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Bridge mag founder addresses Econ Club

Phil Power

MARQUETTE — The challenges befalling today’s newspapers is being addressed by the online publication Bridge Magazine, with its publisher, The Center for Michigan, doing its share to make up for that loss.

The center’s founder, Phil Power, spoke to the Economic Club of Marquette County Monday night at the Ramada Inn.

Power, who called the Ann Arbor-based nonprofit a “think-and-do tank,” started the center in 2006 with the idea that it represented the center of Michigan, being tasked with working with Republicans and Democrats and people from various geographic regions.

Power asked how many audience members believe that organized, special-interest groups have unusual access to the political and the policy processes, an access which he said is often “greased by big contributions” to the political system.

Many hands went up in the air.

Hardly a hand went up when asked if they believe there is accurate and fair-minded news coverage of the government in Lansing and Washington, D.C.

“The answers that you gave to those questions have a lot to do with the nature of the center and why we started the center,” said Power, who formerly was owner and chairman of the board of HomeTown Communications Network Inc., which included a group of community newspapers.

He acknowledged the newspaper landscape has changed since he got into the business in 1965 when there were “two or three busloads” of reporters in Lansing.

Last week when he visited the area, he counted six.

The result of diminished resources in many newsrooms has been the rise of an “information vacuum” between the people and those who are governing them due to the lack of reporters looking over their shoulders, he said.

He also addressed the issue of special-interest groups that use hidden campaign money, or “dark money,” he said.

“One of the consequences of these interest groups is that our politics over the last 10 years has become increasingly ideological and hard-edged, and we have philosophical conservatives debating with philosophical liberals and not trying to talk about what’s best for the country but rather scoring debating points,” Power said.

That makes it hard to get anything done, which goes against the purpose of politics, he pointed out.

“That’s where The Center for Michigan comes in,” Power said.

To engage people across the state, the center every year holds small “community conversations” for “ordinary Michigan citizens” to discuss important topics.

Last year, five took place in the Upper Peninsula, two of which were in Marquette, he said. Since 2007, more than 45,000 people have taken part in these community conversations.

“It is the beginning of everything that we do at the center, because our priorities don’t come out of my head, and they don’t come out of the head of our steering committee, they come from ordinary people, and this is bottom up, not top down,” Power said.

The center also has produced exemplary, in-depth journalism through Bridge Magazine, reporting on topics like the Flint water crisis, Detroit’s home rental market and a variety of education issues.

Bridge Magazine for the second year in a row has been given Newspaper of the Year recognition by the Michigan Press Association.

Power said the magazine in just five years has attracted more than 1 million readers per year.

“Our purpose is to provide a common basis of insight and understanding for people in Michigan, and our device is to do serious, trustworthy, adult, fact-based and fact-driven journalism,” Power said.

The center combines the conversations and Bridge Magazine to improve public policy in the state, he said.

An example sprung out of a community conversation in which the overwhelming opinion was that the way to improve schools was to improve pre-kindergarten education.

The center sent its journalists to investigate the Great Start Readiness Program aimed to improve kids trapped in subpar schools.

“We discovered, at that time, there were 30,000 kids who qualified for slots in the Great Start Readiness Program but couldn’t get admitted because the Legislature wouldn’t appropriate enough money to pay for these slots,” Power said.

The High Scope Education Research Foundation, based in Ypsilanti, performed a study that concluded kids who went through a pre-K program as 4-year-olds were 25 percent more likely to graduate from high school than those who didn’t, he said.

The center journalists decided more money needed to be spent on pre-K to eventually produce competent workers, with Power writing columns on the issue.

The net result was that Michigan tripled the amount of money it spends on early childhood education programs.

“The center has established enough credibility as a non-partisan, fact-driven organization that there is not a legislator in the state with whom we cannot sit down and try to have a rational conversation,” Power said.

This, of course, takes money, and the center spends $2 million annually on its “think-and-do” efforts, half of which comes from Power’s family foundation.

The center’s plan is to arrange for third party contributions from corporations and individuals to make up the other half, he said.

“There is not enough money in the philanthropic system to help pay for the kind of journalism that we must have in this country, which can be based on fact and can speak truth to power,” Power said.

Reporters do their job because they must be “fact-driven adjuncts” to make a political system function to everyone’s betterment, he said.

Power also issued a warning to the state of today’s journalism.

“If you look at the beginning points of dictatorship and autocracy, you find that the first step is always to demonize those who try to speak truth to power, and in recent years, to demonize people who are called reporters,” Power said.

For more information on the center, visit www.thecenterformichigan.net.

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