By Jasmine Wu, Bulletin Staff
‘Stu Neilson is in town crier garb and holding up a copy of the Town Crier newspaper as he waits at an airport in 1999 to greet Michael David Kean-Price, the actual town crier of Tewkesbury, England.’
To say that Stu Neilson retired in April solely as managing editor of the Wilmington/ Tewksbury (Mass.) Town Crier would be an understatement.
Neilson found himself filling almost every role at the weekly newspaper, with a circulation of about 6,000, for the past 50 years, after his father founded the Town Crier in 1955.
“I was the editor, photographer, janitor. I’d fix the roofs, sweep the floors and do everything,” said Neilson, who retired from the Town Crier but will work from home in Wilmington for ACN Marketing, based in Concord, N.C.
He recalled a time when his loyalty to the Town Crier was uncertain. For financial reasons, his father had decided in 1974 that someone at the newspaper needed to be laid off.
“I said, ‘Fine, I’m the one,’ and threw my keys on the counter and stormed out the door and moved to New Mexico,” said Neilson, who is now not able to recall the nature of the conflict with his father. “It was a terrible mistake.”
After a brief stint working at a hardware store, Neilson, then 27 years old, returned to the Town Crier after remembering what he loved about journalism.
“(It’s) the variety of the work,” Neilson said. “There’s something different every 10 minutes … and it just keeps on changing.”
Neilson said bringing changes to the Town Crier was one of his biggest accomplishments.
Although the Town Crier had been using phototypesetting, a technique that requires painstaking hours of cutting and pasting copy onto a layout board, Neilson foresaw the popularity of laser writers and brought Apple Macintosh computers into the newsroom. The Macs could communicate with the printer, which would then enable printing on less expensive paper than phototypesetting required, he said.
“We were the first newspaper in the world to completely shut off all phototypesetting and go exclusively with Macintosh and laser writers,” Neilson said.
The Town Crier was written about in national and international publications, including Time Magazine, for making that conversion, he said.
“I saw it coming down the pike and said, ‘I’m doing that.’ I had people coming in from all over the world to interview me,” Neilson said.
The feat was impressive for a newspaper the size of the Town Crier, but working for a small newspaper allows for a lot more autonomy, Neilson said.
“You get to do what you think is right as opposed to taking orders from someone else,” he said. “On the split side of that, you’ve got responsibility.”
For example, Neilson frequently had to report and write, even though he didn’t really enjoy it.
“I would only do that when it had to be done, but photography is a lot more fun than any of it,” he said.
Even though he likes taking photographs, Neilson learned one day while shooting a football game that it isn’t always pain-free.
“It was a Thanksgiving game … and I was concentrating, not really watching the play, and (the players) ran over me and I ended up crawling off the field,” Neilson said.
“Afterward, when my sports editor was going over the game films, they got to that part and backed it up and played it over again and again,” he said with a laugh.
Another of Neilson’s most memorable assignments occurred on a slow Friday afternoon when he followed a fire truck parked on one side of the railroad tracks that was putting out a fire on the other side. The train station had been called to shut down the trains but mistook the instructions for another set of tracks.
“The train comes around the corner at 60 miles per hour,” Neilson said. “I kept the motor drive running, taking three frames a second, and I ran over to the truck … (The train) sucks one of the hoses up and it swings it around. It was quite dramatic. The train went by two or three feet away from me.”
The photograph, of a train running through the spewing water of the hose as the hose whips around and lifts the hat off a fireman’s head, won Neilson recognition as photographer of the year from the Massachusetts Press Association.
Sometimes at a small newspaper, your best assignments come from “dropping everything you’re doing, with your camera in hand, chasing the fire engines down the street,” Neilson said.
‘Stu Neilson prepares to eat at the Town Crier’s office Christmas party in 1983.’
‘It was a Thanksgiving game … and I was concentrating, not really watching the play, and (the players) ran over me and I ended up crawling off the field. Afterward, when my sports editor was going over the game films, they got to that part and backed it up and played it over again and again.’
–Stu Neilson
Both encouraging and discouraging results from First Amendment survey
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
This year’s State of the First Amendment national survey (SOFA), conducted in partnership with USA TODAY, does more than just sample our attitudes about those five core freedoms – it also might show just how those freedoms can work.
Overall, the survey’s specific findings tilt to the positive on the First Amendment. But there also are a few signs that we and our fellow citizens can do a better job of supporting freedom, or even knowing its components.
A whopping 86 percent reject the notion that free speech ought to give way to protecting people from things that might offend them. When it comes to college campuses – where the impact of negative speech on social media really hits home – support even for speech that offends still stands at 57 percent. Only when it comes to high school students does free speech come up short of a majority: Just 35 percent say it’s OK for those students to offend others.
The survey, conducted by the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center since 1997, still finds strong support for a free press as a “watchdog on government,” though 74 percent doubt that the “news media attempt to report the news without bias.” But perhaps the latter is not as much of an indictment in a time when some liberal and conservative news operations tout their points of view.
Eight of 10 are concerned about individual privacy in the Digital Age, but more than six of 10 would permit the government “to be able to force companies to unlock the data saved on the smartphones of customers who are accused of terrorist acts.”
So let’s turn to an interesting change in attitudes after the tragic mass shooting in Orlando June 12. The horrifying attack, in which 49 people were killed by an assailant, was followed by a burst of anti-Islamic rhetoric after the killer’s declaration of allegiance to ISIS.
In turn, all of that was followed by social and political pushback in the other direction. Muslim leaders decried the use of their faith to justify hatred of the United States or homophobic terrorism. Opposition was vocal to calls to increase surveillance of Muslims in America, or presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s continued suggestion of a ban for an indeterminate period on Muslims entering the United States.
The First Amendment Center went into the field in late May with its annual, national survey of adults – days before the deaths in Orlando. But given the intense national debate involving religious liberty after the attack, a second round of sampling was commissioned and completed June 27.
The second survey found support for First Amendment protection for what respondents might consider fringe or extreme faiths actually increased, despite anti-Muslim rhetoric and reports of an ISIS connection that followed the worst mass shooting in U.S history: The number of people who said such protection does not extend to such faiths dropped from 29 percent to 22 percent.
In both surveys, a little more than 1,000 adults were sampled by telephone, and the margin of error in the surveys was plus/minus 3.2 percent.
The First Amendment is predicated on the notion that citizens able to freely debate – without government censorship or direction – will exchange views, sometimes strongly and on controversial subjects, and find common ground.
In this case, that exchange of views seemingly produced increased support for protecting views many people would find offensive, even in the face of violence. In at least this survey’s findings, the nation spoke – in favor of freedom.
There’s one more result from this year’s State of the First Amendment that’s worth noting – nearly four in 10 of those questioned could not name a single freedom in the First Amendment unaided. For the record, they are religion, speech, press, assembly and petition.
Perhaps not identifying any one of the five as part of the First Amendment is not the same as not knowing you have those core freedoms. But neither does it build confidence that as a nation, we have a deep understanding of the core elements of what distinguishes our nation among others, or is so fundamental to the unique American experience of self-governance.
So in the spirit of the recent July 4th holiday and of the First Amendment year-round: Join in the fireworks – the ones you watch or the ones around important issues. And repeat after me: religion, speech, press, assembly and petition.