’s following the trend of many other newspapers in the U.S.: Daily will soon not mean every day.

Starting Feb. 17, the Gazette will print only three editions per week, on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Otherwise, news of the community will be available via the Gazette’s web site.

Meanwhile, the cost of a print subscription remains the same. The Gazette is making an iffy gamble that people are willing to pay, in effect, much more per printed paper. Their argument, made in a follow-up column by editor Zack Kucharski, is that their cost of reporting the news justifies the continued price.

We’ll see. My wife and I are still discussing what we might do—I am sure we’ll still want the Sunday paper, but if the others papers are available online, is paying for the very occasional print product worth it? Reading the Gazette is a daily habit, it gets passed around the breakfast table, and I don’t think my relationship with the digital product will be the same. But it cannot be a daily habit if the paper no longer is delivered daily.

Well, the Gazette isn’t the only paper that I have an online relationship with. I subscribe to The New York Times, and enjoy skimming its list of stories and picking what I want to read, so the idea of treating a “paper” as an online source is not alien to me.

I hope The Gazette can make its digital presence a bit easier. With the NYT, for example, it was “one and done.” I subscribed, signed on, and their app just keeps me signed on. On both my PC and my phone, the Times seems to know who I am, instantly.

As a print subscriber to The Gazette, I’m supposed to have full digital access to their site, too—but it’s not as smooth. It seems very frequently the Gazette demands that I sign in. In my digital life, I have multiple usernames and passwords, and remembering which applies to The Gazette is not easy for me, and there have been days that I just give up and prefer not to read a Gazette story on their web site rather than find and dig through my password file.

So please, Gazette, if I’m going to depend on your app, keep at it making the app more user friendly. Aim for NYT-level ease.

Gazette web site.

Another issue is that the print Gazette gets passed between my wife and I, and our grandson when he is staying with us. When we’re accessing digital content, only one username or password works, I assume. Is there a way that 2 or 3 “readers” can be associated with a digital subscription so my wife could just as easily install the app and access content as a “household” subscriber who lives with me?

Those are technical issue, adjustments I’m sure The Gazette will consider. The larger issue, to me, is what this change means to The Gazette and to my local news environment.

I know the situation is different, but the same forces that the Gazette contends with have changed the nature of the university newspaper, the Mount Mercy Times, that I advise. We made the decision to cease print operations altogether, as it was be coming too expensive and our readers were out of the print habit anyway.

Unfortunately, at the moment, the status of the Times is not great. Our staff has slowly shrunk, our frequency of updating our news has declined and our online readership has not grown as it should. I hope to encourage students to try some new strategies to boost the Times, but first I must recruit more students, and somehow that was easier when there was a print artifact that reminded everyone that student journalism exists at Mount Mercy University.

I hope that The Gazette can maintain a sense of status and strength when it become more ephemeral, when it’s just dancing digits rather than ink on a page. I’ll miss the morning tug of war over who gets section A first, and the experience of skimming the headlines in my hands rather than on the tiny screen of my phone.

Too many communities in the U.S. have become news deserts. That’s not happening here yet, but it does sort of feel like we’re going from a lush news jungle to a drier, dicey news savanna, where the desert no longer seems so far away.

As a customer, paying the same for less product doesn’t make me happy. But as an old news person, a former newspaper editor, I hope the Gazette finds a way where so many papers have stumbled. Society as a whole is no longer as willing to pay for news, and that has left too many of our citizens subsisting on the junk food of social media disinformation, rather than the richer, healthier diet that a quality daily newspaper provides.

The daily Gazette isn’t perfect. But it will leave a hole, for me, when it is no longer there.

So, from a disgruntled customer, to the Gazette: Good luck. I hope you find a way to make it work but I’m worried.

The End of the Editorial as We Know It

Thanks a lot, Jeff Bezos. Democracy dies in darkness and it seems you’ve turned the lights out.

You got a quarter of a million subscribers to drop the Washington Post by deciding the Post shouldn’t run its already written editorial urging voters to choose Kamala Harris for President. And Bezos is not alone. The Los Angeles Times and the Des Moines Register are joining venerable names in newspaper journalism that have decided not to publish an endorsement editorial in this year’s presidential election.

Are billionaire and corporate newspaper publishers running scared? Or are newspapers returning to their roots? The Post can at least note that 60 years ago it has a tradition of not endorsing presidential candidates, although to cancel a planned editorial via a ruling by your billionaire owner days before an election makes the “we are returning to our roots” explanation a bit thin. However, see excerpt of a Post statement below.

No doubt our politics are becoming more sharply divided. Newspapers have been shedding readers for years, and only a few outlets, such as The New York Times, seem to be getting numbers of online subscribers to compensate for the loss of print readers.

1862 editorial

And online news outlets don’t have the editorial tradition that newspapers have. In 1862, Horace Greeley published “The Prayer of 20 Millions” in The New York Tribune, calling for freeing American slaves during the Civil War. That prompted President Abrahan Lincoln to actually write a letter to the editor in response, arguing his priority was to unite the country, and slavery was not his focus. But months later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which didn’t actually end slavery everywhere, but nonetheless represented a historic shift in that direction.

Most newspaper editorials aren’t that consequential. But I am a fan of newspapers having an active editorial board that can inject ideas into the marketplace of ideas that are worth considering. To me, if the paper covers national news, that makes a presidential election endorsement almost obligatory. It’s one reason I feel lucky to live in Cedar Rapids, where our daily paper hasn’t yet joined the trend of staying silent on the most obvious public policy question of the day.

The argument against endorsements is that a newspaper’s role is to inform so that voters can decide.

Here is the expert of a statement posted by the Washington Post from William Lewis, publisher and chief executive officer:

“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.
“As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:
“‘The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections.’”

Fair enough, although it’s a bit lame in the wake of what appeared to be a personal decision by one billionaire rather than a strategy based on traditional journalistic norms. On the contrary, I think expressing clear, sharp opinion informs in a way that merely reporting facts doesn’t. I think thinking an issue through and coming to a conclusion in a public way is part of encouraging civic engagement.

