Lehigh & Saucon Valley news slowly dying, but support can save it
It’s been bad for a long time, and it’s getting worse.
Across the Lehigh Valley and Saucon Valley, fewer and fewer community governmental meetings get the news coverage they deserve, and that means corruption, cronyism and anti-democratic disenfranchisement will rise. Bank on it.
The Morning Call Guild of journalists walked out over pay ands conditions at the paper last week, and its heartbreaking to witness: Many of those writers want nothing more than to serve the public, but the Morning Call’s investment fund owners have almost cost-cut the paper to death.
In Saucon Valley, we’re not as ill-informed as some communities, but much of the public seems incapable or unwilling to imagine what life would be like here without the quality local news we do get.
Here’s a hint: The quality of life will suck, our community, and the good things associated with (including property values and local services), will decline.
Local bürgermeisters of BS and princes and princesses of deceit pray for that day, but they wouldn’t like it either if they knew better. That’s the day they turn your local information sources into one big ad flyer, mostly to hawk real estate, funerals and nursing care. But since that would benefit a tiny few, it would also be self-sabotaging in the end.
Does anyone really want to go there?
One whiff of the sickening click-stinkbait that is today’s Nazareth Patch previews what awaits us all if our news deserts keep growing.
Patch used to contain real news. It used to be halfway admirable. Now it peddles McMansions.
I know quite a few journalists in the Lehigh Valley, and many of them feel helpless about the whole situation. The Morning Call’s editorial staff has been slashed again and again, and so many older publications in the Valley have vanished.
The critical exception is Josh Popichak’s Saucon Source, one of the few independent community news sources left standing in the Lehigh Valley.
But it’s tough for Josh. He’s too principled not to take his journalism seriously, yet he provides an essentially free news product to a community that takes it for granted. The public often expects Saucon Source to cover every story except the ones dealing with information they want to avoid. If Josh does upbeat local business pieces (and that and schools stories traditionally comprise much community journalism), he’s accused of not being a “real journalist.” (Let me tell you something: He’s as serious and as professional as they come in the Lehigh Valley.) If he presents hard-hitting stories on government or crime, he’s being “too negative.”
It’s a no-win situation.
Saucon Source has a superb membership program to help support its work. (If you’re not a member, you should stop reading me and support Saucon Source, because what it does is far more consequential than this blog.) I feel Saucon Source needs a paywall, but Josh has generously opted not to roll one out so far. Many local publications in 2022 actually must rely on grants or non-profit benefactors to survive. His membership program is a move in that direction. But it needs members.
We’ve already seen Valley Voice collapse in 2020, after 32 years in Hellertown. I don’t know the whole story there, but as a former community newspaper editor myself for several years, I saw a decline in its last few months before Covid seemed to kill it off, as it has so many things.
For a long time, I wasn’t even sure if the Valley Voice was gone for good. But there were no obvious public signs of a coming comeback when it “suspended” publication in July 2020 with this email message from Publisher Ann Marie Gonsalves, who used to work for the defunct Bethlehem Globe-Times:
During this unsettled economic climate, The Valley Voice will suspend weekly publication as the newspaper and our advertisers navigate the Covid-19 situation. Thank you for your patience. … We will have limited publishing dates as advertising allows.
I never saw any final notice when it called it quits eventually. I’d been blocked from Valley Voice’s Facebook page because, well, someone there didn’t like me, I guess.
It was part and parcel of an operation that began in 1988 with the highest hopes, award-winning talent and lots of moral support, but ended in resentment and unresponsiveness on many levels. I remember calling the Voice number several times and no one ever answered the phone. You can’t sell ads if you don’t pick up the phone.
There was no web presence, not really, and when Covid hit, Valley Voice didn’t seem even to try to adapt. I also felt that its editorial content was weaker in the last year. I can’t imagine Editor Paul Bealer was getting rich, and I myself wondered if he was getting the support and latitude to make needed changes, or if anyone even cared to try new things—but that’s pure speculation, admittedly.
The death of Bud Prosser seemed to pull the curtain down on that era.
Generally, Bethlehem and Easton area print news operations, Hellertown’s included, seem to have followed the fortunes, and misfortunes, of Bethlehem Steel and Ingersoll-Rand.
One peek at this video of the old Ingersoll Rand property in Phillipsburg makes for an interesting parable for what’s happening to journalism in our region.
The truth is, we still haven’t quite got past the loss of heavy industry in A-B-E. And we still haven’t quite figured out how to deal with contracted newspaper industry. Again, corruption loves that state of affairs. It’s like the sheriff left Tombstone.
Well, almost left.
The Easton Express and Bethlehem Globe-Times merged in 1991, and the newspaper left in its place, the Express-Times, barely notices Saucon Valley these days, apart from covering one or two of those mandatory stories that would be too shameful to ignore.
Half the time when you do see stories about Hellertown or Lower Saucon in the big local legacy media, it’s because some of us have been screaming at them and begging, behind the scenes, to wake up and pay attention. But that only goes so far.
Hyper-local, opinion-oriented volunteer bloggers in Saucon Valley, such as Andrea Wittchen and I, don’t have the time or resources to do proper, comprehensive news coverage. I don’t expect pats on the back, but I do this, and I think Andrea does, too, as a public service—and again, as volunteer. We believe citizens need information about where they live. I happen to have training in journalism, but this blog is just a minor avocation for me.
What’s a reader or listener to do? Personally, I wish more residents in Saucon Valley grasped just how complex and difficult it is to bring the public accurate local news.
But can’t we just get information straight from local government?
Don’t count on it. First of all, we live in an area with a rich and well-documented history of corruption. Disbarred former judges, embezzlement schemes, obvious conflicts of interest in public officials, and the disease of self-promotion—asking these folks to provide you your news is like asking Godzilla for advice on tip-toeing through Tokyo.
We have a large, wealthy school district that can’t even train and employ a single dedicated public relations professional, and a secretive and very rich township that has taken pains to reduce public input at meetings.
That shows you how committed local government to informing the public.
And if you’re silly enough to think local message boards on social media will ever be an adequate substitute for quality community journalism, well, you clearly haven’t spend much time observing the biased jumble of Angie’s List-style “advice,” plagiarism, lazy-arse complaining, and right-wing bullying that are some of our local message boards.
Nope, those aren’t substitutes for journalism any more than a town-square “info kiosk” could ever be.
So, the rest is real simple:
Locally focused publications such as Saucon Source and excellent public broadcasters such as WLRV and WDIY need your support.
Support them—or lose them.
Once hailed by a writer in the Morning Call (1990) for its courage in journalism in helping to confront local officials, the Saucon Valley Voice suspended publication in 2020. (Image: Newspapers.com)
