Linda Baker – Memphis Flyer

Four of us from the Flyer spent a few days last week in Austin, attending the annual Association of Alternative Newsmedia conference. It’s always a great opportunity to meet and socialize with our peers around the country who are working to keep alternative journalism alive and thriving in these perilous times.

I came away both encouraged and discouraged. Encouraged, because so many papers are still doing such fantastic work, publishing stories that are making a real difference in their communities. Discouraged, because so many papers are fighting to retain the advertising support necessary to pay the reporters and editors who do that fine work.

“We are taken for granted,” is a sentence I heard from several editors. “Everyone reads us, but our ad dollars are down.” It echos a column I wrote a few weeks back, bemoaning the reliance of local businesses on free social media promotion rather than utilizing the local media that are telling their stories.

But everyone is carrying on, exploring new revenue streams, including seeking foundation support, coming up with more profitable events, and trying out ideas such as allowing readers to become “patrons” who pledge a modest amount to support the paper each year.

I’m also happy to report that the Flyer was nominated for three writing awards, more than most papers at the conference.

On Saturday night, many of us in Austin were gathered around a television watching the events in Baton Rouge, where cops in riot gear roughed up peaceful protest marchers and used tear gas and batons to disperse them. Shades of 1963, and very troubling.

On Sunday, when I landed at MEM, my phone’s Twitter and newsfeed were filled with reports about a demonstration happening in downtown Memphis. I went home to watch, fearing the worst. But Memphis came through. The contrast between Baton Rouge and the Bluff City was astonishing. It made me proud of my city. (It also made me proud of the Flyer for its work last year in helping to stop the TDOT closure of the I-55 bridge. Imagine how much worse the situation would have been had we had only one bridge across the Mississippi.)

I would be remiss in not mentioning our sadness here at the Flyer over the death last week of Linda Baker, the beloved wife of Jackson Baker. Jackson has long been the public face for this paper, and when I tell people I work at the Flyer, the first thing I usually hear is, “Oh, I love Jackson Baker.”

We do, too. And we mourn with him this week, even as we marvel at his indomitable spirit. An example (one of many): As I was driving to Linda’s visitation Monday night, I got a call from Jackson — suggesting a tweak to the cover story. His dedication to this paper, to his family, and to his community is second to none. And we’re lucky — all of us in this town — to have him. Be sure and read his column this week. It’s a keeper.

Because I admire Lou Gehrig’s legend as much as anybody else’s who ever lived, I try never to skip a week’s column. Gehrig, for those who don’t know, was the New York Yankee great who set a record for playing in consecutive games — 2,130 before his forced retirement in 1939, a plateau that was only overcome in 1995 by the Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken Jr.

Gehrig kept playing until he was felled, literally, by a fatal illness — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — called “Lou Gehrig’s disease” ever since.

Lou Gehrig

I am also inspired by a more recent case — that of Shirley Povich, father of today’s TV host Maury Povich but best known as a sportswriter — and a good one — for The Washington Post from 1933 until his death in 1998 at the age of 92.

How good was he? Povich’s last column, written the day he died and published the day after, on June 5, 1998, was, in part, a shot across the bow of the rest of the media for its uncritical enthusiasm over the the ongoing home-run heroics of Mark McGwire. Povich noted with some suspicion that McGwire had somehow “bulked up” on what he chose to call “the new diet of ‘nutrition shakes’ popular in the clubhouses.”

We would soon learn to call that diet by a now all-too-familiar name: steroids.

And then there’s the case of 60 Minutes‘ Mike Wallace and, well … I hope you get the idea. More than longevity, I’m really talking about perseverance, the kind, say, that was for so long demonstrated in Memphis by the late great newspaperman/broadcaster George Lapides.

My dear wife Linda died last week, an agonizing death from pancreatic cancer. She persevered through pain and discomfort that you cannot imagine. With grace — the amazing, proverbial kind.

For reasons that surely go without saying, I had to take some time off during and after her ordeal. But I found myself in the aftermath attending an event or two on my beat, more or less as an observer — to get out of the house, the way another person might take a long, head-clearing walk.

I went, for example, to last Thursday night’s meeting of the Shelby County Democratic executive committee. As anybody knows who’s been reading me or the other political scribes in town, the Democrats are riven right now, locked in a civil war of sorts over the issue of whether to endorse an arrangement, insisted on by the state party chairman. In the arrangement, a former chairman, charged with misappropriation of funds, would pay back a certain portion on an installment plan, thereby avoiding the prosecution that half of the committee members were insisting on.

After two hours of utmost rowdiness, the committee failed to ratify the arrangement by a tie vote of 10-10.

But the most memorable aspect of that meeting, to me, was the fact that partisans on both sides of the issue, at various times during all the furor, took time out to come over to me and express the kindest sort of condolences. It reminded me of the genuine human stuff they were all made of. I never at any point felt like taking sides, and I thought I saw the way forward to their all getting somehow on the same page some day in a way that had nothing to do with politics.

I had the same feeling a couple of days later at a candidate forum at the IBEW union hall. There was a lack of venom and a comity in the way rivals for the same office spoke, something I found unusual and distinctive.

And I saw it again on TV Sunday night, as cops and protesters walked along together in downtown Memphis in an ambulatory common dialogue of sorts. You don’t see that sort of thing every day, either. (You didn’t even see it, by all accounts, at the follow-up public meeting at Greater Imani Church on Monday.)

So what am I saying? Well, maybe that it’s important, in cases like mine, to keep filling the space, if that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. We all have our space to fill, and the more we do it, the more we realize that it’s all really the same space. Q.E.D.