A year that has healed some wounds

A year ago today, I woke up and got physically ill. Then I drove to my office to turn in my laptop computer and employee badge, ending a 29-year career in daily newspapers.

On the way out the building, I grabbed some old posters the company had offered – castoffs just like me and the scores of other employees who lost their jobs as of Oct. 1, 2012, as part of the Newhouse/Advance Publications shift from print journalism.

This morning, I awoke with a song in my heart, celebrating my first year as a freelance journalist.

My daughter commented about how less grumpy I was in the morning, versus a year earlier. My mother has said I seem less angry.

Despite the struggle that has been the last year – or perhaps in large part because of it – I am happier.

For six years or more, it seems like my family and I have lurched from one disaster to another – some natural, some financial and some resulting from my wife and I both having careers then in a crumbling industry.

When Anna and I were hired in 2000, The Birmingham News prided itself as one of the last of the cradle-to-grave employers. Newhouse, the owners, preferred to keep employees from organizing into unions by offering guild-style pay and benefits, as well as a pledge never to lay off employees from the daily newspaper due to the economy or change in technology.

But the newspaper industry has been mired in a paradigm shift for decades, one of the many changes the Internet has brought to our world. Newspaper revenues dropped, first affecting publicly traded companies whose executives vainly tried to maintain rich dividends and profit-margins in a shifting economy.

Privately held media companies like Newhouse were shielded for years. I recall that when Anna and I were about to buy our first house in 2002, the latest set of layoffs was being announced at our old employer (owned by a publicly-traded company) while we at The News got the latest in a series of letters reminding us of “The Pledge.”

But by 2008, a variety of forces brought reality crashing down on Newhouse employees. Thus began the death of a thousand cuts – wage freezes, furloughs, a pension freeze, reduced sick leave, benefit cuts like parking and insurance subsidies – accompanied by multiple buyouts of diminishing value that always carried the threat of layoffs if financial targets were not reached.

As the newsroom shrank, demands increased on those who remained. This was accompanied by a mad scramble to establish relevance in the modern Web-based world without any clear vision of how to accomplish that goal – but still underscored with the threat of job loss for those who could not keep pace or meet the standards set by ever-shifting measurement tools.

Anna got out, putting her considerable skills to better use as point person on healthcare reform for Viva insurance company. But I tried to hang on in newspapers, preferably until I hit my retirement age of 67 that also would mark my youngest child’s fourth year in college.

Newhouse provided notice it was killing “The Pledge,” which was followed at some papers by a publisher purge. The guillotine fell in late May 2012, when Newhouse announced that Birmingham and its other Alabama newspapers would shift to three-day print publication and a more youthful, 24/7 emphasis on the Web platform, al.com. Massive layoffs would accompany that change.

But the specific heads didn’t roll until mid-June, touching off an agonizing period of weeks while people accepted their announced fate of either being retained or cast aside.

Those of us who were told we didn’t have the tools for the new world order were asked to stay on until Oct. 1, 2012, which may go down as the world’s longest layoff. Things got awkward as the transition neared – new employees came and got training and new equipment, departing employees were displaced to rearrange the office furniture and as the transition neared, vacation leave for departing employees was denied while the folks remaining took some time off.

I will always be thankful, however, for how we were treated financially. When the Birmingham Post-Herald closed eight years ago, there was no lay-off period and no severance. People on vacation learned they had no job awaiting them back home. One guy called in with a story to file, but was told there was no paper to print it.

Instead, we who were laid off at The News got paid for that “world’s longest layoff” period, some 15 weeks or so. We also got severance pay based on longevity. In my case that provided paychecks past the end of the year, allowing me to get established in my freelance work.

As a consumer, I miss having a daily local newspaper. As a journalist I mourn for an industry, and its audience, that no longer has the time or sufficient resources to study an issue in depth and present it in a compelling manner. As someone who got into daily newspapers with the goal of providing the information needed for an informed electorate, I am concerned about the increasing superficiality across the news industry for coverage on a local, state, national and international level.

I dearly miss being a daily newspaper reporter and the depth and storytelling opportunities presented by my favorite beat, the court system. It was a large part of who I am, and some days I’m still angry that was taken from me. And I regret I never was able to reach my professional goal of becoming a full-time food writer exploring how to live to eat and eat to live.

But I have thoroughly enjoyed my work over the past year, working on legislative affairs materials for a local hospital system and helping author and edit The New Politics of Judicial Elections, a national report on judicial campaign financing that is soon to be released. I maintain a presence in the Birmingham News and al.com through monthly restaurant reviews. I plan to expand my client base soon, or bow to certain realities.

It’s been hard work with some mighty long hours as multiple freelance deadlines overlapped. Most of the work has been done in my basement office, which I have dubbed “The Cave.” To fit in family duties, this troll often starts work at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m.

But I’ve had the joy of working for Alabama Possible, formerly the Alabama Poverty Project, as moderator of a talk on race, poverty and justice with former Judge Scott Vowell and noted lawyer J. Mason Davis. I was able to do a little publicity for my church centennial.  I got to help a high-school buddy out with some copy for his online organics business, Safe Organics.

