Hi, I’m Eric Whitney, the news director here at Montana Public Radio.
I’m here to explain why I made the difficult decision to discontinue commentaries on Montana Evening Edition.
First, I want listeners to know that the mission of the news department is not changing. We’re here to give people the information they need to understand what’s happening in Montana. We’re not going to reduce the diversity of opinions and voices heard on local news. To the contrary, my plan and promise is to actually put more voices and points of view on the air, by including them in our news stories and interviews.
I’ve been a public radio reporter for 21 years now. In recent years, there have been two disturbing trends in the news media, a drastic reduction in amount of local news available, and an increase in one-sided opinion pieces across all forms of media. According to the Pew Research Journalism Project, in 2012 alone, the number of professional journalism jobs in the US fell by more than six percent. Since 1989 nearly 20,000 newsroom jobs have been eliminated nationwide, many of them at local newspapers that have cut staff dramatically or simply shut their doors.
At the same time, there are more venues than ever allowing people to express their opinions in the media.
That’s why I’ve decided to focus all of Montana Public Radio’s news resources on reporting local news. There’s not enough of it, the amount of quality local news continues to shrink, and we need to spend all of our time and money reporting local news.
I recognize that there has been a long tradition of commentaries on this station, and that they are valuable content, but producing commentaries takes significant staff time and resources. Particularly time intensive is ensuring editorial balance so that Montana Public Radio is not perceived as biased for or against any one particular point of view.
My decision is that, at this time, our limited newsroom resources are best allocated to finding and telling local news stories; hunting down the best sources across western Montana to reflect what Montanans are thinking, saying and doing about the issues that matter to us all, and reporting them as news.
Ending commentaries was not an easy decision, nor one I made lightly. Tonight I’m making the promise to continue informing Montanans about the issues important to people here; to continue representing a broad spectrum of opinion in our news stories, to include the voices of many different kinds of people in the many communities where our signal is heard, and to use all the tools I have to produce local news that matters.
Thank you for continuing to listen to Montana Public Radio News. I hope listeners will give us an opportunity to prove ourselves, and then get in touch to let us know how we’re doing.
