If your life is threatened in an emergency, you want to have faith that local law enforcement will be able to get to the scene quickly. If you’re the victim of a violent crime, you want to have faith that local law enforcement will investigate thoroughly.
You want to have faith that your tax dollars are being spent in a way that best serves and protects you — but how do you know it’s happening?
Last year Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin, reporters for the East Valley Tribune, wrote a five-part investigative series on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s illegal immigration enforcement — and how the crackdown on illegal immigrants affects the rest of the state.
“[The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office] often neglected regular law enforcement work during its hurried evolution into an immigration enforcement operation,” the series asserted.
Arpaio’s methods resulted in slower emergency response times, fewer arrests and excessive overtime expenses, according to the Tribune’s reporting.
Scary stuff, right?
Regardless of what your personal opinions of Sheriff Joe or his methods are, the value of the investigative work done by these East Valley Tribune reporters on a limited budget was profound. The writing and reporting was thorough and accurate. It deserved to be read. And it was — just not by enough Valley residents to keep the newspaper afloat.
But the Pulitzer committee did read the investigative series. They thought it worthy of winning the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
That award should have boded well for the paper. It didn’t.
Ironically, in the same year the newspaper reached the pinnacle of journalistic achievement, it will go out of print. The East Valley Tribune is set to close its doors at the end of December, citing economic hardships. This shutdown essentially leaves the Valley with only one major daily newspaper, The Arizona Republic.
For ASU journalism students, this is just another in a series of blows to the job market, but what does it mean for students studying history, education or any of the numerous majors at the University?
For one, it means your options for news sources in the Valley are getting slimmer.
The Arizona Republic isn’t winning any Pulitzers, but it has a monopoly on the Phoenix-area media market, for all intents and purposes. While we respect that newspaper, having only one major news source is no good for anyone. Invariably it means important stories will fall through the cracks, and there will be fewer checks and balances on the people in power.
“It’s a sad day when a newspaper dies, particularly a paper like the Tribune that has been such an aggressive watchdog of government,” said Steve Doig, a journalism professor at ASU in an interview with The Arizona Republic Monday. “The Tribune’s Pulitzer underscores the importance of its work. The only winners here are the crooks and incompetents who will escape the spotlight of shame because there will be fewer reporters watching them.”
It costs money — a lot of money — to run a news source that reports in-depth, investigative stories.
Some fault must lie in an inability to make Internet news sites profitable, but successful journalism takes more than a Web site. It takes readers.
And if unearthing radical drops in law enforcement reliability won’t make a newspaper interesting, what will? A news site can only run so many Lindsay Lohan stories before losing credibility as an organization, no matter how many hits they get.
The success, in a business sense, of newspapers depends on the tribunal of public opinion, but how can a newspaper successfully serve the public if that public won’t let it?