I’ve gotten to spend more time with my children, especially during this past summer’s “Camp Daddy” weeks. I have the flexibility to do even more to help my family. I hope I’ve become a better husband.

Sure, in some ways we’ve still got the proverbial foot on a banana peel. I’m less financially secure than I was two years ago today, when the thought of squeezing out more years of my daily newspaper career seemed plausible.

But I am more secure than I was a year ago today, amid the uncertainty of starting all over in a market crowded with talented displaced journalists.

I have a year of accomplishment under my belt. And a smile on my face.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Justice delayed, justice denied

If Chris McNair has taught us anything here in Birmingham, it’s this old adage:

Justice delayed is justice denied.

McNair is the father of Denise McNair, one of the four little girls killed in the Klan bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church 50 years ago this month. For decades afterward, an alabaster wall of silence, coupled with federal government complicity, delayed bringing the bombers to justice.

McNair also is a former Jefferson County commissioner and one of the reasons county sewer rates are so high. Commissioner McNair was a central figure in a bribery-for-contracts scheme during the early years of Jefferson County’s court-ordered sewer rehabilitation program that began in 1996.

McNair was the only elected official among more than a dozen county employees, construction contractors and engineers who went to prison for their roles in rigging sewer contracts. The corruption added at least $336 million to the cost of what became a $3.2 billion program funded solely by sewer customers.

In 2006, McNair was convicted of some bribery charges, and in February 2007 he pleaded guilty in connection to others. On Sept. 19, 2007, a federal judge sentenced McNair to five years and ordered nearly $852,000 in restitution.

McNair was 80 years old then. But legal wrangling allowed him to delay reporting to prison until June 2011. The 87-year-old was released last month under just-expanded medical hardship rules, after serving only 26 months of a 60-month sentence.

Normally in federal prisons, defendants must serve at least 85 percent of their terms; under those circumstances McNair would have spent nearly twice as long behind bars than he actually did.

Chris McNair was 85 when he finally went to prison. Had he accepted his punishment when he was sentenced in 2007, he would have served his full term of 51-60 months and still have been freed many months before the planned ceremonies marking his daughter’s supremely tragic death.

McNair’s was a cynical crime. At the time, commissioners oversaw county departments (the struggle to end that practice continues even now). As a result, elected members of the legislative branch also performed executive-branch roles as super department heads.

Commissioners then didn’t meddle in each other’s fiefdoms – a professional courtesy that helps explain why so many former Jefferson County commissioners are now convicted felons. McNair ran the sewer department, and therefore the court-ordered sewer rehabilitation program that was begun in 1995 to settle a lawsuit over excessive sewer discharges.

If McNair said a sewer bidding policy or contract was OK, the other commissioners broke out the rubber stamp.

When county sewer department officials took care of their buddies by steering them no-bid engineering contracts, McNair signed off on them. When the sewer department officials created a system that limited construction bids to their buddies, McNair signed off on it. And he willingly went along when county sewer officials dragged their feet to expand the list of qualified contractors so construction bidding would be more competitive. McNair didn’t say a word when county employees routinely allowed contractors to bypass the bidding process and award new, lucrative work at inflated prices.

In return, those engineers and construction companies helped rebuild and outfit a photography studio for McNair, a state-of-the-art showcase for the professional photographer. The charges against him included receiving cash and construction services for a lake house in his native Arkansas.

Under McNair’s watch, the estimated cost of the sewer rehabilitation program nearly tripled to $3.2 billion. Financing schemes to pay for all that led to another round of federal corruption convictions and ultimately to the county’s bankruptcy. With government services cut beyond the bone, residents now spend hours in line waiting to renew a car tag or register new property. Part of that wait ultimately is attributable to McNair’s corruption.

Chris McNair deserves sympathy. Few can look at the bombing on Sept. 15, 1963, and not feel at least some of the pain he and the families must have endured all of those years while waiting for the men who killed Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley to be brought to justice.

Delay in bringing 16th Street bombers Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton to court was a denial of justice, not only for the McNairs and the other victims’ families but for society as a whole. A fourth suspect died before he could be brought to face a jury.

In the same vein, delay in McNair’s imprisonment also was justice denied to the Jefferson County residents who, decades from now, still will be paying off the bonds sold to fund the county’s sewer rehabilitation program.

Chris McNair should not be denied a prominent spot on the podium this month when his daughter’s death is properly remembered as a clarion call for civil rights. Five decades ago, his was a powerful voice for nonviolence amid the anger many felt over those four girls’ horrible deaths.

But the reputation McNair built after the bombing is part of why he was elected to the state legislature in 1973 and to the Jefferson County Commission in 1986. It was why he was in a position to profit from corruption in the sewer program in the years leading to his sudden resignation in 2001.

He took the bribes and he admitted guilt. His delay in reporting to prison allowed him to escape full justice.

On a day commemorating the four little girls killed in that terrorist attack, the concept of justice should be black and white. But sadly, it also will be shrouded to a small degree in shades of gray.