On Gary Fineout

Corcoran boasted in a December television interview that the House imposed tough new sexual harassment rules for its members in 2016 in response to what he called “grossly inappropriate” and “illegal” behavior from “male pigs.” Those rules included mandatory training for House members.

Corcoran said this week he did not report any of these incidents to authorities. Corcoran said he could not give an exact number of how many legislators he witnessed engaging in misconduct, but added that there were probably “less than 10.”

The reporting is vintage Fineout … straight-forward, probing, and without any of the thumb-on-the-scale zeal that is the hallmark of too many other journalists’ writing.

“I am just looking to hold people accountable,” Fineout is fond of saying.

To be honest, Fineout has been something of an enigma these past few months, as the capital seems intent on destroying itself from within. Neither the AP, not Fineout specifically, are purposed to deliver the ‘journalism for those who can pay for it’ that has come to dominate Tallahassee. Fineout and Co. are writing to the audience that exists outside the bubble, so they’re not going to traffic in the kind of ultra insider-y content provided by Florida Politics, the News Service of Florida, or POLITICO Florida.

Yet, there’s rarely been a time like the present when the institutional knowledge of Gary Fineout is more needed.

Still, the place in the world of a reporter of Fineout’s stature is increasingly nebulous, a situation he readily acknowledges in a papal bull of a recent Facebook post. Here’s an excerpt (I’ve include the full text at the bottom):

Instead of being challenged to do better journalism, reporters are becoming assembly workers as part of a content mill. That content can be in the form of audio and video – and in fact one of the other trends is the continued death of narrative and print – but skills that enable reporters to analyze, ferret out details, and hold people accountable are becoming less important.

What’s more important? Did you do that story on an alligator that we think will drive more clicks?

My fear is that in the near future news organizations will devote fewer resources to covering local government and state government. The only coverage that matters right now from a political/policy standpoint is D.C.

While Fineout’s post is mostly right, not everyone agreed with what he had to say. Tallahassee Democrat publisher Skip Foster says his experience and outlook are somewhat different. Responding on Facebook to Fineout’s post, Foster writes:

While I agree that the type of watchdog journalism to which Gary refers is the bedrock of what we do, I also see a valid spectrum of coverage and mediums that doesn’t necessarily have to distract or detract from “old school” reporting. Audio and video reporting can (and should) be valid ways to augment traditional written reporting—often exceeding the capabilities of the written word to convey important information. Further, I see opportunity, not danger, in being informed by what readers like to consume.

What the conflict between the worldviews of Fineout and Foster says to me is Fineout’s problem isn’t journalism writ large. It’s where Fineout practices his craft that is the issue.

Quite frankly, the Associated Press is no longer the right place for Fineout’s work. He needs to be able to mix the straight reporting he provides for the AP with the insightful commentary he offers on his blog, The Fine Print.

If there’s one Florida political reporter who could do what Jon Ralston is doing in Nevada—traditional reporting housed in an independent media organization—it’s Fineout.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, I imagine the needs of Gary Fineout, husband and father, preclude him from striking out on his own. He needs health care benefits, retirement benefits, etc. Could he make enough money as an independent journalist to make up for the loss of these benefits? Maybe. But it’s probably not worth it to him to risk finding out.

Short of starting GaryFineout.com, Fineout might need to, like an all-star baseball player signed to the Marlins or Rays, eventually head to POLITICO or the Times/Herald, the Red Sox and Yankees of Florida’s political media.

I can report now that The Tampa Bay Times last year made a run at Fineout and he went so far as to interview for a position with its Tallahassee bureau, but mutually agreeable terms could not be reached.

So Fineout’s still (stuck?) at the Associated Press, spending most of his time reporting the kind of stories he wrote Wednesday night about the House Speaker. Unfortunately, he’s increasingly spending some of his time yelling “Get off my lawn” to some in the media who don’t operate in the black and white world which existed a decade ago.

But Florida politics is better off when Fineout is on the hunt for the next big story.

Hopefully there’s always a place for the big man to do his thing.

Here is the full text of Gary Fineout’s Facebook post.