And it can be dicey, especially these days where the social media information system we’re all part of favors quick, over-the-top outrage because the goal is attention, and strong emotion brings more attention.

So, I understand the strategy that there isn’t much to gain by poking the bear and alienating half of your potential readership. However, I disagree with it. Again, I think “traditional” opinion writing, with its careful, rational voice is important.

Gazette, Nov. 1.

See the Gazette’s editorial endorsement of Kamela Harris. I think it’s clear and carefully written. Part of what the Gazette had to say:

“Trump has talked about using the military and Department of Justice to attack ‘the enemy within,’ including his political opponents. Trump has called Inauguration Day ‘Liberation Day’ if he wins. If he doesn’t, he likely won’t accept the outcome. The best way to avoid the shredding of the Constitution is voting for Harris and dealing Trump a loss he can’t come back from.”

It’s a good editorial—and, while readers don’t always understand this, the reporters who report the news are not the editors who opine on behalf of the paper, so this editorial doesn’t mean that the Gazette’s news coverage is skewed for Harris. (It’s skewed for Harris because objective, fair reporting in the fact-based, rational universe doesn’t favor the clearly deteriorating crazy lying old fascist, but that’s another story).

For an even stronger editorial on this topic, see the New York Times endorsement of Harris. Part of what they have to say:

“This unequivocal, dispiriting truth—Donald Trump is not fit to be president—should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.”

Whew. Don’t be shy, NYT, tell us how you feel.

Screenshot of online version of NYT editorial.

Anyway, I would rather see more newspaper endorsements, even if some are for Donald Trump. I don’t think they move voters a lot. But they help sum up ideas, to sharpen and clarify the necessary public debate in a democratic republic. So, Bezos, you’ve turned out the lights, and you’re not alone. The trend is for dozens of newspapers that endorsed in the past to flip the switch and stay silent this year, when silence is particularly painful in one of our most consequential elections. Darkness, indeed.

And that, to me, the lack of courage to speak out on the part of newspaper editorial boards is a shame.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Delivered papers around campus Wednesday morning--first edition of MMU campus newspaper of the year. Looking forward to having a work study student do this!

 

After two decades, it is apparent that the Afghan military we built to hold the country together was unwilling to resist an Afghan extremist faction taking over Afghanistan. I’m no expert in either military strategy nor in foreign policy, but this does not make President Biden look good.

Nor, to be fair, does it make the younger President Bush look good. Nor Obama. Nor Trump. Two decades of no end point were not enough for us to achieve the impossible goals that we never articulated anyway—although there is also a saying that Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Just ask the British or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Bad as it is to walk away from 20 years of money, sweat and death, the comparison with Vietnam ignores how much bigger an impact that conflict had on America. We lost almost 2,500 American service people in Afghanistan. Tragic as that is, about 17,000 American service people died in 1968 alone in Vietnam, and in the decade that we were engaged in combat there, well over 50,000 American souls were sacrificed.

In both wars, the people of the country where the battles took place paid a much higher price than we did in lives and destruction, something we ought not forget, either. And, as a wiseass man once said, one of the great lessons of history is: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.” See “The Princess Bride.”

Anyway, to me, the decline of the Pax Americana is only tangentially related to Afghanistan. What we face, more fundamentally, is a crisis of discourse—a tendency to ignore unpleasant facts that don’t coincide with our point of view. We have culturally long downplayed the value of education, and now we’re reaping the rewards of a post-literate culture.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. (Too many movie references, sorry. Thank you, “Cool Hand Luke.”)

And it partly is a result of the decline of the American newspaper. In pre-social media days, Walter Cronkite would report the news to America—and CBS in that era was often influenced by sources like The New York Times or The Washington Post. It was the Post that pursued the Watergate scandal, and CBS that eventually started to pick up the story, too.

Well, I don’t want to be a Luddite. The cortex (a “Firefly” reference, what a great name for the internet) may spread lies too quickly, but it does open the world to many more voices. What’s wrong is that the audience isn’t doing well in knowing which of those voices to listen to. In ancient history (say, the 1990s) there was a vibrant newspaper industry that served as the information algae of the media ocean. And today, that medium is in rapid retreat. The base of the info food chain is drying up. A general economic crisis more than a decade ago knocked the newspaper business model off kilter, and the days when the Penny Press model worked are not coming back.

There are recent signs of that decline in my corner of the world. The Marion Times, a weekly paper that served the largest suburb of Cedar Rapids ceased publication this summer. The Gazette is now that community’s primary newspaper news source. And The Gazette is in decline, too. This summer, delivery of the paper to my house became sketchier, as the paper shifted to “driveway” delivery, which will be fun to cope with this winter.

And more recently and importantly, the paper decided to shut down its press. Mary Sharp wrote a long and interesting feature on the move, see link earlier in this paragraph.

Despite owning several daily papers, The Gazette’s local parent company apparently can’t keep that giant, expensive machinery going, and our paper will now be printed by The Register in Des Moines

Why the neighborhood gets to see me in my PJs, paper on the driveway. The horror.

And so, it goes. The world turns.

Not all the media trends today are negative. The New York Times recently reported it has reached a subscription level of 8 million. I’m sure that rating number would embarrass Tucker Carlson, but still, old school journalism is, for some players, growing—at least online.

Online—the Wild West. As Americans, we can’t even agree that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, although it’s clear he did. Some significant portion of our population would rather listen to its own crazy echo chamber than tune into the factual universe. Rachel Maddox calls it Earth 2, and it is Earth 2 that is causing America to lost its spirit.

At the university where I teach, my student editor wrote a column in the first edition of the student newspaper this year stating that Mount Mercy University is lucky to still have a print paper. 

She’s right, although we’re also trying to transition to be a more online source. The problem is, once online, will any students pay attention to us?

Special early issue of MMU Times paper.

Of course, do they pay attention to us now? It’s a bit depressing how “reading” has become so old school among young adults who aspire to be college educated.

