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THE ASTORIAN • SATuRdAy, MAy 30, 2020
OPINION
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
DERRICK DePLEDGE
Editor
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BEHIND THE NEWS
‘It’s like there’s a bunch of invisible hurricanes’
B
ruce Jones was the commanding
officer at the U.S. Coast Guard
air station in New Orleans during
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, so he has
some experience with disasters.
How does the coronavirus pandemic
compare?
“With a hurricane, you see it on radar.
You know when it’s coming and within
about 48 hours before landfall you know
pretty much exactly when it’s going to
come and where it’s going to go. And
you can prepare physically for it,” he
said.
“With the corona-
virus, it’s like there’s a
bunch of invisible hur-
ricanes, tropical storms,
ministorms and they’re
all over the country. And
you can’t see them on
radar. You don’t know
DERRICK
when they’re going to
DePLEDGE
pop up. You don’t know
if they’re going to pop
up.
“There will be some parts of the coun-
try that never get hit.”
Jones, the mayor of Astoria, said
another difference is federal leadership.
After a muddled initial reaction, the
Bush administration chose Thad Allen —
a Coast Guard admiral — as the national
leader of a multistate response to the
hurricane.
Allen, he said, was “out there in front
of the news cameras, in front of the gov-
ernors and the local officials every day
with a clear and coherent national strat-
egy. And he was empowered to exe-
cute the strategy by the president. And
he inspired confidence that there was
a strategy, that resources were coming
and they were being taken care of and
coordinated.
“I would say that is the exact oppo-
site of what we have here, where we have
really no understood national strategy,
no confident, coherent messaging of a
national strategy. It just kind of ricochets
around every day what we’re doing. So
each state has kind of been left to its own
devices, to a great extent, which I think
makes it very difficult.”
In an interview, Jones talked about the
optics of lifting government restrictions
over the virus after two outbreaks at sea-
food processors, the pressure to reopen
lodging, docking idle cruise ships at the
Port of Astoria and the potential for a
second wave of cases.
Q: Clatsop County lifted govern-
ment restrictions over the coronavi-
rus just after two outbreaks at sea-
food processors. We know the county
met the state’s criteria for reopening,
but how do you explain the optics to
people?
A: We’ve got quite a few questions on
that. Why are we reopening when we’ve
just had infections? And you do refer to
the state guidelines.
The underlying assumption is there’s
going to be infections. That has to be
something people accept. There will be
Hailey Hoffman/The Astorian
Bruce Jones is the mayor of Astoria.
infections. That is true today. It will be
true next month. It will be true in Decem-
ber. It will be true for the indefinite
future. There’s going to be infections.
So the question is, what is it that rises,
that elevates to the level of risk to where
you need to either not loosen restrictions
further or actually tighten restrictions
back again?
And I do agree with the state’s seven
requirements, focused on actual hospi-
talizations or emergency room visits for
COVID-19. And then, of course, the PPE
(personal protective equipment) avail-
ability, the contact tracing and testing
and all that. I think those are pretty good
metrics.
Otherwise, you would just be closed
down forever if it was just based on you
have a couple new infections. And, really,
the number we’re talking about is still
pretty small, you’d have to say, in rela-
tion to the whole county.
Q: The idea behind a phased
reopening is that counties have to meet
certain benchmarks to move forward.
Yet the county already announced that
lodging restrictions would be lifted
next Friday. Did Cannon Beach and
Seaside force everyone’s hand?
A: We talk regularly — the mayors of
Cannon Beach, Seaside, Gearhart, War-
renton and Astoria, we talk to each other
— and early on we had a unified front
with the lodging: Wait till phase two.
At some point, it became apparent
there was a crack in the alignment, I’d
say, between north and south county.
Essentially Seaside, Cannon Beach and
then Warrenton, Gearhart, Astoria and the
rest of the county.
It’s understandable. Their econo-
mies are more heavily tourist-focused
than ours are. People talk about Asto-
ria having a tourist economy. We don’t
really have a tourist economy. We have
an economy which includes tourism as
one of the major legs of the chair, but it’s
not a primarily tourist economy, whereas
theirs are more primarily tourist based.
Since Cannon Beach and Seaside indi-
cated they were going that direction, the
other mayors — we talk several times
a week with each other —and we’ve
all stayed in alignment that we want to
stick to the phase two for lodging. And
we’ve chosen to go with the incremental
approach that the county’s going to use
— the 60% (capacity).
... Nationally, it’s a great experiment,
because it’s a new disease that’s still
poorly understood. So there’s all these
experiments going on in different states
and cities around the country with what
works and what doesn’t work, and every-
one has a chance to — you try to learn
from other people.
Cannon Beach and Seaside are going
to be the experiment for the county. We
will see how their populations respond
to the lodging now being open at 100%
and whether or not they get any spike
in infections. What happens in Cannon
Beach in the 10 days between when they
went to full open on the 26th and June
5, that will help inform, I think, with the
rest of the county with what we do.
Q: There was some concern at the
county and the city over the Port of
Astoria hosting idle cruise ships right
after the Bornstein Seafoods outbreak.
In hindsight, given the financial hit to
the Port, was that the right call?
A: That was absolutely the right call.
It’s very unfortunate, though.
I wish — I think I was even quoted in
the paper — if they had only been able
to get that contract done and get those
ships in a week earlier, and it was already
in place, and county public health had
already talked to the crew, and they had
done all the protocols that are required,
they were comfortable with it, and then
the Bornstein outbreak had taken place,
then it would have been manageable.
