This has hardly been a ‘Daily’ journal. Sorry about that.
The coronavirus has been a big distraction. Too light a word, distraction. It’s been a scary life-changing event for most. If you’ve been following this blog, you’d think that all I’ve been doing since April Fool’s Day is listening to piano music.
Holy Titanic, that’s not the case!
To catch you up on what I’ve been doing these past few weeks, I’ll start with the point where I realized this was a huge deal.
It was Friday, March 13, and after an exchange of emails with Dr. Michael Saag that started the previous day, I received and read an Op-ed piece Saag sent me and it really opened my eyes. In clear straight ahead prose Saag laid out the pending crisis from transmission to infection to possible runaway contagion and worldwide shut-down. Saag’s piece was a hard-hitting , fact-filled, Paul Revere call- out.
I felt Saag’s sense of urgency now . The AL.com headline published Friday evening:
Renowned AIDS expert: Alabama not prepared for ‘major storm’ of COVID-19
On Saturday I talked to Saag again about some of the emails he had received from doctors he knew on the front lines in Italy. The emails painted a vivid and tragic scene: overrun emergency departments, bed shortages, medical staff weeping as they helplessly watched patients die. That story published Sunday, I believe.
Italian doctors reveal how COVID-19 is blowing up the health care system
Saag agreed to do a Q&A and follow that up with daily reports answering questions as the pandemic unfolded. We did get a couple in:
I did a few other virus related stories after that:
MVC asks: Proof that God doesn’t favor the devout. And is coronavirus testing a farce?
Alabama hunkers down for virus and tornadoes
Many of these stories were getting 10s and even hundreds of thousands of page views. Saag’s Friday the 13th Op-ed has had half a million page views to date. Millions were reading AL.com stories and our hard-working staff of several dozen have written and are writing hundreds of stories.
I have been in this business for 40 years at three major news organizations from Florida to California and have been involved in stories that have had major impacts. But in terms of public service and changing lives, the alarm bells — once we started ringing them — probably helped slow this thing down by educating the public. And while I’m viewing this through the lens of AL.com, I think it is true of the news media in general. It is a great example of where the value of journalism shines.
And so it is ironic, and yes cosmically intertwined — like Saag getting the virus — that my company announced pay cuts and mandatory unpaid furloughs this week.
The reason: The coronavirus has hit our economy with a wallop not seen a long long time. We make much of our money from advertising and businesses are slashing those advertising dollars. And of course, some business will not survive.
What do we do? Keep on keeping on. In the meantime if you are so inclined, we announced a new way for readers to help: voluntary subscriptions. We hope enough readers will chip in $10 per month to help us do our job keeping the public informed.
I’ll leave you with a song I have adopted as my own personal coronavirus song by one of my favorites: