By NSNC President Tony Norman and NSNC Communications Director Bonnie Jean Feldkamp
Columns, as opposed to explanatory news stories, are uniquely positioned in the journalistic ecosystem to get things done. Unlike our just-the-facts reporter counterparts, we columnists get to directly call out our elected officials and community leaders, hold them to account, and ask for the fix that’s needed. Community columnists have a direct and rewarding impact, one that both NSNC President Tony Norman and Communications Director Bonnie Jean Feldkamp recently experienced. Their stories are great reminders of the superpower that is column writing.
For Tony Norman it happened like this:
It all started with a FYI email in November from Bonnie. She forwarded a link to an article about a gratuitously cruel policy that denied inmates easy access to books at the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ), the local jail here in Pittsburgh.
I wasn’t aware of the policy despite living here. It hadn’t been covered by my newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Fortunately, several smaller papers covered it, including one weekly that Bonnie had read.
It bothered me that Bonnie, who lives near Cincinnati, was aware of something in my own town that had eluded our coverage. So, I jumped into the discussion with all of the righteous indignation I could muster. In my December 1 column, I excoriated ACJ’s policy of withholding access to physical books, charging inmates an excessive amount to read books on electronic tablets after an initial free period had elapsed, and for being a laboratory for anti-intellectual, dissident-crushing policies by a cruel and stupid warden and his cronies.
A representative from the ACLU contacted me later that day to commend me on the column and to share a letter and promise of legal action it had also sent to ACJ’s warden.
One day after my column ran, ACJ announced “an expanded partnership” with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh “to provide access to additional eBooks and audiobooks to incarcerated individuals inside the facility.” The available books to read would expand from a few hundred curated titles to over 6 million.
Without directly addressing my column, ACJ also announced it was reversing the previous policy of forbidding family and friends from sending books via barnesandnoble.com and christianbooks.com to inmates who preferred physical books.
The press release went on to portray ACJ as if it were some kind of oasis of free thinking — a virtual utopian jail-as-campus where freedom of thought and expression was encouraged, which is, of course, absurd. Still, I was pleased that ACJ scrapped the policy I had complained about after only one acerbic column. I was prepared to make the conditions at ACJ a crusade for as long as it took. I didn’t expect capitulation in one day.
I would be remiss in not acknowledging that other publications, all smaller regional publications, had weighed in before I did. But, I hope it isn’t too churlish to point out that ACJ didn’t act to reverse itself until a columnist working with the institutional backing of Western Pennsylvania’s largest newspaper started smacking around the warden and the jail’s culture of corruption, mediocrity, and arbitrary vindictiveness. Because of this, my column was guaranteed to get a lot more exposure and have a bigger impact than the news pieces that had come before it.
When columnists opine primarily about national events (ahem, guilty), we can sometimes be tempted to forget that closer to home, our opinions have greater impact and reach. At street level in our communities, we have the freedom to “name the devil” and watch things change for the better because readers care that much more about outrages closer to home.
It is in writing about these disparities at home that we, in the NSNC, can have the broadest impact. If we’re willing to write with passion and conviction and call out those responsible for making our communities less safe, less democratic, less fair, and less humane, we can help bring about the change we want to see happen simply by writing about it. We can do what reporters can’t — we can introduce a moral dimension to the public discourse.
At this point, I’m turning over my monthly presidential message to my colleague Bonnie Jean Feldkamp, who has a similar story about the impact of columnists on community events. Because Bonnie Jean pointed me in the direction of ACJ in the first place, it seems only appropriate for her to weigh in on this topic.
Here’s how it happened for Bonnie:
At the beginning of the pandemic while fighting to flatten the curve and dreading a spike in cases, a team of reporters that I was a part of sought to
report hospital bed and ventilator capacity on a daily basis for public understanding through Eye On Ohio: The Ohio Center for Journalism. We were floored when hospitals denied us that information and then the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) denied our formal public records request. We went to court.
After a seven-month legal battle, the courts ruled in favor of releasing those records, but the Ohio Department of Health continued to stall. I was super frustrated. Via email, ODH’s lawyer, Socrates Tuch, feigned confusion and was combative. What he didn’t know was that I was in a unique position. I am a freelance writer but I’m also a columnist on the Editorial Board of the Cincinnati Enquirer. I decided to write an op-ed. In which, I specifically called him out for his behavior. The op-ed appeared on Saturday, November 21, 2020. The following Monday, November 23, ODH Press Secretary Melanie Amato wrote in an email, “Here is the latest information on your public records request. Moving forward, please send your requests to me for I will be supplying you with the information.”
Just like that, the data we requested started rolling in and Socrates Tuch was taken out of the loop. Don’t ever underestimate the power of an op-ed column.
Now, the citizens of Ohio have a clear understanding of what the hospitals in their state are facing with COVID-19 and can check on the capacity of each hospital that is reporting data. It will help individual communities cope with what’s happening in their area in real time.
As we close out the tumultuous year that was 2020 and look forward to more solutions and hopefully fewer challenges in 2021, remember your community superpower as a columnist. While reporters gather the facts to explain what is happening around us, columnists underscore the inequities uncovered, question community leaders publicly with purpose and intent, and yes, columnists enact real change.
Webinars You Don’t Want to Miss
