Jim Stasiowski, writing
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It took 12 tries by an equal number of people before someone finally succeeded in explaining to me how tax-increment financing (known as TIF) works.
Maybe 15 tries.
Even before I fully understood TIF, I knew it was a way that a government uses tax money to lure businesses.
To some, the fact it took me that many tries to grasp the intricacies of TIFs makes me look less than intelligent. But I think it makes me look good.
See, I kept trying to understand TIFs. I didn’t give up when I heard about it the first time, back in the 1980s, and told the explainer: “Huh?”
What you need to know about me: Whenever I have been interviewed for a job, and my prospective boss asks the standard, “So, what are your strengths?” I always say I’m a slow learner. I mean, slo—o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ow.
I don’t say that out of some reverse-psychology ploy or a brutally honest display of self-awareness; I say it with pride, because what I mean is that I pick up details the way a bricklayer builds a wall: one piece at a time. And if one doesn’t fit – continuing the bricklayer metaphor here – I will tear down what I’ve done and start over.
Throughout my life, I’ve been around fast learners, from my parents and siblings to classmates and colleagues.
Even my wife, Sharon, swiftly masters numbers and technology and puzzles and instructions and the layouts of cities. When we first got our home wired against break-ins, the security technician had barely started his script when he looked at a distracted me and said, “Sir, are you following this?”
I said, “No,” then pointed to Sharon and added, “but she is, and she’ll fill me in.”
For me as a journalist, slow learning has been an advantage. No matter how difficult the topic, I insist the source go over it until I can explain it to readers.
An example: On a Friday morning last winter, I covered a meeting at which an extremely intricate legislative proposal was discussed. Despite my copious notes, I really didn’t follow a lot of what was said.
After the meeting, I asked the most knowledgeable speaker – call him Roger – to fill in the details. Thinking I could get a story done for the next morning’s edition, I told him I needed an hour of his time.
Roger turned me down, but offered: “How about tomorrow?”
He was running errands on Saturday, so he called me on his cellphone. For four hours Roger helped me, brick-by-brick. It was painful to acknowledge how little I knew of the proposal, but he enjoyed playing tutor. After we talked, I made a few more calls – Reporting tip: In cold climates in the winter, many people are easily reachable on Saturdays – and I wrote a multi-source, nuanced story for the Sunday edition.
I know I should have found a way to get that story on Friday, put it online as soon as possible, then into the Saturday paper. But journalists get paid for more than just speed and clicks; in accepting a newspaper job, we also accept the responsibility of using our judgment. If I had written the story on Friday, it would have been superficial, like local-TV pieces in which, after a complex meeting, the reporter gets 40 seconds of on-camera comments from the mayor.
Yes, I could have found a different source on Friday for a lengthy interview. But here comes the judgment: In listening to the speakers at the meeting, I zeroed in on Roger as having both the broadest knowledge of the topic and the best reputation for candor.
It helped that my editor agreed with me: The story needed steeping, patience, consideration. In our modern media blizzard, speed is seductive but often shallow. A murder? Massive traffic accident? Trial outcome? OK, get it online and compete to be first (and, not incidentally, best).
But a topic with profound and long-term implications deserves time to develop.
I am not criticizing fast learners; I often wish I were one. And my self-assigned “slow learner” label hasn’t inhibited my ability to swiftly turn a slender news tip into a solid deadline-pressure story.
Still, it is an asset to know what I don’t know, like how to operate our home’s security system.
Now, back to TIFs: They started as a noble workaround to develop blighted areas, but shrewd business executives exploited simple-minded politicians lusting after credit for the holy grail called “economic development,” and today some TIFs are little more than corporate welfare, larding with tax money projects that companies would have done without such help.
When your local government considers a TIF, start at the bottom. First study the TIF laws, then methodically build your story brick-by-brick.
THE FINAL WORD: Although I usually reject new or trendy words, I do appreciate the utility of “workaround,” a noun the dictionary defines as “a method for overcoming an obstacle or bypassing a problem.”
Inaugural Day ‘open letter’ – to the rest of us
Gene Policinski, inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him on Twitter:
@genefac
Sending an “open letter” to President Trump has been in vogue these days.
Social activists, business moguls, media chieftains and political leaders all have penned a multitude of them since the November election. Some offer advice, some raise alarms, some offer praise and some just convey insults.
All well and good – those exchanges and more are in the “free speech and free press” ethos protected by the First Amendment of speaking “truth to power” – even if the response from Trump more often than not has been to tar vigorously any unfavorable messages as “untruth.”
So this moment in history is just too ripe not to join in, but with a twist: Here’s my open letter about our core freedoms of speech, press, assembly, petition and religion … as a note not to the new commander in chief, but to the rest of us — “We, The People.”
For those who reveled in Trump’s oath of office, take a moment to consider that the freedoms of speech and press that he seems to be targeting were in no small way vital to a campaign rooted in reaching out to those who felt marginalized, ignored or even betrayed by both major parties.
Trump’s ongoing “fireside tweets” are both new to American politics and an echo of FDR’s similar mastery of the new medium of his era, radio, to speak directly to voters. He and we need to keep in mind that loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue a reporter also will make it easier to mount a legal challenge to all of us – including Trump – over our online comments.
And then there’s Trump’s biting, emotional indictments of the news media. More than 60 news and free press organizations earlier this week sent a multi-page note to the president and Vice President Pence, asking for a meeting to discuss transparency and press access to their administration.
We, the people, should endorse that call to coverage by our independent “watchdogs on government.” In turn, journalists must take action to reverse a widespread view – 74 percent in the latest State of the First Amendment survey – that the news media is failing to live up to its responsibility to be accurate and unbiased in news reports or to, at the least, be transparent in declaring bias.
Holding government accountable in public for how public policy is made, and how public money is spent, would seem to be a nonpartisan objective on which we can all agree. In that same State of the First Amendment survey, 71 percent of us said that was the case.
We will need to keep in mind as a nation that discussion, dissent, disagreement and debate are the hallmarks of a strong and open system of self-governance – and provide the means for self-correction when this nation goes astray. Let’s consider how rare it is in the world to be able to assemble peaceably without fear of government persecution or prosecution, and to petition the government for change.
In like manner, there might be those who decried the “Women’s March” that followed the Inaugural Parade by one day as divisive. But what a grand example to other nations: Hundreds of thousands of Americans on one day, celebrating the peaceful transition of national power after a heated, closely contested election — only to be followed a single day later, in the same space, by hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting the political particulars of that transfer.
And finally, there’s certainly every reason to fear domestic and international terrorists. But we need to remember that targeting others solely because of their Muslim religious faith not only violates our nation’s unique commitment to respecting all faiths, but resurrects images of a time when unjustified wartime fear and disgraceful ethnic bias led us to intern Japanese Americans at the start if World War II.
More than ever, as we enter this new “Era of Trump,” we should heed the call to duty as citizens expressed in the observation by my late colleague John Seigenthaler that our First Amendment freedoms “are never safe, never secure, but always in the process of being made safe and secure.”
We might disagree – and often do – on how those five core freedoms of the First Amendment apply to any given set of facts.
But we should all stand behind them against any attempt to limit, weaken or ignore them on the basis of the variable political winds, the power of fear – or even the impact of the occasional presidential tweet.