Post-literate. Not illiterate, just too busy, too amused, too self-indulgent to bother.

But there is hope. Even if it is the world where a jackass like Tucker Carlson shouts anti-Cronkite nonsense in too many ears, there are 8 million New York Times subscribers and growing. And it was a student, a young American adult, who recognized the value of what a little newspaper on a little campus contributed to that campus culture.

Editor of MMU Times making mages for the issue of the paper that came out this week.

Just today, I received a sweet message from a former student. I had posted on Facebook (the modern town square) that I was distributing the first edition of the school paper, and she let me know how much the paper meant to her while she as in school.

This is what she wrote:

Hey Joe!
I was thinking yesterday while doing real estate photos how much the newspaper and you believing in me helped me be able to do this job 🙂 I have social anxiety that was way worse in college. But having events to go to, having friends on the newspaper really helped me face that fear. Just wanted to say thank you 😊 Hope you’re well!

I am well, thank you. I think I would feel more well if I felt a bit better about the state of our democracy. Seeing Afghanistan collapse didn’t feel good—but it’s not the heart of our darkness.

Experiments in Democracy and Zoom

My screen during Pints and Politics event. I had some issues dealing with the Gazette link--and the monkey is here to say "something went wrong." Iowa is seeking a new motto for it's welcome sign, maybe the computer has supplied a timely slogan: Something Went Wrong.

On Feb. 25, a week I ago, I tuned in to view a “Pints and Politics” panel discussion put on by the Gazette.

They do these now and then, and I’ve been to one before. However, Thursdays tend to be busy days and nights in the academic universe, so sadly I often have to miss these. But I viewed this one and enjoyed it.

Erin Jordan of the Gazette moderated, and Todd Dorman, Adam Sullivan and James Lynch, Gazette writers, were joined by Kassidy Arena of Iowa Public Radio.

The panel talked about the freak winter storm in Texas, Iowa education bills and election reforms pending in the Iowa legislature.

It’s been a week—I’ve been busy—but here are some of my notes from the program:

Best quote: The panel spent much of its time describing some rather strange and anti-democratic ideas in the Iowa legislature—ending tenure, a protection of free speech, in the name of free speech; tightening election rules to stamp out nonresistant vote fraud; rushing through important bills with minimal feedback partly due to a failure to create safety rules during a pandemic—it was a discussion of a legislative session in which one party has run amok. Adam Sullivan, I thought, had the quote that summed up the spirit of the discussion: “States are supposed to be the laboratory of democracy, but they are running some messed up experiments.”

James Lynch had interesting points to make, but also provided the séance moments of the event, as he sometimes froze. I noted that he used a background that had the Gazette name—but it appeared backwards, to me.

A bill that would tighten election rules drew much of the discussion. The bill moved through the legislature at breakneck speech, and Kassidy Arena noted that it did so at a time when many Iowans are reluctant to go to the Capitol—where the GOP leaders have not mandated masks.

That points out what to me is one of the oddest things that has happened in recent politics. Iowa’s governor has relaxed rules as infections, while dropping, remain higher than they were for much of 2020. In Texas, in the week since this Pints and Politics discussion, the governor there cited mysterious “matrices” in announcing an end to state mask mandates.

Is he drinking the same Matrix vodka that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has been drunk on for the past year? Somehow Reynolds sees matrices none of the rest of us see. Not it has spread to Texas like a bad virus. Matrix delusion--the new GOP affliction.

Back to this event. I enjoyed my own beer as I listened, yet I appreciate that Jordan said the Gazette may try some social-distance in-person events this summer. I would have to pay more, but I'm OK with someone bringing me my drinks. Assuming I have a shot by then—and not of whiskey, of a vaccine—I would like to go.

I also thought Arena was a good guest panelist and hope she attends again.

Kassidy Arena of Iowa Public Radio during event. All  images on this post are screen shots of the Gazette event.

I also kind of miss Zoom. Yes, I know, they used Zoom for this event, but I was viewing it indirectly, not via a Zoom link. At an earlier Gazette discussion featuring photographers, the chat in Zoom was an interesting adjunct to the discussion. This event lacked that chat feature, and I missed it

Of course, given the political nature of this event, it’s possible that chat comments easily get out of hand, and maybe The Gazette knows that from experience. As I say, I have not been able to attend these all that often.

I enjoyed this one. Still, the men in the panel, at least visually, all had some trouble—James had the backward background and froze; with his t-shirt and unruly hair, Dorman looked a bit like he was being held hostage in suburban Marion (with COVID-19, I suppose he sort of is); Sullivan had a mantle sprouting from the sides of his head.

From a nicely decorate cell somewhere in Marion, a hostage speaks.

The double X’s in the crowd, in contrast, opted for contacts if they needed corrective eye lenses, had their hair comparatively under control and seemed to have more of a sense about their backgrounds.

As far as the optics go, men, the woman are making us look like slackers. What else is new?

Anyway, apt final word to Dorman, who made a point about the pandemic: “As long as we can get beer and streaming services, we’ve proven over the past year that we can make it.”

Or maybe to Jordan, whose final sentence cut out and finished on these segue words: "until then."

An Emotional Trip Down Derecho Memory Lane

 

Aug. 10, 2020—a day that will loom large in the memory of Cedar Rapidians.

This week, on Wednesday, I zoomed into a session sponsored by The Gazette, our daily paper. Their four-person photojournalism staff shared many images that they made and discussed memories of the devastating storm.

A tornado can be bad. A big, powerful one may stay on the ground for a hundred miles, leaving a sometimes mile-wide swath of destruction. But such monster twisters are rare even here in Iowa where we are used to tornado safety drills and listen for those warning sirens when the summer skies darken.

But the derecho was a whole level of crazy beyond that. We were expecting a storm Aug. 10, but nobody expected an unusual bow of destruction, a bent wall of straight-line winds that would sweep across much of the state, flattening crops, ripping off roofs and uprooting trees as it blew and blew.

