Battle Creek, Michigan, is one of the world’s most famous corporate towns. It is as synonymous with cereal and Kellogg’s as Hershey, PA is with chocolate bars and Hershey’s.
On the surface, Battle Creek is a small Midwestern town with a busy industrial park and many amenities that make it a desirable place to “work, play, and raise a family”. Scratch that surface and you find a small city that is plagued with urban blight, drugs, prostitution, crime, and gang violence.
Keep scratching and you find out there is a reason why it seems so nice on the surface. Our sole hard news media outlet, the Battle Creek Enquirer, is being controlled. It has to be. If they published the truth about what actually happens in the streets of our city on a daily basis, it would be “bad for business”. And that is what the powers that be tell you when you start asking questions. And who can argue with a reason like that? Who wants to do something that is bad for business?
I admit that it is very hard to attract businesses and new residents to a town with two warring street gangs who regularly fight it out in the streets around our city’s once proud high school, now a cauldron of violence straight out of the movie “Lean on Me”. And so, we pretend it isn’t happening and lie to each other. Those who are trying to fix the problem, pretend that their methods are working and lie to each other.
Unfortunately, the dying daily newspaper is suffering from that control, which is bad for the newspaper business. The editor, who believes in the freedoms of speech and the press, tried a work-around. In the spring of 2008, bloggers were asked to start writing about what’s really going on in town on the newly-launched online platform. This is how I became known in my village as a revealer of truth. You can also find me on the battlecreekenquirer.com website, blogging as “caught in the act”.
Unfortunately, that attempt hasn’t been successful. Instead of using the paradigm that the Hearst newspapers utilize, requiring that aspiring bloggers submit a writing sample and a resume, Gannett allows anyone and everyone to blog on their newspaper websites. It seems like a good idea, as long as you haven’t the slightest idea how the Internet works, and you don’t know the difference between an Internet journalist and the average blogger. The signal to noise ratio is that of your average online community.
And the blogware was horrible. I stuck it out for about 10 months before returning to WordPress. In all that time, not one upgrade, except to allow us to embed videos.
Laura Adams
