When Paul Bass, JE ’82, was eight years old, his mother died of cancer. He was unable to say goodbye: Hospital regulations in New York City did not allow children into the intensive care unit. Ever since then, Bass said, he has found himself sneaking into places where he is not supposed to be. He identifies that mischievous impulse as the reporter’s drive. “You really need to enjoy blowing the lid off,” he said, “because what you are trying to do is break through the arbitrary barriers that institutions set up to keep people from contacts they should have.”

This drive has gotten him into trouble more than once—his wife has to remind him not to read other people’s mail—but it has also made him a staunch advocate for the rebirth of participatory politics. As the editor of the New Haven Independent, an alternative news website, his mission is to revitalize local news in order to connect people who might not otherwise meet.

The Independent describes itself as “a five-day-a-week report on news about the city of New Haven, Connecticut, produced by veteran local journalists, and by you.” In an attempt to spread the Independent’s ideals, Bass also directs the Online Journalism Project (OLP), a not-for-profit organization whose stated mission is “to encourage the development of professional-quality hyperlocal and issue-oriented online news websites.”
Bass graduated from Yale College with a degree in political science, and lectured in the department for a number of years. Now he sports a bushy beard and spends most of his time in a cramped office in the corner of Orange St. and Elm St. In his own words, he has been a reporter “ever since he was a kid,” and his many articles for the Yale Daily News can still be found in the Manuscripts and Archives section of Sterling Memorial Library. New Haven turned out to be “a great news town,” Bass said, and he decided to stay after graduation.

That was 30 years ago, when the city had two full-fledged daily papers, five radio newsrooms, and a thriving weekly. By the turn of the century, things were different. The radio was dead, one of the dailies was gone, and the weekly was on the brink of extinction. “Corporate media,” Bass said, “completely destroyed local news.”

The centralization of news that ensued after smaller papers were bought out, Bass explained, did great damage to the city’s public discourse. What little went to print was often irrelevant and disconnected from the people who lived the news.
Bass believes that this disconnect stemmed from the uniformity of perspectives inherent in a corporate outfit, and from the marginalization of local, nuanced news. Wearing sporty sandals and a colorful yarmulke and a button-down shirt, he walks a thin line between the hippie and the professorial.

“In the old days you would write an article, and over the course of the week, you might get three or four letters to the editor. Then someone from the mainstream would choose the few views that were considered acceptable, and the rest were ignored.”

The voices that made it into the paper, Bass said, were almost invariably those of professional pundits who tended to express canned opinions and commented on stories they understood little about. With the majority of people silenced and dialogue replaced by pre-packaged monologue, he felt that the public sphere was shrinking to the point of near-disappearance.

The New Haven Independent was born within this disheartening context as a response to the corporate news monopoly. It took advantage of the digital revolution, which democratized the kind of exposure previously reserved for those with millionaire budgets.

“The great advantage of the Internet,” he said, ”is that it allows grassroots independent alternatives to take back the news.”
From its inception in 2005, the OJP had a definite political goal: to revitalize democracy through in-depth local reporting. Bass conceives of journalism as the bridge between everyday life and Politics with a capital ‘P.’ Earth-shattering issues are reflected in the day-to-day existence of regular people, he said, and the mission of the local reporter is to bring out the vital importance of apparently small events.

“There is value, in and of itself, in what happens in people’s everyday lives, because they are the building block of politics,” Bass said. “Every story about justice, every law that is made, begins with an event in the life of a single person in a specific community. Journalists who only look from the top down miss that, just like lawmakers who are out of touch with the people lose sight of their mission.”

Yet simply taking the analysis of local events seriously is not enough. In order for the Independent to fulfill its larger goal, Bass said, it also has to promote a multidirectional dialogue among its readers. Here, again, the Internet proves crucial; it allows newspapers to double as public forums. Indeed, a cursory glance at the OJP’s website reveals that the text of almost every article shrinks in comparison to the amount of comments it inspires.“The people became the punditocracy,” Bass explained, “and most of what is said is really good. On average, I’d say it’s a much better batting average than the official punditocracy ever had.”

As dozens and dozens of perspectives replace the two or three views handpicked by the moguls of corporate media, the mission of journalism changes, Bass said. It no longer provides people with opinions, but instead supplies the raw materials for the independent formation of those opinions.

Yet, Bass acknowledges that it is difficult to produce truly impartial journalism. The Independent defines itself in opposition to powerful corporations, which makes it from the start a project with an agenda.

“Of course, all journalists are biased. You can’t be completely objective unless you don’t have any thoughts in your head, in which case you have no business being a journalist. The challenge is to recognize your bias, be upfront about it, and work hard to incorporate perspectives from all over the spectrum so that you present a complete picture.” Bass holds that it is possible to be political without being politicized. The impossibility of objectivity does not give journalists license for partisanship.

Yet the problem of impartiality is an insidious one, and extends into the moderation of the open discussion that constitutes the project’s soul. Unlike many sites that seek to protect themselves from lawsuits by not moderating their forums, the Independent submits every single comment to review. Bass said that promoting a culture of respect is essential to the quality of the conversation.

“The discussion goes to great places as long as you moderate and keep the rules simple, so that people from very different backgrounds can participate and treat each other relatively humanely. We’ll take far left, the far right and everywhere in between, but I have no interest in having our site become a forum for the Ku Klux Klan. We send all those people to the [New Haven] Register,” Bass said.

Beyond the dismissal of toxic views, which he is quick to admit are extremely hard to define, Bass is committed to open conversation in a way that has become rare in this day and age. “Some of the efforts at promoting New Democracy are disingenuous, in that they want people to arrive at a preconceived answer. I don’t want to be a part of that. If you believe in social justice and that motivates you as a reporter, then you trust people enough that you don’t have to try to fool them or sway them. You trust that honest reporting and analysis will give people the means to act in their own interest and decide how to change society for the better.”

This seems to be the cornerstone of Bass’ theory of journalism: a slightly old school, and yet very inspiring, notion that the truth shall set us free.
But to what extent is this theory true in practice? Bass doesn’t mince words—the Independent has been very successful. “Our goal was to revitalize the polis, to bring back the public square —and we did it within our first year,” he said.

As an example of how the Independent makes a real impact on the political life of the city, he cites the seemingly humble case of the traffic lights problem and the subsequent movement to fix it. “People were getting run over and cars were colliding. Citizens got together, and discussed ideas to fix the problem, using our stories as springboards. They demanded action from the government, and got it,” Bass said. “Now you have people trying to work with each other to share space in a better way.”

Indeed, the Independent’s combination of analytic reporting and open dialogue has made a mark in issues that range from crime to school reforms; its forums have seen lively and positive discussions between students, teachers, administrators, parents and lawmakers, people whom, in Bass’ words “might otherwise have never met.”

The phrase is telling, for a recurring theme in Bass’s discussion of his craft seems to be the enabling of conversations. He puts it eloquently: “There are people who live in the same city and whose lives affect one another, and who yet don’t talk to, don’t see, and don’t understand each other. I like to think of journalism as the attempt to tear down those walls, so that people can look at the ones standing on the other side.” Perhaps that is what so compelling about Paul Bass: He conceives his mission as the transformation of strangers into neighbors. In that way, he is not only a model for journalists, but also a democrat in the truest sense of the word—a breaker of barriers.