Aug. 10, after the storm, C Avenue traffic slows to a crawl as street is blocked by power lines. (Not a Gazette image, see theirs on their video above, all images in this post are mine).

Hurricane-force winds devastated wide areas of the state. Cedar Rapids, its immediately connected communities such as Marion, Hiawatha and Robins, and the small towns in the county surrounding us were hit with a storm that started as a thunderstorm but quickly escalated and seemed like it would never stop. “Derecho” means both “right” and “straight on” in Spanish, and the Spanish word labels a straight-on storm whose violence is hard to image if you have not lived through one.

And in many ways the derecho hasn’t ended. Many homes were damaged—apartments and houses—and the impact of derecho devastation still reverberates in town. One result is that this city, which just last summer featured a beautiful canopy of mature trees, will take a generation to recover its shade. Me and my family were lucky—even though our houses were damaged, and we just signed a contract this week for one derecho-recovery project with more to come.

Last August! I remember the sense of survival instinct in those dark powerless days following the storm. Much food was spoiled, gasoline was not to be had in town, and we had to get creative. But we were among the fortunate one—our problems were manageable and our house inhabitable even if not fully intact.

In Cedar Rapids, we are blessed to have a local newspaper owned by a local company. In many places, photojournalists are an endangered species. We have four talented photographers who freeze historic moments in time, and The Gazette published a book based on their images.

At the session, moderator Mary Sharp noted that Gazette photographers made more than 10,000 images of the storm and its aftermath, and used 1,000 by printing them or sharing them online.

Then, 195 of them were used to publish a book about that storm. The Gazette is donating a part of the proceeds to replanting trees.

Aug. 11, campus of Mount Mercy University. There was a much beloved grove of huge pines that were in the lawn by Warde Hall. Past tense, they are gone with the wind now. Here, one lies on the building the day after the storm. The campus suffered millions of dollars in damage.

Each photographer took turns describing the story behind the images shown Wednesday. Andy Abeyta shot both the image that become the book cover—it was chosen partly because the image had room for the cover text—and the more famous front-page image of passersby aiding a truck driver caught in an overturned truck.

As Abeyta described it, he was in Iowa City that day to make images of a protest there. He was returning to Cedar Rapids when the once in a century (knock on wood) storm blew through. He saw a truck that had just overturned, parked and ran back to see if he could help—but three other people were already there to aid the driver, so Abeyta took out his cell phone and shot some images.

It is an interesting note that a media photographer with fine digital SLR cameras ended up capturing this key moment with his phone. But I think angle, timing and an eye that can quickly see the possible images—I always tell my students that journalism requires imagination, and I do not mean making stuff up but rather recognizing possibilities in gathering information or making images—are a photojournalist’s most important tools.

It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer. Nothing substitutes for recognizing you’re in the right place at a key moment and using whatever tool you have.

All of the photographers—Liz Martin, the Gazette’s head photographer; Jim Slosiarek, who has recorded the first draft of Cedar Rapids history for many years; Rebecca Miller; and Abeyta told interesting stories of many images.

One lesson driven home again and again is the importance of journalists to get out and about—to report by being there. Again, it’s a key point I try to make with my students, with mixed results. Don’t email all your sources or consult Google to retread information—the best journalism is what you find in the world, and you have to be out there to encounter it. That’s always true of photographers, but is a lesson for the rest of the tribe, too.

And, as Martin noted, news photographers are always looking for “the human impact.” Another journalism 101—don’t just show “the thing.” Show what the thing means to people—and that is very true of photography. I often make images of nature—because I’m a journalism professor, not a journalist—but I have a pretty good reputation as an event image maker at MMU, and I always think what I try to do is capture what something means by capturing the emotions of the people.

Things can be important too, and Martin made the point while showing an image without a person in it, so not every news pictures requires a person in it—but people are usually key.

Later in August, power is finally back on. Butterflies, birds, deer--wildlife had been scarce since the storm, but critters are starting to reappear. Here, an angry squirrel on the felled giant ash tree in front of my house seems to hold me accountable for the disruptions to its life.

One question posed was whether the news photographers were invading people’s privacy at vulnerable moments. They all described asking for consent—and for tying to make images in a respectful way that does not interfere with the moment.

And that gets to anther point. People who suffer through an experience like the derecho can be vulnerable—but what they least want is to be ignored. Journalists—photojournalists like this panel of four but also writers, videographers, radio reporters, TV reporters, web site journalists—are there to prevent that, to tell the stories that otherwise might be ignored.

It was a bit emotional watching the images float by. Photography has power because it does freeze an instant in time, and the best images capture the emotion of that instant. And those of us who lived through the derecho can’t help but recall the intense feelings of that time as we watched the slide show on Martin’s shared desktop.

It was an interesting night. I’m glad that the Gazette gave us this opportunity to learn more about the stories behind the news images.

The Role of Journalists: The Story of the Storm

Image by Mark Vitosh/Iowa Department of Natural Resources, downloaded from Iowa Public Radio “Talk of Iowa” web page: Vehicle in Linn County crushed by a broken tree from the August 10 derecho.

A friend on Facebook, whose political leanings I don’t really know, posted an anti-media rant after people in Iowa complained about the national press not paying enough attention to the huge natural disaster that befell our state last week.

NPR just reported this morning, Aug. 19, that the National Weather Service now is saying winds in Linn County were sustained at over 100 mph for over half an hour on Aug. 10, a date that will live in infamy in Iowa. The initial stories in national media about the storm covered a key topic—crop losses—which in an agricultural state are not trivial.

But the derecho drenched cities and people, too. And in the days following the storm, frustration grew that American news media were not paying attention.

The friend on Facebook? “Defund the media,” she wrote in her rant. She added a hashtag: #socialmedia.

I found the post to be almost exactly backwards. Social media has a role to play—a helpful Facebook page for local people to share questions and answers post-storm quickly sprang up—but as we should know by now, social media is the uncontrolled child mind of our collective intellect—a pouty toddler that spouts, unfiltered, whatever is on top of lazy consciousness. It’s often erratic, hurtful, and lacks any scientific or historic context.

