Nows and Forevers

This is the fourth Christmas with Covid-19 around, and far from it being in the past, the SARS-CoV-2 virus seems to be making a resurgence. A new variant is leading to a wave of cases this December, and making headlines.

What do I say to that? Covid never left.

The virus definitely has taken a back seat in the headlines. I have written about Covid for a long time — my first article about it was Jan. 23, 2020 — and it feels like all of 2020 and most of 2021, that’s all I wrote about. The first year of the pandemic remains one of the most consequential of my life, and one I’ll never forget. (I don’t think anyone who is old enough to remember it will ever forget.)

Yet even if Covid isn’t as deadly as it was, Covid is still deadly and it’s still contagious. It’s still a big health threat and it’s something to be taken seriously. I was able to delay my first case of Covid for more than three years, just enough time to have the latest vaccine AND a quick prescription of Paxlovid. I’m thankful for both, and thankful my Covid bout was on the mild side. But I’m not naive or careless enough to think that my less-dire experience is indicative of everyone’s experience.

It’s not. Axios said 67,200 people have died of Covid in 2023. Perhaps that’s less than the 246,200 in 2022 and the 463,300 in 2021. But it’s still way too many.

We’re not counting Covid cases as we once did, so we don’t know what’s happening. There is tracking via wastewater still. That shows, according to the CDC, that Covid is “very high” in 22 states. That’s “very high” in two states that border my own, although my own state of Pennsylvania is only “high.” (Only?) New York, my former state and where I’ll be part of this holiday season, is also “high.”

One school system near me has gone to virtual because of a high number of cases. A big hospital system here in Pennsylvania is requiring masks again. I know more than a handful of people who either have Covid or RSV right this moment.

I’m hoping my recent Covid case, added to the vaccine I got a week earlier unaware I would get the virus, will help protect me. So I haven’t begun wearing masks again. I wore a mask in public all the time from February 2020 to the winter of 2023.

But I may. It’s getting tough out there again.

I heard about a Zoom call the other day that both surprised and amused me. But after thinking about it, I’m not sure I see the humor after all.

Someone I know was on conference call where one of the participants identified itself as the AI personal assistant of someone who had been invited to the meeting. Let’s call the AI Betty, even though that wasn’t the name. Betty said in the chat that she was attending in place of a human being, and would be taking notes.

Soon after, there were introductions. The moderator asked, aloud, whether Betty wanted to introduce herself. There was silence on the line.

“I think Betty is AI,” someone else said. Turns out, Zoom offers a virtual assistant free with a paid account.

I suppose I should be amazed at how AI can now attend meetings in someone’s place, and contribute, allowing the human to do other things. But I thought more about the cheekiness of the human who sent a virtual assistant instead. Is that really cool?

If I sent a virtual assistant to a meeting instead of me, I think my boss would be upset. And I wouldn’t want to go to a meeting or an interview, only to find that I came with my human presence but my counterparts were all machines. Makes you wonder whether the meeting was really necessary after all.

I’ve seen more than one prediction that says virtual assistants are going to be everywhere soon. Bill Gates say it’s within the next five years.

“They will utterly change how we live,” Gates told Fortune.

But I’m wondering if it will be a change for the good completely. Guess we’ll soon find out.

Most Connecticut natives are conflicted. We live in between two oversized brands, New York and Boston. We’re a small state, incredibly rich in some areas, especially in the 25% or so that could be considered a New York suburb. Yet Connecticut also holds some of the poorest cities in the country. And there’s a lot in between.

To be from Connecticut is to feel those contradictions.

From the outside, Connecticut is often seen as a “drive through” state on your way to New York or Boston or Cape Cod. Or, as this article says, a place of prep schools and Yale. We often define ourselves in terms of either Boston or New York. I know I do.

I was born and raised a commuter train ride away from Grand Central Station. I saw Long Island from my school bus window every clear day, and watched New York TV, listened to New York radio, read New York City newspapers. Yet my grandparents both lived outside Boston, so we were there many weekends and every holiday. My grandmother ordained me a Red Sox fan, which I remain. But I’m closer to New York in thoughts and feelings than I am to Boston, not just growing up but also having worked in Manhattan and living in the Hudson Valley and in Queens for a significant portion of my life. Two of my children are New York natives, as was another loved one.

