media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

For What It’s Worth

Arizona reporter Paul Giblin also won a Pulitzer this year, but was laid off several months before finding out. He was one of two reporters at the small East Valley Tribune who last year exposed how a local sheriff’s enthusiasm for fighting illegal immigration was bankrupting his department. In Florida last July, the Sun-Sentinel newspaper laid off its investigations editor, Joe Demma. He led a team that uncovered massive fraud and mismanagement at the Federal Emergency Management Agency run by Bush appointee Michael Brown. Demma won three Pulitzers over an astounding career.

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, in her new collection of essays by various authors on censorship, writes that “a writer’s life and work are not gifts to mankind; they are its necessity.”

She wrote: “Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.”

She and her fellow authors of the essays in Burn This Book worry about censorship and suppression of journalists, fiction writers and poets by totalitarian governments and religious regimes. But a more subtle method of suppression is taking place in this country now — the purging of journalists under the argument that the public won’t pay for what they write and advertisers will no longer subsidize them.

When I was a reporter at Internet startup thestreet.com, we joked that anytime a company bought ads on our site, it was our duty to investigate the company to prove to our readers we weren’t bought. In November, thestreet.com shut the San Francisco office where I worked. The joke is on us now, because the corporations don’t need to advertise to get business and when they pull their advertising, bye bye to the journalists who shine the harsh light of reality on them.

Failing to pay journalists won’t silence all writers, but it will silence those who end up in marketing, public relations and academia. Most journalists don’t have a cash cushion. When laid off they scramble for a job to support themselves and their families. That leaves no time for unpaid writing and reporting. And there is no need to censor, ban or spin what never gets written.

You read this column in a free publication. It doesn’t cost you a penny.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism at Humboldt State University. She wound up in Humboldt County after a national financial magazine laid her off in 2003 during a previous round of journalism layoffs.

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