Meanwhile, we have already defunded the media, and that’s a huge part of our national problem. Our democracy is dysfunctional and seems unequal to any crisis—whether caused by weather or a virus—due partly to the noise and fury of social media and our collective contempt for “mainstream” media. The fourth estate has become the freak out estate.

Newspapers have been cutting staffs and closing. National news outlets have not been immune to the cutback trend. For a generation, the big three broadcast networks have been gutting their news operations. Congress and the state have pulled back from public broadcasting, leaving PBS and NPR to panhandle for dollars from foundations, corporations and viewers/listeners.

There are lots of reasons why the storm and its tragic aftermath were not the Big Story in the national media that it deserved to be:

• The news telling tribe is smaller and different. Cable TV news has always been more niche oriented and attempts to cater to ideological identities to build the loyal audience that will trust only Fox or MSNBC. We tend of think of the “news media” as an it, when it’s always been a they, and the nature of the they is shifting. “Media” is not a thing, it’s still a large, dynamic system, and the old-school, Joe Friday, just-the-facts reporters are not as easy to find.

• The news audience is shrinking. The internet made information and disinformation available for free. Audiences for news programs and readership levels for local newspapers have plunged. The audience for “news” is still large—the internet means many stories get many eyeballs—but we’ve been trained for 25 years to think of news as a free commodity, not, as it was in the past, a service that was paid for via subscription and/or ads. The Gazette managed to get a paper out Tuesday after the storm, but fewer of us read it than would have in the past, not just because of delivery issues (all streets blocked by felled trees—ironic that dead trees kept a newspaper from being distributed) but also because readership penetration has been eroding for years. It’s long been true in America that we are suspicious of the media for manipulating the audience, and we ignore the reality that the opposite is even more true. The audience builds the media. It’s even more so in this internet era, but always was a key fact: What gets paid attention to in the media environment flourishes; what gets ignored withers. If we pay attention to “The Epoch Times” or other such media outlets, we the audience are building a nonsense media system to replace news media.

• The derecho story doesn’t fit media paradigms. A hurricane doesn’t sneak up on anybody, and there is an information infrastructure built around tracking and reporting such a storm. This derecho was a summer thunderstorm—an everyday occurrence—but on steroids. Derechos have happened before, just not like this. This was a monster storm that formed in South Dakota and Nebraska and swept across the Midwest almost to Ohio. Nobody expected it. Good Morning America didn’t have a reporter on the beach somewhere in a yellow poncho to show that, yes, wind is blowing. It didn’t hit major, known cities on the East Coast or Gulf Coast—no New Orleans, Miami or New York City were in its path. Chicago felt it, but not like Des Moines or Cedar Rapids (or Marshalltown or Vinton). And so, it came, it went, and the suffering it left in its wake was mostly uncovered in the days that followed the devastation.

I am not here to offer simple “solutions.” Franky, I think I’ve only begun to identify the multiple roots of a complex problem. And my delusional Facebook friend at least does have a point: Social media does democratize information. That can be a bad thing when Russian trolls can derail American democracy, but our modern media environment does give voice to the formerly voiceless.

And, to play devil’s advocate, its inevitable that this won’t be the Big Story of 2020. For those of us in Cedar Rapids, we’re obsessed with the derecho and its aftermath—and it is a big story that deserves more national coverage. Yet, this is 2020. An unchecked global pandemic rages and our country is the epicenter because of a totally botched government lack of response. Our dysfunctional political system lurches into another dangerous, dark-money dominated election season, with no adult leadership attempting to rationally protect our sick body politic. The Trump administration is successfully tossing sand into the gears of government at many levels, crippling or hurting the EPA, the Postal Service, the CDC, the Justice Department—it’s a draining of the swamp that is creating a government derecho that will take years to clean up from.

2020: The Democrats nominate Joe Biden this week, the Republicans will crown King Donald I next week. The election seems a world away—a week can be an eternity in 2020—but it sucks up media attention.

The derecho? Yesterday’s news. Well, not really, the suffering is real and continues. Local journalists Beth Malichi and Lyz Lenz have both brought some attention to the storm in the national media, which is good, although on “Talk of Iowa” Aug. 19 on NPR, Lenz bemoaned that it takes an op/ed in the Washington Post to get some national media attention.

“Talk of Iowa” had a show this morning about covering the derecho storm, and it featured some key Cedar Rapids journalists. One was Andy Abeyta, a Gazette photographer, who was out on Interstate 380 when the derecho hit, and he saw multiple trucks that had been blown over. He used his cell phone to make some images of one rescue of a trucker (he had his camera in his car but did not grab it because he ran up to the truck to assist in the rescue, but thankfully others were able to come to the trucker’s aid first).

Besides Andy, it was an all X chromosome show, featuring host Charity Nebbe; Michaela Ramm, a Gazette reporter; Lyz Lenz, a Gazette columnist; and Beth Malicki, a local TV news anchor on KCRG. Here are just three quotes from those journalists that stood out to me:

• “It’s astounding, the level of devastation.” Michaela Ramm, Gazette reporter. She is based in Iowa City and was talking about driving into Cedar Rapids the day after the storm.

• “We’re still struggling here on the ground to get the reality of the devastation—that story—told.” Liz Lenz, Gazette columnist.

• “It (help) came so late that people were truly suffering,” Beth Malicki, KCRG TV anchor. Later, more from Malicki: “It is immoral how the response has not met the need.” She wasn’t pointing a finger at any agency, and was grateful for the many people who have gone out of their way to help, but rightfully bemoaning the lack of coordination.

The country needs to hear our story because aid follows narrative. Which is, in itself, also part of the problem—it should not take tears form Malicki on national TV (reference to her appearance on an ABC program, not the video from PBS I embedded) to draw coverage to Iowa.

I would rather that FEMA be able to find a disaster without having to see it on Good Morning America, a Washington Post op/ed or hearing about it as a trending Twitter hashtag.

