Coming Soon – A World Without News

OK, I lost my newspaper job after 33 years in the business. Many of my fellow journalist friends are also out of work. This is not about that. Not really.
What this is about is the fact that the newspaper industry, nationwide, is on a death spiral. I read that it is predicted the last newspaper will be printed in 2040. Then what?
In my area, not only did my own weekly paper close, but also a weekly freebie paper has reduced staff to a skeleton crew. The three daily papers that I read have all cut staff and are steadily becoming slimmer and slimmer. One has gone from two 16-page sections a day to four 6-page sections in a vain attempt to fool the readers into thinking there is more there than there is.
People like me who read several papers notice that the same exact stories appear in each one. All the papers are filled with news off the wires and reporters are being shared. None of this is good.
I realize that people are getting their news off the TV and Internet. But is that really news? TV news is given to us in tiny bites by attractive “news readers” that don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time. Where is Walter Cronkite when we need him?
Internet news is often quite suspect, with as much opinion as facts. The non-discriminating Internet news searcher is just as likely to blunder into a blog as a legitimate news source. And where do people think Internet comes from anyway? At some point some actual person, an actual reporter, has to go out and observe and talk and ask questions and get a story that can later be opinioned and blogged into something that may or may not resemble the truth.
I think part of the problem is that people value their own personal opinions so much that often the truth just gets in the way and who wants that anyway?
As an aside, I recently attended, by accident as it turned out, a talk by a photographer who was supposed to speak on minor breeds of livestock. Since that’s my thing (I raise minor breeds of sheep, cattle and chickens) I thought it would be interesting.
After 27 years of studying and raising minor breeds I think I know something about them, but I would not presume to be an expert and give a talk. Turns out the speaker had spent a few days with the animals and much of his information was conjecture on his part and flat out incorrect.
Truth is relative and because he was the speaker, his words appeared to be the truth to the audience. Not to cynical me.
Back to newspapers. I have heard over and over in the four months since my paper was absorbed into another, that people just don’t know what’s going on - with town finances, building projects, school issues. Without reporters at meetings no one is ever going to know. Ironically, the very people who used to be reported on - town and school officials, etc., - who you might think would be relieved to meet without reporters hanging about, now worry that they have no way of getting important information out to the people.
Western Massachusetts is but a microcosm of the rest of the country. It’s still possible to find out what’s happening in Washington, D.C. and the state capitals, but for how much longer?
Even the nation’s largest papers are starting to share reporters with their rivals. This is not a good thing. Different reporters ask different questions and pick up on different details. Reporters and their editors can slant the news, on purpose or by mistake. Reading different accounts of the same event has always been a good way of getting the real story.
Granted, I’m a news hound as well as a news junkie, but this all bothers me and makes me fear for the future. The Fourth Estate has been around for centuries; I hope the 21st is not its last.

New Year’s Day started with the alarm going off at 5 a.m., a full hour earlier than normal. The temperature was two below zero and the wind was howling. From the bathroom the wind sounded like the wind of movies, the kind where you know it means business.
Phil and I, dressed in many layers, left the house by 6 a.m., met two Mohawk Outing Club kids and the father of one, and drove to the DAR State Forest. The plan was to hike about 1 1/4 miles to the top of Moore’s Hill and its fire tower and watch the first light of the New Year rise above the horizon.
Several other students were to have joined us, but with a wind chill of 23 below, we were not surprised they had opted out. As we crunched along the forest road to the tower with our noses and eyes barely visible, I wondered why I was there instead of home in my warm bed with the two Border Collies and three cats. It was so cold that we had left the dog grrrls at home.
We made it to the tower in plenty of time. In fact we climbed up, and down and back up, mostly to keep circulation flowing, before the sun rose, right on schedule at 7:15 a.m. Phil took a few pictures and a short video that captured the rocking of the metal tower in the fierce wind.
Sun up, we quickly retraced our steps back to the cars. Instead of stopping with the others for coffee, Phil and I returned home to deal with a frozen drainpipe.
Our circa 1855 farmhouse not-so-cleverly has its plumbing on the north wall, from whence come the coldest winds in the winter. I had remembered to leave the door open under the kitchen sink, so the incoming water pipes were fine, but a forgotten slow drip from the faucet had caused the drain to freeze.
A frozen pipe can burst and cause a lot of problems, but a frozen drain is simply annoying. The drainpipe goes from the sink, through our unheated pantry and down through the floor. The pantry part has frozen in the past.
I removed all the little-used items from the far back bottom portion of the pantry and Phil first heated the pipe with an ancient hand-held hair dryer that once belonged to my grandmother. That didn’t work, so with fire extinguisher at the ready, he gave the pipe a blast with a propane torch. That didn’t work either.
Turns out the pipe had been frozen just at the wall between the sink and the pantry so it took some time to get it thawed.
By then it was almost 9 a.m. and I was later than usual getting out to the barn to feed the animals. Once there all seemed fine, though frigid, except that a six-year-old ewe named Lucy was slow to get up and refused to eat her morning hay ration. She also seemed unsteady on her feet. She had been totally fine 12 hours earlier.
The only thing that had changed in Lucy’s life was the temperature, which had fallen from the mid-20s the day before down to zero. I suspected some sort of digestive problem, Phil suggested hypothermia.
No matter what, we had to get her warm. I planned to put a sheep sweater on her and place hay bales around her and her pen mate, Phil thought she needed more than that so Lucy came into the laundry room.
The laundry room was once another kitchen in our previously two-family house. Since our cellar is small dirt-floored and very dark, we store everything a normal family might keep in the basement in the laundry room. So along with the washer, the freezer, the ironing pile, geraniums and other plants I winter over, pails of apples, our juice and soda collection, three bicycles, assorted climbing, biking and canoeing gear, and assorted thawing water pails from the barn, came Lucy.
By the time we had dragged in a hog panel (a section of portable metal fence) to block off the corner of the room, Lucy was not doing at all well. She drank some warm water but would not eat. Her temperature was a bit low. I gave her molasses in warm water and a dose of banamine from my collection of veterinary meds. I basically fussed over her all day.
Finally she started eating, first with no real interest, later with the gusto of a normal Shetland sheep. She is now fine and is spending the days in the barn, but has been coming inside when the temperature falls below 20 degrees.
At first we just could not explain why a healthy adult sheep would get hypothermic. A couple of days later it dawned on Phil that dehydration can lead to hypothermia. The sheep have all had access to water each day, but it’s been so cold that if they don’t drink within an hour of my bringing their pails, the water freezes solid. Perhaps Lucy didn’t drink when she had the opportunity.
So Jan. 1 was a long and eventful day, but not atypical of our lives here at Whitney Acres Farm, in fact I would say it was just about a normal day.
Happy New Year.