But there was going to be a burden on
county public health in the initial screen-
ing and when the ship first got here that
was going to take some of their man-
power. So it just became undoable to
have those two cruise ships arrive just as
they were focusing 100% of their man-
power on Bornstein, with the contact
tracing.
It’s just terrible timing.
Q: You don’t think it was a pub-
lic relations decision more than pub-
lic health?
A: No. Absolutely not. I know it
wasn’t.
Personally, County Manager (Don)
Bohn and I and the Port director spoke. It
was absolutely not.
Honestly, I know there’s people in the
community that were reaching out to me.
They were adamantly opposed to having
any cruise ship here ever at any time. I
understand that perspective, but it’s not a
rational perspective.
So we’re trying to make it sci-
ence-based and based on what’s best for
public health. So it really wasn’t a public
relations decision. It was purely a man-
power availability in the Public Health
Department, because, regardless of what
the cruise ship company says they’re
going to provide, the burden is going to
fall on the locals if there’s an outbreak.
Q: We have been struck by how
people on the North Coast – for the
most part – have complied with the
stay-at-home order and the other gov-
ernment restrictions to contain the
virus. What do you think will happen if
we get a second wave of cases after the
county reopens or in the fall? Will peo-
ple need to see local hospitalizations or
even deaths to shut down again?
A: So because the fact we haven’t had
that first wave here in Clatsop County
yet — we haven’t had the deaths. I think
there may have been one brief hospital-
ization, if any.
What I have observed is that our Pub-
lic Health Department at the county and
the hospitals are coordinating constantly
— seven days a week, 24/7 — they’re
very well-prepared. And they’ll be even
better prepared as every month goes by.
So if we do have the big wave in the
summer or the quote-unquote second
wave in the fall or the winter, I’m confi-
dent they’re going to be well-prepared.
The economy will be the greater con-
cern, I think, at that point. What will
be the state of the economy when fall
and winter come around, if there is a
big spike in infections here in Clatsop
County?
How will the state and federal govern-
ment be prepared better the second time
around with more targeted and appro-
priate and timely assistance? This time
around it was kind of just, get something
out there.
And, at the state level, of course,
there’s been an absolute disaster in the
timeliness of unemployment assistance.
In some cases, people have waited eight
weeks now and still haven’t gotten their
unemployment assistance. Will that be
fixed by the next wave?
And will the federal government be
able to quickly step in with appropriate
assistance to the affected businesses?
derrick dePledge is editor of The
Astorian.
GUEST COLUMN
Make Facebook and
Google pay for local news
I
f you are a newspaper subscriber or
you pick up a copy at a local retailer,
you pay for the news and informa-
tion you receive in your paper’s print
edition or digital outlets.
But it may surprise you to learn that
the multibillion-dollar digital behemoths
Facebook and Google don’t pay for the
enormous amounts of
news content they scoop
up from newspapers every
second. Facebook doles
out a little bit of money
through grants and funds
to a few publishers — and
Google provides some
DEAN
small grants through its
RIDINGS
News Initiative. While
these are positive steps,
they in no way make up for the use of the
news content they are using for free.
Newspapers’ original reporting, espe-
cially on the community news and infor-
mation that only local papers can pro-
vide, drive traffic to Facebook and
Google, keeping people on their sites
longer and attracting advertisers.
And news is a rich source of revenue
for the Big Tech platforms. A 2019 study
conducted by the News Media Alliance
concluded that news publishers’ content
makes up 16 to 39% of Google’s search
results, which goes largely uncompen-
sated. That figure doesn’t include the
more intangible benefits that news con-
tent, and the data that comes with it, pro-
vide the search giant, such as using it for
new product development.
The irony is that the news and con-
tent that newspapers pay journalists to
provide is used by Google and Face-
book to steadily drive advertising rev-
enue away from newspapers, and into
their coffers. The two digital giants now
gobble up 60% of all online advertising
in the United States — an amount certain
to increase with the cratering of newspa-
per ad revenue caused by the coronavirus
pandemic.
Facebook and Google don’t have
reporters or the associated expense. They
rely on small and large newspapers to
feed their search results.
Here’s why this patently unfair situa-
tion should concern you and your com-
munity: It now threatens the existence
of some local newspapers, the source
of news and information that underpins
democracy and civic life itself.
It’s long past time for Google and
Facebook to do what newspapers and
their subscribers do: Pay for the local
news that benefits them so richly.
There are ways for that to happen.
Ideally, Google and Facebook would take
the responsibility and voluntarily propose
a method to share revenue with newspa-
pers and other news organizations. They
already pay licensing fees to music pub-
lishers, for instance.
Associated Press
Facebook profits from local news.
Realistically, though, the two behe-
moths will have to be forced to a solu-
tion. America’s Newspapers, an associa-
tion of some 1,500 newspapers, including
many operated by families for multiple
generations, along with the News Media
Alliance and other media associations
have urged Congress to pass the Jour-
nalism Competition and Preservation
Act, allowing newspaper publishers as a
group to negotiate rates with Big Tech.
Other nations around the world have
taken notice of the ill effect the market
dominance of Google and Facebook has
on the viability of independent journal-
ism. Australia is now developing a code
that would require Google and Facebook
to compensate news organizations when
their content is used in the digital giants’
news products. Similarly, France just
ordered Google to negotiate with news
publishers over pay for news content.
This public health crisis has demon-
strated the importance of the report-
ing of local newspapers, even as it has
wreaked economic havoc on them, forc-
ing layoffs and even silencing printing
presses on some days. Requiring Goo-
gle and Facebook to pay their fair share
for news would go a long way to restor-
ing the long-term health of your local
newspaper.
dean Ridings is the CEO of America’s
Newspapers, an advocacy group.