Maxwell Knauer: A staff writer’s plea to support local, independent news

Hello Watershed Voice readers, it’s staff writer Maxwell Knauer, writing to you today about why Watershed Voice matters to me and why it should matter to you, too. 

As we continue our NewsMatch campaign and ask you to monetize your value of our product, I wanted to give some reasons why it matters to me. 

First, who am I? 

Other than my introductory article, it’s unlikely you know me as anything other than “Maxwell Knauer is a staff writer for Watershed Voice,” and that’s for good reason. The less you know about me, my opinions, and my personal life, the better because I strive to provide fact-based, objective reporting to our readers. So if you feel like you don’t know me or my opinions, that means I’m doing something right. 

I’m a 22-year-old graduate of The Ohio State University with a bachelors of arts in philosophy and political science. I’ve always enjoyed studying government, its nuances, and oftentimes—its abject failures. I feel I have a unique relationship with government because I find it and its functions genuinely interesting—a blessing and a curse. So much so that I’ve started talking about government in what was intended to be my biography section. 

I also love basketball and watching movies. 

Okay, back to government.

Much of our coverage at Watershed Voice is local government; whether it’s city commission meetings, examining the effectiveness of policies, or interviewing candidates. I want to outline why that matters and why it is as important as anything else we do. 

Throughout the course of earning my political science degree I learned about all kinds of different governmental structures, their histories, and origin stories. But what always piqued my interest was the fact that hundreds of years ago a few men in a few rooms talked, wrote, and argued until they developed a stack of papers that they felt outlined a system of governance. And here I am, working to uphold that very system. So what? How does James Madison compel you to donate to Watershed Voice? I’m getting there. 

Our seemingly indestructible institutions, I think, are actually quite fragile. I agree, it all seems so thought-out and set in stone that one crack in the foundation here or there won’t matter all that much. However, it only seems that way. Every piece of the 250-year puzzle is just as important as the other. While the government might still govern, what role is it serving without public accountability? And how can the public hold their leaders accountable without a free press to inform them? Enter journalism. 

Without journalism, our impossibly complicated democracy is no longer a democracy.

I’m not saying Watershed Voice is the producer of democracy, rather, that the whole only exists thanks to all of its parts. Whether it’s the governing body, police officers, or freedom of speech, in order for us to think, act, and collaborate as a functioning populace, we need the free press to inform the free thinkers to create the free-doms. 

Which leads me to one of the main reasons I choose to work at Watershed Voice: independence. 

Watershed Voice is a not for profit, independent news outlet, and that means a lot to me. The fact that we exist as a free to act, independent entity working to provide rural Michiganders with the facts of what is going on in their community is not something I take lightly. In fact, it’s why I work here in the first place. We are in charge of our reporting, not a giant media conglomerate. And by we, I mean you all because we are funded by our readers which is why we work for our readers. 

I chose to work at Watershed Voice because I wanted to be a part of journalism that isn’t just a cog in the machine, churning out transcripts of meetings or local tabloid drama. Instead, I am proud to be a part of a publication that strives to inform its readers through fact-based, independent reporting. 

So if you too value that or anything else I’ve said, I ask you, with gratitude, to please consider making a donation to our NewsMatch campaign so I can continue to do the work I do and you can continue to read it…or not. But at least you have the choice.

In closing I want to share an idea I learned in my theories of democracy class with professor Emma Saunders-Hastings that has stuck with me since. It’s one of the reasons I not only work as a journalist, but love it. The idea is simply that we need discussion to strive towards a more intelligent populace. It’s from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. 

The argument goes as follows:

Premise 1: Individuals and societies can only improve their understanding of truth through open discussion, where different ideas—including false or unpopular ones—are freely exchanged and examined.

Premise 2: Open discussion sharpens reasoning, prevents beliefs from becoming dogmatic, and produces more informed, intellectually capable citizens.

Premise 3: A democracy depends on citizens who can reason well, evaluate evidence, and make informed decisions about public affairs.

Conclusion:
Therefore, the more open and extensive the public discussion in a society, the more intelligent its citizens will become, and the stronger and more effective its democracy will be.

This argument, in one form or another, is something we’ve all heard and I would hope we all agree with. Implied in the argument, however, is an access to the information in our society that would facilitate discussion. It implies that we have access to current events, an ability to read and learn, and a written documentation of the past, present, and future. So, Mill also seems to believe that in order to have these discussions, someone must write about and document the world.  

So again, from me, John Stuart Mill, and the whole Watershed Voice family, keep us alive so you too can pursue the truth without corporate influence.

Maxwell Knauer is a staff writer for Watershed Voice.