I have just returned from the annual meeting of the League for Leaner Loins, or LLL for short. This bastion of exclusively male society was founded by my husband’s maternal grandfather, Leon Keach, and has as its motto, “There is no exercise without sweat.”
The LLL consists of Keach descendents and their friends. All are, or have been, adventurers. Everyone is, or has been, a hiker but sailors and climbers are represented as well.
I am not a member of the LLL, though for the past 20 or so years females have been allowed to attend the annual meetings, which consist primarily of a meal and the sharing of pictures and stories of the past year’s adventures.
Not that I’ve ever been asked, but if I were nominated to join the LLL I think I would politely decline. There is still a place in this egalitarian world for men-only or women-only clubs, especially if we still get to share the food.
During the journey to and from the meeting spot at the Whistling Swan in Sturbridge, I thought about the meaning of adventure and why some people need it. What I came up with, and this was echoed by Phil, was that it is a stress-reliever.
When every step is an effort and you are working against the weather, the clock, gravity, or all the elements of nature to achieve a goal, your focus becomes very narrow and there is no room for the mundane worries that plague us all. Some people zone out in front of the TV or at a sporting event, the result is similar, but there is no argument that a sail, a hike or a climb in the outdoors relieves stress while providing exercise and a better perspective on one’s place in the universe.
I love to hike and I’ve climbed all of the New Hampshire and Vermont 4,000-footers but as my livestock collection continues to expand it is ever more difficult to get away for an adventure that is more than a few hours long. Have you ever tried to get a sitter for 80+ animals of six different species?
So my adventures are generally closer to home and my adrenaline gets pumped when the cow gets out or a sheep gets her head stuck in the fence or the baby chicks disappear into a crevice and can’t get themselves out. I wonder if I can rescue them by myself, and when I do there is a similar sense of accomplishment to scaling a mountain, though it is definitely harder to explain.
In general the livestock tends to cause more stress than they relieve but there are two things that calm me and warm my soul. One is standing in one spot in the barn where, right after evening chores, I can hear the contented chewing of horses, cow and sheep, all with their slightly different rhythms. The other is after securing the chickens safely in their coop at night, if I quietly pause for a few moments and listen I hear the happy sounds of chickens “singing,” which is more like humming, as they settle down to sleep.
Relatively few people scale mountains, but I bet even fewer get to hear the evensongs of chickens.

Up until four months ago, I had spent 33 years involved with the journalism business. I started with newspaper production, eventually moved into proofreading and editing, and finally I became a writer.
This was a weird career for an incredibly shy person, who throughout her school years could hardly bear to have her teachers read her assigned papers. But writing turned out to be addictive and the need to have one’s name in print became strong. People I’ve met in the past two decades probably would not believe how hard it once was for me to talk to strangers and to pick up the phone and make calls. Over the years I’ve gotten so I can call anyone and ask nearly anything, and strangely enough, they’ll answer me. Senators, sports figures, Bishops and judges, I’ve learned I can talk to anyone. It’s all been very empowering and I’ve loved it.
The writing gig became serious when I started covering sports for our local area paper. Later I moved into covering town and school district politics and finances. Though dull subjects to some, it was what I felt was the most important. Perhaps inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, I always felt that getting information to the people was a noble endeavor. While I’ve never suspected the local officials I’ve covered of Nixonian tricks, I have always maintained that having the press in attendance only helps to keep them on the straight and narrow.
Unlike many reporters who would rather write features, which allow some degree of personal expression, I enjoyed keeping my personal views out of my stories. The greatest coups came when I would receive compliments (or criticisms) on the same story from people on both sides of the issue, each saying that they “knew I was on their side.” Of course I have my own opinions, some very strong, but news writing was not where I expressed them.
So now we come to the blog thing. In August the paper I had been associated with for the past 23 years “merged” with its competitor. Merged is a huge misnomer. Their writers, office, editors and style were retained. My colleagues were allowed to apply for rather nebulous jobs, which few chose to do. Our office is closed, the staff is dispersed and there is little trace of our paper in the “blended” publication.
So after years of cranking out hundreds, often thousands, of words per week, I was left with no outlet except for the Ashfield News, the monthly all-volunteer publication of my town.
Fans have encouraged me to keep writing and my husband, Phil, has been nagging me about starting a blog. I’ve always thought of blogs as rather self-indulgent and largely uninteresting to all but those near and dear to the blogger and I expect that this will not be widely read. But after years of keeping my personal opinions to myself, I realize I have things to say and so I’m going to say them. I expect that my entries will range from rants on local politics to stories about my farm, but the discipline of writing has been missing from my life for several months and it’s time to get back up on that horse.
Thanks for indulging me. Feel free to make comments or criticisms.