| To say that James Danky is a unique individual is probably an understatement. Anybody who knows him would probably say that he is a character with a good soul and a quick wit. They would also probably say that he is very good at what he does -- or did because he retired from the Wisconsin State Historical Society last June -- the curating of alternative and ethnic print media for the Society's voluminous archives. Since the early 1970s, Danky, a downtown Los Angeles transplant who has lived in rural Wisconsin as a gentleman farmer since he came to Madison to earn his Master's degree, has helped the Society amass the world's largest collection of alternative and ethnic print media. On some levels, it is Danky's enthusiasm for small and sometimes obscure print media that has saved this media from a dusty life in obscurity on some of the shelves and dank basements of America's libraries. In Danky's view, there will always be a role for alternative and ethnic print media because the mainstream press can't do it all. Just like the Chicago Tribune has a smaller circulation in the northwest suburbs of Chicago because The Daily Herald has expansive coverage of suburban issues that aren't necessarily of interest to other areas of the Chicago metropolitan area, so too the ethnic press covers issues and stories that may not be of interest to readers of the mainstream press. "The alternative press is a necessity because the mainstream media can't possibly capture the variety of experience," Danky said in an interview with The Capital City Hues in his State Historical Society that was cluttered with newspapers. "I would think that honest editors and writers -- many of whom are friends -- would say that too. It's not what they can do. The better solution is to look at the other kinds of print that are available. If you want to know about gay and lesbian life in Wisconsin, then you should look at the Queer Life tabloid out of Milwaukee. It's not that you won't find articles on the LGBT community in the Madison and Milwaukee dailies. It's just that why not start out with the most authentic voice of that particular community. It's not the only one. But it is an important one and a good place to start." "It's hard to be a newspaper that does everything and then still does a particular part of it as well as it needs to be done," Danky continued. "We saw this with Capital Newspapers about eight years ago when they decided to produce free-distribution newspapers for Stoughton, Oregon and Verona. They rented a building that said Stoughton News, but they eventually pulled the plug because they couldn't compete with the paid circulation Stoughton Courier Hub. I don't know if it is brand loyalty or better coverage of high school sports. But sometimes it can be on those kinds of things that you have to know your community to produce the paper." The Black press runs into the same kind of difficulty when trying to expand outside of its place of origin. In the late 1980s, Nathan Conyers, publisher of The Milwaukee Times, tried to establish a statewide network of Black newspapers, which would carry the same content in each paper except for some local stories. Eventually, The Milwaukee Times withdrew back to Milwaukee although some of the publications he helped start are still in existence" "It's hard in The Milwaukee Times sort of model to figure out how you're going to do it," Danky said. "It seems easy. You have it there. You have a story of general interest. But how do you 'Kenoshaize' it? You can do that. But it's the investment. If you write a sports profile of a high school athlete, they don't care about the star in Milwaukee. They want it to be a story about Kenosha." Danky is concerned about the decline in print media over the past several years as the Internet, television and cell phones have grown to be the preeminent sources for news. The signs of the decline are everywhere. "The model of a newspaper covering the whole city, which provides unity, you've seen their circulation drop anywhere from 3-9 percent a year for a long time now," Danky said. "We've seen layoffs and cutbacks. Hardly a couple of weeks don't go by that there aren' layoffs at some major paper. The number of people each of us knows who are employed as reporters, eventually they will all be able to meet in my office, which isn't that big. That's sad. But it represents the shift that we are in the midst of. I don't know how all of that is going to play out. The prevalence of electronic information has totally changed the world that you and I grew up in. I know I am scrambling and falling behind because it is changing so rapidly. It's scary, hopefully invigorating, but certainly scary." The decline of print media in America's major urban areas has a detrimental impact on the quality of the news that we, as citizens, receive, according to Danky. "We're already in a difficult period because with very few exceptions we don';t have cities where two papers compete. I think until you lose that, you don't realize how much you needed it. You need two reporters on the same beat trying to knock each other out every single day to get that story. And that is what will produce it. That will produce the oversight, the watchdog role that is frequently missing to our great loss. You need to have two out there competing. You don't need to compete on everything, but you need the thought that if we don't cover it in our paper here, then the other guys will beat us to the punch and they'll get the scoop." "If you end up with a one-newspaper town for a daily, then there isn't any competition and so, the first thing that happens is you shed staff," Danky continued. "There are fewer people doing it. Consequently, the product can look much thinner. I have students take daily newspapers in my class and I have them code the local stories only. The unanimous conclusion is that how little news is local unless you do sports." It is this ever increasing spiral downwards in terms of news content that has Danky most concerned for ultimately, it can threaten democracy if the electorate is not well informed. "Probably most people might go 'ho-hum' and say 'That's an economic decision and they have to return value to their shareholders,'" Danky said about the cuts in newspaper reporters. "I just say 'Well, if there isn't somebody on the hospital beat in a big city or someone on the school board beat who is always there and always listening and asking questions, then instead of just getting the press releases from the school district and printing them, then the public really has no way to learn enough or get its questions asked about what is happening with education. We lose that oversight function. I can't get up and discover if the water is good to drink in Madison. I have to depend on the public water utility and the Wisconsin State Journal to stay on the story. That translates into a specific economic equation. To stay on the story, somebody has to be a reporter who understands the story, has the phone numbers and contacts and calls them back and asks 'That problem, do you have it fixed?'" Ultimately, the solution might be that newspapers will eventually become non-profits like the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the Pointer Institute. It might be a solution that comes too late. "Some other kind of model that doesn't rely upon meeting a quarterly estimate for Wall Street has got to evolve because if it doesn't evolve soon, the newspapers won't be worth saving because there will be so little local content," Danky emphasized. "They have to figure out how to provide the level of understanding and analysis that we sometimes associate with specialized newspapers and magazines to try and help us understand a situation like Iraq where we didn't know there was more than one kind of Moslem there. We need someone to tell us. We need someone to place these things in context for us." It's a brave new world out there for print journalism. While there probably will always be a need for it, it is anyone's guess how print journalism will look 10 years down the line -- or less. |
| James Danky retires from State Historical Society of Wisconsin Keeper of the written word By Jonathan Gramling Part 2 of 2 |
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