Defund the media? I say, put the P back into PBS and NPR. Fund the media. Not because they are popular, but because telling the story is necessary.

If nothing else, the derecho is another example of how starving credible media leads to an information desert that social media does not fill.

How to keep the republic strong in a social media era

Painting n the U.S. Capitol, by Howard Chandler Christy, in 1940, depicting signing of the Constitution.

As he was leaving a meeting of the constitutional convention in 1787, which was debating in secret over a new government blueprint for the infant United States of America, the elderly Benjamin Franklin, so the story goes, was accosted by a Mrs. Powell of Philadelphia.

“Well doctor,” she asked. “Are we to have a monarchy or a republic?”

Benjamin Franklin by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis.

The ever-quotable Franklin immediately replied:

“A republic. If you can keep it.”

At the time, the convention was riven by partisanship. Two political factions battled for power—the federalists, commercial and urban groups who thought a strong central government was the key to economic prosperity; and the anti-federalists, rural landowners who worried that a strong central government might threaten individual liberty.

To get the Constitution ratified, the federalists struck a bipartisan deal. One of the first orders of business for the new Congress of the United States would be to propose a list of constitutional amendments to spell out guarantees of individual liberty, a so-called Bill of Rights.

Today we recognize the first of those 10 amendments as having been crucial in our history to our republic’s public life. And the language of that First Amendment has never been more relevant:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Bill of Rights original text. There were 12 amendments proposed, the first two were not ratified. What we call the First Amendment today was the Third Amendment in the proposal.

Why freedom of the speech and of the press? Well, in the 1700s, the founders were familiar with a radical British political theory that included the ideal of a “marketplace of ideas,” that an educated public with open access to information unfiltered by government authority should be able to discern truth from falsehood and make rational political choices.

And the Constitution that the founders wrote, a flawed document built on political compromises, still lurches along. It spawned a vibrant republic.

Well done, Ben and company. Except …

It’s no secret that the news media in this country is in upheaval. Fewer staff members toil in local newsrooms. At the same time, disinformation spreads quickly via the internet.

The founders who imagined a marketplace of ideas didn’t contemplate algorithms on social media sites that would measure our clicks and preferences and serve us each an echo chamber of our own prejudices. Nor did they contemplate a president governing via Twitter, calling journalists “enemies of the people.”

In Iowa, we get a front-row seat early in each presidential season. For us, the campaign of 2020 has been underway for months.

More than 200 years ago, the founders of this republic recognized that a free press was a necessary condition to have a self-governing, democratic republic. Today, with staffs of newsrooms shrinking, trolls stalking our twitter world, and crazy theories finding an equal footing with truth in the cyber universe, it’s becoming more of a challenge to have faith in the marketplace of ideas.

 What is the role of news media in the election of 2020? How are the ideals of freedom speech and of the press still relevant to our ongoing effort to maintain our republic? In an era when media are called “enemies” and “fake news,” whose information can you trust?

On Constitution Day 2019, Tuesday, Sept. 17, at 7 p.m. in Betty Cherry Heritage Hall, Mount Mercy University will host a panel discussion on how our First Amendment freedoms interact with the 2020 election campaign.

I and another MMU faculty member, Dr. Richard Barrett, assistant professor of political science, will be joined by several media figures—including Zack Kucharski, executive editor of The Gazette; and Lyle Muller, retired editor of Iowa Watch—to discuss these issues.

I hope you can join us and help us talk about these big issues as jointly we strive to keep our republic.

Note: The preceding was published by "The Gazette" in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Sept. 15, 2019, as a guest column on page 4D. The only editing I could find that they did to my text was to add "strong" to the headline and to insert a paragraph mark at the end--the sentence "I hope you can join us" was part of the previous paragraph in my draft. I present the text here as it was published in "The Gazette." Most images in this post are from Wikimedia Commons, except my image of the column and an image of a poster created by the Marketing and Communication office at Mount Mercy University.

Poster on campus. More information on the MMU web site.

The Importance of the Campus Newspaper Experience

I don’t doubt that we’re headed for a post-newspaper world, but I am not in a hurry to get there.

Take The Gazette, for instance. Our local newspaper, which arrives at my house frustratingly late each morning, nonetheless provides an important forum that both covers the news and provides important local commentary on it.

And recently, two former editors of the MMU Times, the campus newspaper that I advise, had interesting guest columns published in The Gazette.

Image posted by The Gazette on Aime Wichtendahl's column.

Aime Wichtendahl, a member of the city council of Hiawatha, a contiguous city with Cedar Rapids, wrote about the impact of proposed property tax caps at the state level. I like to think Aime’s experience as Editor-in-Chief of the MMU Times made the column a bit easier for her to write.

Erika Brighi,
posted by Gazette.

And Erika Brighi, a former managing editor of the MMU Times, explained the “100 Who Care” program in her guest column. Erika was both a writer and gifted photographer, and I know she has carried on the photography interest—it’s great to read her words, too.

I really enjoyed seeing those familiar names in print—and nice that there is still a forum for their expression in the form of a local newspaper. Of course, in the coming post-paper world, online news sites can step in and provide key forums. Today, sadly, the online world doesn’t have a great track record, but I hope that changes.

For now, yay newspapers. They are still important, and the MMU Times is still a force on campus.

Next year’s editor is interviewing students this week to set up her team—and we’ve had the biggest response to our call for applications in years, with more than a dozen students stepping forward. That young woman who will lead the Times has the enviable task of having more willing workers than she probably has slots for, and it’s the first time I recall that happening recently at Mount Mercy.

Something is in the air. The Trump bump? Whatever—on campus, the struggle is to get students interested in reading the newspaper, but a campus without vibrant student media is missing something important. At least it’s not as big of a struggle to get students who are willing to write and edit the paper.

It’s great to see that at MMU, young writers still aspire to produce the news. It’s wonderful to have future editors so ready to take on the challenges of what comes next.

