I’ve been an L-E reporter for 38 years. I’m invested in Columbus, and I need your help
No workday ended quietly, back when I started at the Ledger-Enquirer as a rookie crime reporter in 1982.
When I walked out of the building at midnight, the place was still a beehive of activity, with the press running and trucks and paper carriers loading up the next morning’s edition.
Back then, when the newspaper was on 12th Street between Broadway and Front Avenue, it was mostly alone in being abuzz at night downtown. Except for a few blue-collar bars that catered to late-shift mill workers, downtown was dead.
In those days, when you needed a landline to phone in a story and a darkroom to develop film and print photographs, it was hard to envision a time when the telephone would be an index-card-sized device in your pocket, and it instantly would transmit text, audio or video live on a wireless network connecting everyone.
Much has changed in the newspaper business. The press is elsewhere, now that the content can be transmitted to it, so the in-house production system that once lit up one corner of downtown decades ago is gone, and newspapers today must be fast and lean and focused on their mission.
We also now depend on support from our readers and community members to keep us moving forward.
Over the years, the Ledger-Enquirer has uncovered corruption and spurred needed change, as it held leaders accountable while providing an open record of historic events for the public.
I had just become a columnist when the paper in the late 1980s took on a project called “Columbus Beyond 2000” that brought diverse residents together to discuss the city’s future. The connections that series made in its critical review of the city’s stagnant and aimless direction led to new leadership, and the momentum continued with a succession of public projects that revitalized downtown.
The empty downtown I drove home through years ago is desolate no more. It has a mix of shops and restaurants and concert venues.
And it still has a newspaper, too, just a few blocks down Broadway from where it used to be.
Today its mission is focused largely on documenting the COVID-19 outbreak, and what that’s doing to the city the newspaper has called home since 1828, the year the infant town was cradled here on the fall line of the Chattahoochee River.
Reporter Nick Wooten has been tracking the COVID-19 case numbers and deaths, and questioning mismatches in the data. And the paper regularly is talking with business owners about the challenges of reopening, amid this mix of hope and worry.
This summer, two more journalists devoted to coronavirus coverage will join the staff, in a partnership with Report for America. The nonprofit will pay half their salaries, and the Community Foundation of the Chattahoochee Valley’s Local News and Information Fund will pay the rest.
Though gone are the days of big press runs that cranked out flag-sized newspapers, the Ledger-Enquirer’s reach online now is far beyond those old print circulation numbers.
Meanwhile it remains focused on the mission of serving the public, as a resource and advocate, at a time when so much of the information bombarding us is not vetted, but repeated without question.
The newspaper’s business model has changed, but its mission has not. That’s why we’re asking for your support.
Support the Ledger-Enquirer today by making a donation to our Coronavirus Reporting Fund at givebutter.com/ledger-enquirer. All donations will directly fund the newsroom and its journalists.
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM.