After 33 years, this is so long, but not goodbye for OC Register/SCNG columnist Teri Sforza

I’ve been here for 33 years, people! How can that be?

From the Laguna Beach fires to O.J. Simpson’s slow-speed chase; from Orange County’s bankruptcy to fertility fraud at UC Irvine; from Richard Nixon’s funeral (Henry Kissinger hugged me, which was weird) to Madeline Albright’s visit to Newport Beach (Saddam Hussein once called her a snake, so she wore a snake pin and, no, she did not hug me). And who can forget B-1 Bob Dornan, chalking up his loss to Loretta Sanchez to illegal voting? Everything old is new again!

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Oh, my heart. The vicious newspaper wars of the 1990s and early 2000s seemed like life-or-death affairs; the thwack of the Los Angeles Times on the darkened driveway propelled us out the door to anxiously ascertain if we had scooped them or if they had scooped us … were we heroes or villains that particular day? We needed to gauge how brutal the city editor’s morning tirade would be. He was truly insane. There were a lot of crazy people in journalism.

But really, that was the beauty of it. We didn’t know then that those were the glory days — endless hours in a noisy newsroom with quirky characters pounding out saucy scoops with (the Libertarian Hoiles family’s) bulging budgets. Off to Rwanda in the wake of genocide, tagging along with an O.C. church group bringing medicine and comfort to orphans; off to India on the heels of a Laguna Niguel boy who had glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, then moved to Dharamsala to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk at age 13.

There were hundreds of journalists in the newsroom of that hideously ugly orange building on Grand Avenue back then — and oh, how I miss that hideously ugly orange building on Grand Avenue! Even then, there was far more that needed doing than there were time or people to do it. Dozens of city governments and water districts and sewer districts and transportation districts and school districts and nonprofits … you always felt like you were missing something important.

And y’all know what’s happened since then. The advertising that fueled this model of journalism disappeared. Social media took over. Now, artificial intelligence. In 1993, when I started at the Register, there were about 460,000 journalism jobs in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the St. Louis Fed. There were some 98,000

Today, the ranks of journalists have collapsed to about 82,000. The ranks of public relations specialists have ballooned to 314,000, the BLS says.

This should scare the hell out of us. Surely there are PR folks whose goal is simply to disseminate timely and accurate information, but that’s generally not the raison d’etre of “corporate communications.” PR people are paid to portray their clients — governments, businesses, individuals — in the best possible light. To tell you what those governments and businesses and individuals want you to hear. It might bear some resemblance to the truth. It might not.

It hurt to see so many of my talented colleagues turn government spokespeople over the years — but hey, everyone needs to eat, right? PR pays a load more than journalism does. And journalists keep getting voted off the island.

Which makes me marvel at the young people who continue to enter this profession. They’re called to the work, sort of like priests to the priesthood. They want to witness, to help, to change the world for the better by holding a mirror up to it and forcing us to see. Much of journalism’s power is in that magic mirror, in reflecting what’s actually happening rather than what people want you to think is happening. Journalism’s power is often in simply shaming those in power with the truth.

People, please. Continue to support local journalism. We are not the enemies of the people. We are your eyes and ears. We are pedaling as hard as we possibly can against tornadoes of spin and apathy and misinformation. Yes, we make mistakes — we’re human too — but damn, we’re trying.

My editor will tell me that I’m burying the lead. So here it is: After 33 years (and five weeks and five days), I’m finishing my tour of duty here at the Orange County Register/Southern California News Group. I don’t think of it as “retiring,” but rather, as “reWIREing.” I fully intend to keep committing journalism, so you’ll probably encounter me again in these pages, but first — those two half-finished novels. And the documentary film. And the language school in Venice. And, at least for now, those literary journalism classes at CSU Long Beach where I get to teach kids who’ll be inheriting this profession what I think they need to know.

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It has been a privilege, an honor, a thrill — and occasionally infuriating — to be entrusted with this work. I can’t begin to thank you enough, dear readers, for continuing to read, and for sending tips, and even for the occasional scold. And thank you, many bosses, for letting me do the most consequential work that exists: holding that magic mirror up to California’s oft-dysfunctional systems and insisting that we do better.

I am cautiously optimistic. During my last week on the job, and to my astonishment, the feds arrested addiction treatment providers we’ve been writing about for years and charged them with health care fraud. The two gubernatorial candidates actually responded to my queries about this fraud-plagued system — at least acknowledging it exists. That’s something the current governor refused to do. People have died, and continue to die, because of this refusal to see. I beseech you all! See.

Here are a couple of things I’d love readers to remember:

• Every time your city/state/county officials need tax hikes because expenses are outpacing revenues, remember that it’s largely because they’ve made bad choices. State and local, Republican and Democrat, city councils and state legislators, they’ve all lavished pay and pensions on public servants that they simply can’t afford.

• You should be absolutely furious that most California public school students can’t read or do math at grade level — despite K-12/community college education being guaranteed 40% of the state budget. Official test results released last week gave this failure that ol’ PR spin — we’ve improved over last year! — while the grim reality is that only 49.3% of students were proficient or advanced in English language arts, while only a shameful 38.4% were proficient or advanced at math. What we’re doing is not working, people. Demand that we do things differently.

• The firefighters who make a half-million dollars in overtime alone? They can do that because they’ve convinced your city councilmembers that they must work round-the-clock for several days straight, sleeping, eating and living at the station. Other emergency workers, like nurses, police officers and sheriff’s deputies, typically work 12-hour shifts. No one has ever been able to explain to me exactly why firefighters can’t do the same.

• Substance use is the root of so many of society’s ills. Two of every three people in the criminal justice system — 66%! — have addiction issues, . About half, and perhaps as much as 80%, of parents in the child welfare system do as well. The rate for “unsheltered homeless” people was about 78%. Insist that we approach addiction with science and medicine rather than with cheerleading and magical thinking. It must be managed as a chronic, lifelong condition, like diabetes and heart disease, not as a short-term “acute care” crisis. Can you imagine entrusting a diabetic’s care to … another diabetic? It’s ludicrous. Bring addiction care back into mainstream medicine.

• Dealing with shenanigans in the addiction care landscape, as a patient, parent, neighbor? File complaints with the California Department of Health Care Services (https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/individuals/licensing-and-certification-complaints/); the Federal Bureau of Investigation (310-477-6565 and tips.fbi.gov.); the California Department of Insurance’s fraud reporting portal (https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0300-fraud/0350-fraud-claims-and-forms/); the U.S. Health and Human Services tip line (800-HHS-TIPS and https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/report-fraud/); as well as the local city’s code enforcement department and local police/sheriff. My colleague, Tony Saavedra, will be the point person here, and you can send him tips at [email protected].

• Need help with addiction treatment? Start with an accredited addiction medicine physician. Find one at www.csam-asam.org/physician-locator and/or www.asam.org/physicians.

Journalism is truly a magic carpet that I have been so damn lucky to ride. I hope to pop in from time to time, but the kids will take it from here. My colleagues sent me a bottle of Writer’s Tears double oak Irish whiskey today to say so long, and I’m shedding some of those tears now. I’m on the interwebs — stay in touch! I’ll never be able to thank you all enough. But thank you.

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