Veronica Jons, next year's MMU Times editor--future Gazette guest columnist? Or editor?

Veronica takes notes.

One of the students being interviewed--Nicole was a staff writer this year.

The Dangers of Windmill Thinking

The crazy keeps piling up. This week it was windmills. Our Dear MisLeader is convinced they cause cancer, although as Colbert points out, the real danger is that listening to Trump trumpeting his nonsense causes brain damage:



And part of the problem here is that wind energy is not all sweetness and light—it does have problems, and noise and bird deaths are issues. Still, the death, environmental damage and pollution caused by fossil fuels seems to make wind a pretty good deal, in comparison—and all those windmills rich jerks like Trump like to hate are being put up by pretty hard-headed utility companies.



But I worry that Don Trump Quixote may again be distracting us. While the media are tilting at his ridiculous farcical notions--meanwhile, horrible other policies are taking shape. Take this excellent column by Lynda Waddington from this morning’s Gazette.

I have no words, no wind, no ability to summon anything but anger. In the Civil War, the question was whether freed slaves would become citizens of the United States. A wise man of the time said some wise words about African-American soldiers:

"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."

Frederick Douglass

Frederick had it right. Deport U.S. veterans because of misdemeanors or old paperwork errors? The sound you hear is not wind, it's my blood boiling at the very thought. I'm not a veteran, and you don't have to be one to love America, but if anything clarifies your loyalty to the U.S., wearing our uniform ought to, and citizenship for those whose breasts bore, in a symbolic sense, the brass letters "U.S." isn't even open to question, to my mind.

I hear a wind coming, and I hope it is a political storm that sweeps the Trumpers out in 2020.

Never forget—this is what this awful, evil administration has brought us to. While we are distracted by the idiocy of the war on windmills, our government is doing dark deeds that should bring us all shame.

Which means that it doesn’t really matter who is nominated to oppose Donald Trump in 2020. No, I know it matters in many ways--but it does not matter for whom a rational person a will vote that fall. As long as they aren’t Donald Trump, chances are they will at least have enough of a grasp of reality to know that the noise of wind can sway hearts and minds, but it cannot cause cancer.

As for the orange one, he is a cancer on our body politic. Let us remove him and his minions ASAP.

The Leadership Style of Duck the Media

Official portrait of Spiro Agnew.

In Des Moines Iowa almost 50 years ago (Jesus, I just made myself feel really old), Vice President Spiro Agnew famously decried the news media as the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Well, he didn’t call journalists “enemies” of the American people, but we’ve seen a thread of political vitriol from the right spreading over the decades. It turns out rejecting “coast” culture and decrying the media snobs who look down on the “real” America is a winning brand.

Agnew was a crook who worked for a crook, and both he and his boss Richard Nixon left office in disgrace. But Nixon was an evil political genius, and many of the strategies he unleashed during the turbulent late 1960s have become embedded in American political fabric. The GOP as a party of the White South? See Nixon. The “mainstream media” as a distrusted punching bag? See Nixon.

And now we are in the fragile election year of 2018, waiting to see how potent the poison in the well has become. We have an ignorant, misogynist, narcissistic president who is pumped up and rallying the boob troops. True, it’s too easy to underestimate Trump—he does have some entertainment instincts that seem to serve him eerily too well in American politics, where government seems to becoming show biz.

In the run up to the election, Trump is ratcheting up his delusional, politically charged lies. See this PBS interview with a media fact checker.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Gage Skidmore. Donald Trump in happier times--2011. He wasn't yet the liar-in-chief.

Trump says crazy stuff: Democrats are a liberal “mob.” A caravan of migrants is full of “bad people” were probably funded by Democrats. This self-described nationalist (the reason, sir, that you’re not supposed to use that word is because in politics it is the philosophy espoused by facists) lies, lies and lies some more. Because it works for him. His base doesn’t care—they just like the message.

And most of all they like to see those enemies in the media squirm.

The tragedy, to me, is not that it’s unfair to accuse the American media of bias. There are all kinds of bias built into our media system that should be recognized. But to term journalists as enemies of the people is breathtakingly ahistorical. We have a First Amendment that protects the press because our founding political philosophers understood that, perfect or not, independent purveyors of information were vital for democracy to maintain itself.

I don’t think Trump cares about democracy. He is way too chummy with authoritarians, and makes too many wild assertions to be taken seriously as a man who wants to lead or convince or persuade. He’s a bully with a bully’s worst instincts—and he loves leading a bully mob.

Anyway, the deterioration of respect for sellers of information has led Republicans down to the local level to shun media. I read a post on Facebook by a local state representative, Ashley Hinson, who was calling on this local newspaper to publish an op/ed written by her leader, the Republican speaker of the House of Iowa. But Representative Hinson herself is part of an awful trend. In 2012, running for the U.S. Senate, then candidate Joni Ernst eschewed meetings with major Iowa newspaper editorial boards.

Hinson herself did the same with the Gazette this year, and she is not alone. I’m sure she has an explanation for her decison, and I’m also sure I don’t want to hear it. Because whatever it is, as a former TV anchor she should know it's BS. Shame on her. Shame on Senator Ernst. Shame on Republicans who shun editorial boards in general. It’s fair to be critical of the media—but to refuse to sit down with working journalists and discuss issues with them is to disrespect the role that the press serves in our democracy.

The Gazette was right to complain about the trend. See their editorial.

Vice President Agnew had a bit of a point, even if he was a crook. In his time, print media were more conservative than today—his main complaints were about network television, which then was way more powerful than now in shaping public discourse. As a media professor, I think the spreading of outlets, the ability of anybody to publish anything (including this blog) can have positive impacts. Voices that were silent can be heard. Diverse points of view are readily available.

But the rallying cry of “fake news” that Agnew’s remarks eventually unleashed have reached a dangerous fever pitch.

And the right has won the war against news, in many ways. Mainstream media is in retreat.

But, what’s left in its place? Fox “News,” Russian trolls, Brietbart? It’s a vapid swamp of delusion and misinformation. Sort of like any political speech theses days by that national embarrassment, the liar-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Thanks for the family memories, Harry Potter

Image from Wikipedia.

