A VERY LONG Editorial On What We Have Lost, What The Work Has Cost, And What We Still MIGHT Build
Thoughts and Observations By ANN Editor-In-Chief, Jim Campbell
E-I-C Note/Apology: My apologies for the length of what follows… apparently thirty years of Aero-News, decades of flying and reporting before that, and a growing frustration with aviation’s squandered possibilities will not fit comfortably into a bumper sticker. But more than anything, this comes from a promise I made to my dear friend Bob Hoover in the last months of his life, when he worried about the aviation world he would leave behind. I promised to do my very best to help change it for the better. That promise still matters, and there is too much worth building—and too much at risk—to leave it at good intentions. Hence the following diatribe…
Part Three: We Could Have Taken The Money… But Then What Would Any Of This Have Meant?
Before I go much further, let me explain a little about what it takes to keep Aero-News Network—ANN—coming your way. A story, an Airborne episode, a newsletter, an interview, or a livestream from an aviation event is the part you see; reporting, editing, shooting, producing, and keeping the business operating are what have to happen behind it. Then tomorrow arrives and we get to do it again, whether yesterday went beautifully or left us wondering what else could possibly malfunction. It has occupied more than thirty years of my life, and, folks, it is a bloody enormous amount of work.
A finished story is the visible end of a process that may involve digging through documents, tracking down somebody who does not particularly want to answer, finding the person who actually understands the technical issue, separating a claim from a demonstrated fact, and deciding whether the material in hand is good enough to publish. The camera has to get there, the sound has to work, the interview has to produce something worth hearing, and the finished program has to make sense to somebody who was not standing beside us when it happened. Then comes the next edition, the next deadline, the next correction, the next unexpected development… and all the ordinary obligations of running a business. For some inexplicable reason, the people sending the bills remain remarkably uninterested in being paid with our good intentions.
And people do that work. Writers, videographers, editors, production people, and others have given their time, talent, patience, and much more to make ANN possible, often when a less demanding assignment would have been awfully attractive. I put my name on an editorial like this, but I have never done all of it alone. The people who have stood beside me deserve to know how much their work has mattered, and readers deserve to know that a news operation does not arrive on their screens because one opinionated old flyer has decided to have another thought.
There have been extraordinary sacrifices, and I am not going to make them sound like the charming adventures of a fellow who chose an interesting career. The hours come out of your life, the worry follows you home, and the financial consequences do not disappear because you believe you did the right thing. I would have liked to spend a great deal more time enjoying aviation and considerably less defending the people trying to take part in it. But you cannot always put a concern aside until it fits a more convenient schedule… particularly when somebody has trusted you enough to ask for help.
We could have pursued a far more financially rewarding business by doing what I have watched too much of aviation publishing become comfortable doing: take the money, deliver the agreeable coverage, overlook the inconvenient questions, and make sure the people paying the bills have very little reason to be uncomfortable. Keep it pleasant, keep it marketable, and leave the consequences to the reader who eventually discovers what the article did not explain. I believe that choice could have made us substantially more prosperous. I also believe it would have destroyed the reason ANN was worth building in the first place.
We refused to sell the answer somebody wanted printed. Advertising, sponsorship, and honest commercial work are necessary to keep a business alive; I have no quarrel with earning money properly. But an advertiser buys advertising, not the right to decide whether his conduct can be examined. If an airplane is good, explain why; if it has shortcomings, explain what they mean to the person buying it. A check cannot make an unsupported promise come true for the customer, however useful that check might have been to us. We have had opportunities to make that distinction less important… and we did not take them.
And I have to admit that this has not always felt noble while we were living through it. Sometimes it has felt exhausting, expensive, frustrating, and damned lonely, particularly when the easier approach was being rewarded all around us. A principle can look splendid on the wall and feel considerably less comfortable when you are trying to figure out how to carry another month’s obligations. There is no automatic prize for doing the difficult thing, and I am quite certain a sensible business adviser could have found much to criticize in our stubbornness. But I could not ask a fellow flyer to trust our reporting while quietly arranging our business around reasons he should not. Whatever else we have gotten right or wrong, that was a line I was not willing to cross… and, yes, there have been times when the price of holding it has hurt.
We have carried much the same stubbornness into efforts beyond the daily news. We have tried to teach, bring people together, expose problems, introduce worthwhile ideas, and let people see more of aviation than a sales pitch would show them. Some efforts worked, some failed, and some accomplished something worthwhile without becoming what we had hoped. So we tried again, changed the approach, and learned—sometimes at considerable expense—that enthusiasm will get you started, but somebody still has to do the work, find the resources, and keep doing it when the excitement has worn off.
I will not tell you that everything we tried was a success, because that would make this editorial no better than the institutional self-congratulation I have spent years criticizing. Some things did not work, some needed more than we could give them, and some taught us lessons I would have preferred to acquire by a less expensive method. Apparently experience does not offer refunds. But we have also succeeded in incremental ways that matter, and we have kept trying to learn the difference between what actually helps aviation and what merely looks impressive while it is being announced. When people have put their time and confidence beside yours, you owe them the honesty to admit a disappointment, understand it, and decide whether to try differently. You certainly owe them more than pretending it never happened.
And I need to say something else about ANN, because the difficulties do not erase what has been accomplished. In a number of areas, Aero-News has done extraordinarily well, even beyond my wildest dreams, and I am proud of what the people who have worked beside me have made possible. One of the most meaningful signs of that comes through the telephone, day after day, when people call because they trust us, because they believe we will listen, and because they tell us we are the only ones left they feel they can turn to. After all these years, that confidence still means an enormous amount to me. It is a privilege to be trusted when somebody has a real concern and needs to know that the person on the other end will take it seriously.
But, dear Lord, think about what those calls also tell us. I am grateful people know they can reach us, and I intend to keep listening. Still, how can I be satisfied when so many feel that a small news operation is the last place they can turn to be heard? They deserve someone who listens, certainly, but they also deserve help when there is something useful that can be done. Every call reminds me both why ANN matters and how much more is needed than we can presently provide.
So when I say ANN has done things that exceeded my wildest dreams, I mean it… and when I say it is not enough, I mean that, too. It was not enough then, it is not enough now, and it cannot be enough for the future. I cannot keep hearing about the same failures, expressing the same concern, and accepting that our best answer is another story about what went wrong. The journalism must continue, but we have to find ways to do more with what we learn… and I have got to help make that happen.
If you wonder why I am prepared to take on still more of this work, look at what we have already tried to do. We have spent decades asking questions, telling the truth as carefully as we know how, and sticking with stories that would have been much easier to leave alone. You need not agree with every conclusion I reach to understand why I am still trying. I could have found an easier way to make a living, and I could probably find an easier way to spend the years ahead… but I have never been particularly comfortable pretending that somebody else’s problem stops mattering when it becomes inconvenient to me.
FMI: Comments? Criticism? YOUR Thoughts On This Diatribe (So Far…)?