Connecticut is where I went to school, played baseball, went to church, had my first relationships, where I first learned to ply my trade of journalism. It’s where my eyes opened to disparities, racial and economic, thanks to my parents’ social conscience.

I have lived all across the United States and haven’t lived in Connecticut since 1996, though I’ve lived in Connecticut and New York well more than half my life. My father left the state several years ago. I no longer get to Connecticut regularly. Yet Connecticut never leaves me. Two places stir my heart when I’m there. One is in the Hudson Valley, which looms large in my lie and where part of me will always be. And the other is Connecticut, which birthed me and made me who I am, better and worse.

What’s Connecticut’s brand? For me, home.

Jean Knight, who sang this Billboard No. 2 hit in 1971, died this week at 80. I recommend a listen to what makes this song so great: Jean Knight.

She lost out in Grammys that year to Aretha Franklin and Bill Withers, a heavenly trio if I ever heard one. Withers’ entry was “Ain’t No Sunshine.”

Even though I have worked as a journalist for a long time and know the state of the industry, a recent annual report on the industry shocked me.

A third of the newspapers in the United States have shuttered since 2005. That’s 2,900, which is more two a week. That’s not just afternoon papers, which are probably just about dead by now, but also entire daily newspapers and weekly newspapers. And I don’t think it counts the number of daily newspapers that now publish only a handful of times a week or moved completely online.

A third of all newspapers have shut? Wow.
Back when I started my career, this would have been unthinkable. There had been a winnowing of newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s — casualties of the rise of TV and the changing media habits, even then — but by the time I arrived at my first newspaper in the late ’80s, the bleeding had mostly stopped. I didn’t know it at the time, but the ’80s and ’90s were a golden age for newspapers. They were flush with cash, well staffed, and still full of post-Watergate passion for what the best journalism could be as a public service and a vehicle for storytelling.

As a reporter, I went off to workshops and conferences where we talked about writing and reporting and how to get better. As an editor, I tried to put those into practice and inspire my reporters and other editors to reach ever higher.

Even in the early 2000s, as the Internet began to buffet local and national newspapers, that worked. But then social media came and so did private equity and others who were interested more in squeezing profits out of newspapers instead of journalism. They squeezed all they could and then began to cut, and cut, and cut. They’ve kept cutting to the point where newspapers that once had hundreds of employees in the newsroom now have dozens. Or less. You can see that in just about every big city as well as every small city.

I see that first hand. The newspaper I work at has
been lucky, and we’ve weathered the storm better than others. I’m too anonymous to disclose how we do that, although I’m impressed and appreciative with their vision and scale. But we’re a special case.

Most other papers have long been eviscerated. There’s no time to do much of anything anymore.
I can see that in the newspapers I’ve worked for in my career. My first, in Connecticut, remains an independent and seems to be surviving if not exactly thriving. My second newspaper was sold from a trust to a chain, which owns a bunch of other newspapers in the region. My third paper was once a part of a national chain that’s no more and now is part of the company that swallowed up my second newspaper.

The papers I ran in another state, in very rural areas spread across hundreds of miles, they are shadows of what they used to be. The same is true of the newspaper I worked at in New York.

The other two publications I worked at in New York City, one online and the other what had been a daily entertainment magazine, remain although the latter has long since gone weekly in print.

And that’s just my career. I know journalists who have lost their jobs when their newspapers shutter. Two other newspapers in Connecticut just this week — the Meriden Record-Journal near my hometown and the Winsted Citizen — were sold to out-of-state conglomerates when the owners realized, in their words, that local news no longer could be sustained.

That makes me so sad, not just for the people who have lost their jobs but also for the communities that have lost their voices. Newspapers are not perfect servants. For a career based on accuracy and completeness, we haven’t always lived up to that role. But where we as a newspaper industry used to turn away from stories for space reasons, we’ve long since gone the other way and shunned many things for lack of staff.

At a time when we need more community, we end up having less. There’s no one keeping a watch on government and power, which is a tradition of journalism that must be preserved. And the supposedly egalitarian online community, whether it’s social media or online journalism, well a lot of that hasn’t been able to fill the gap.

And we’re all poorer for it.