I am a little late to the party, but here’s to 20 years of Harry Potter.

We were living in a tiny town in western Iowa when the novels started coming out. I am not sure how or why we heard of the series, and my wife says she bought the first and second books at the same time, but the novels quickly became a family affair. My wife and I and our kids all read them—indeed, the first few were read aloud to children too young to read them for themselves (or, perhaps, just wanting to hear them read even if they had already read them).

And we bought into the whole hoopla that started to spring up when new installments were published. While we never stayed up overnight in a book line, it always was a bit of a saga to locate the latest installment as soon as possible.

For one of the books, my wife was working second shift as a hospital nurse, and stopped at an all-night grocery store after work. The store was already stocking for the next day—release day—and put out a display of the new Harry Potter book, which my wife purchased two copies of.

The next morning, the kids were very excited that we already had the book.

There developed a bit of a family system for Harry Potter. My oldest daughter and son were “first readers” because they read relatively quickly. My son sometimes would stay up all night and devour a HP book in one massive read fest.

I was always at the back of the line—I am a writer and a reader, but I read like I ride a bicycle. I enjoy it and do it a lot, but I do it slowly.

The series was to our family what baseball was to the father and son in “Field of Dreams.” It was something that united us across generations, a shared cultural experience that was exciting to all of us.

I respect the series on several levels. For one thing, an enduring theme of the Harry Potter universe is that it’s not usually your nature that makes you good or evil, but rather it’s the choices that you make.

The series is responsible for many happy memories for me and my family. Cuddling up together in the evening as a family to hear JK Rowling’s stories is one. There was also the sharing and discussion of the latest book—and the thrill of secret conversations that have to be carefully gauged until, finally, dad read the darn thing.

During one Freedom Fest in Cedar Rapids, my youngest son and I (we must have been at the end of the line) were photographed by “The Gazette” as we awaited a fireworks display at Kirkwood Community College. We were reclining together on a blanket, reading one of later installments of the series.

Harry Potter! To me, you are always first and foremost a book series. It would be sad to know you only via the movies, and I’m glad you were there as I was raising a family of readers. For almost a decade, the hoopla around your books helped make reading cool. That wasn’t so important to my bookish brood, who enjoyed many other books, too—but still.

You were the boy who lived in our imaginations, on the pages we read and as part of our family experience.

So thank you, JK. This muggle is glad that you shared your imaginary world with us. Twenty years—hard to imagine it has been that long.

July 4 addition: After I posted this, my youngest daughter found a copy of the photo from the Gazette. I was (based on the book I was reading) published in 2003:

The son in the foreground is now in his mid-20s and getting a PhD at ISU. Three of my other children are also in the image. The son in the picture looks like an older version of his youngest nephew (and also his oldest nephew). Come to think of it, a bit like older versions of his other nephews, too.

I Unexpectedly Place in Media Photo Contest

Fourth place photo in one category of a Cedar Lake photo contest. The three photos that did better were, as I recall, all sunset images. Cedar Lake is a great place to shoot sunsets!

Well, it was fourth place, but still. The “Friends of Cedar Lake,” a group that is working to develop a local industrial pond—a swampy area that was used as cooling water for a now closed power plant—into more of a local park and attraction cooperated with The Gazette, the Cedar Rapids newspaper, to run a photo contest of the lake this fall.

There were different categories, such as “wildlife” and “people.” I won fourth place in one of the categories—scenery, or something like it—for an image I made of afternoon clouds reflected in the lake.

I like Cedar Lake, I bike around it often since the most prominent local bicycle trail goes there, and I wish the local lake friends group all the best in its efforts to promote that body of water.

My entry in the photo contest was almost entirely by accident. On this very cold day in winter, it’s interesting to remember back to the extraordinarily warm fall we had. On Sunday, Oct. 30, Mount Mercy University had its “Halloween on the Hill” event, and it was also a production weekend for the “Mount Mercy Times” student newspaper.

I am the advisor to the Times, and so I was headed to campus a bit early that day (the Halloween event was to begin at 5, I think, I and was going to work for a couple of hours at the paper before it). Anyway, because I anticipated taking photographs of my grandchildren at a big party, I was carrying my Nikon camera with my on my bicycle ride. And because the day was so extraordinarily sunny and warm for that time of year in Iowa, I rode the Cedar River Trail down to Cedar Lake at about 3 in the afternoon, and shot some photos while I was there.

Then, after Halloween on the Hill and after more work at the MMU paper, I got home a bit late, but was glancing through the Sunday Gazette. I don’t recall the section it was in, but the paper had an announcement of the lake photo contest, which it was sponsoring along with the Friends of Cedar Lake.

Well, as chance would have it, I luckily had some nice images I had taken with my nice camera, which I rarely have with me when I ride my bicycle by Cedar Lake, so I figured, what the heck? I went online and entered a few photos—five, I think, since I have a folder on my PC desktop labeled “Cedar Lake” with five images in it.

I had shot the images in late October and entered them in the contest the following week, Nov. 1 or 2 or so. And weeks went by and I didn’t hear anything, so I figured I hadn’t won. I am happy to report I was wrong in that assumption.

I remained in ignorance of the contest results until my wife, who skims the weekly “Milestones” section in the Sunday Gazette, saw an image I shot printed in the Jan. 1 edition of the paper.

Well, cool, I guess. Although it might be nice to let a photographer know when he has won a minor bit of recognition. The Friends of Cedar Lake stated on a Facebook post that 50 photographers had submitted images, so I guess fourth place finish is OK.

The day I shot the images at the lake, I wrote this post for by bike blog. As you can see, I was pretty photo happy that day—sun drunk, I suppose. We don’t often have butterflies and bees on the day before Halloween in Iowa.

Well, seeing my picture in The Gazette was an interesting way to start 2017—an unexpected appearance in media. Here are the other images I submitted to the contest, by the way: