What a difference a watchdog makes

I'm still thinking about the impending bankruptcy of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, often referred to as West Virginia's watchdog newspaper.

That expression hit home to me. For several good years, Goat Rope Farm was watched over by Arpad the Magnificent (above, with deer carcass), our Great Pyrenees. The bad guys stayed away while the big dog was on watch.

After he died, the predators moved in. Some chicks here, some grown chickens there, a turkey or two. It was on.

I hope the same thing doesn't happen here. Things are plenty bad enough already.

Funeral for a friend

Like a lot of other people I know, I was hit pretty hard by the news of the Charleston Gazette-Mail's bankruptcy and its possible buyout by Wheeling Newspapers. In the past, when I was trying to explain the impact of the Gazette's reporting in WV, I sometimes joked that without it, we'd be living in detention camps.

That doesn't strike me as so funny now.

It remains to be seen how much the new owner will retain of the old Gazette, including staff. But there's no way around the fact that this is a huge loss for West Virginia.

At a personal level, I'm grateful to the Gazette first for letting me know what was really going on in WV for over 30 years. I'm also grateful that when I was just a low wage worker in a public library, editor Jim Haught gave me the chance to be a contributing columnist. And my current editor Dawn Miller still puts up with me.

When I first started doing that in 1988, it paid $20 a week, which, believe it or not, was a lot of money to me then, buying a good sized bag of groceries at a time when my family lived in poverty.  My pay was eventually reduced to zero, but the chance to rant about the issues I cared about was invaluable to me. I probably wouldn't be doing the work I'm doing today if not for it.

We often really don't realize how lucky we were until things change.

Remembering Paul Nyden

I was saddened to learn today of the passing of longtime Charleston Gazette investigative reporter Paul Nyden. I was an avid follower of his work ever since I started paying attention to what was happening in West Virginia.

I was in awe of his high-impact exposures of corruption and greed in corporate and government settings He was a tireless advocate for coal miners, working people and the disadvantaged.

It was a privilege to get to know him when I began working for the American Friends Service Committee in 1989. From then until  his retirement a couple of years ago, if there was a story of injustice that needed to get out, you could count on Paul to do it.

He wasn't just a great reporter. He was a great reader and thinker, an avid baseball fan, and just a bit of a wild man at times.

With a PhD.from Columbia (documenting coalfield struggles), he could easily have had a cozy academic career. Instead, he was drawn to West Virginia by the struggles of miners during the Black Lung and Miners for Democracy movement.

He once told me of a conversation he had with a university administrator who was critical of his interest in such apparently trivial matters as the well being of coal miners. Paul just started staring at the ceiling.

"Why are you looking at that?: his critic asked.

"Do you ever worry about it falling on you?" Paul responded.

"No," said the administrator.

Paul just said, "They do."

Game changer?

The big news in WV these days is a "game changing" deal with China Energy that could mean $83 billion in investment around shale gas and related developments. I found two different but interesting takes on this news from different parts of the state.

This Gazette piece warns that the deal could doom WV to another century as a mineral colony and could have negative environmental impacts. Closer to the likely point of impact, I found this piece from the Wheeling Intelligencer, which is generally pretty conservative, to be interesting. While not criticizing the deal as such, it warns about the dangers of continuing to rely on one major industry, even a relatively new one.

It even calls for making the Future Fund, which is only on the books at this point, a reality. The idea behind a Future Fund is to set aside a portion of severance taxes to create a permanent source of wealth for WV.

I especially like the idea of investing more in education, or "preparing our children for careers in which they, not anything pulled from the earth, were viewed as the valuable resource."

In any case, I hope WV doesn't make the same mistake in the century to come that it did in the last one.