Good journalism aims to produce more than anger

Our editorial on this page in Wednesday's editions focused on solutions to the pensions mess that we've been writing about all week. But it also carried an implicit message about the purpose of our series "Public Pension Time Bomb."

This could be the year legislators act, the editorial said, or it could be the year they "bow to short-term political expediency . . . (and leave) the large-scale financial fallout on the heads of our children's generation." The next step is up to them - and you.

But it's important that we all take a next step. There's surely value in exposing and discussing problems, but we also have to act to solve them, and that goal is the ultimate aim of our series.

One critic complained that our first day's main headline strayed from the strict dictates of objective journalism. "Can we keep paying these pensions?" the writer said, was an implicit declaration that the newspaper believes we can't. Perhaps so. Our editorials this week certainly have made that case. But I see that headline as more of an invitation, an invitation not only to read about a situation we think demands attention, but also to act on it. For, if the answer is "No, we can't afford these pensions," then surely we must do something about that.

The crisis in public pensions is, of course, nothing new. We and other newspapers have been writing about it for years. The legislature swooped in earlier this month and uncharacteristically adjusted several key aspects of the process aimed at steering public pensions in a more manageable direction. But as our series showed, the changes affect only newly hired employees, not those currently in the system, and it doesn't address the system's $78 billion in debt. Much more remains to be done.

Indeed, when lawmakers voted to increase the age at which new employees could begin to receive benefits and capped amounts they could receive, we were struck by the difficult fundamental decisions that remained since Assistant Managing Editor Diane Dungey, who led the project, Senior State Government Editor John Patterson and senior writers Matt Arado and Robert McCoppin first began researching the issues last fall. The systemic flaws that led to the crisis were largely sidestepped.

Patterson's review in Part 2 on Monday, for instance, graphically demonstrated how school districts have continued the practice of jacking up salaries in the final four years of employees' careers for the sole purpose of fattening their pensions, even at the risk of having to pay penalties in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. That basic mechanism for setting pensions remains untouched.

McCoppin's story in Part 4 on Wednesday examined a range of potential solutions from eliminating the pensions altogether to raising taxes to pay for them. Not all of those ideas will, or should, be implemented - but some of them must. For an issue that could too easily devolve into loud emotionalism, Dungey and her team strove to find an approach that acknowledged the complexities of the problem and eschewed creating simplified villains and heroes. Their goal, our goal as a newspaper, was to lay the groundwork for you to work with your local and state officials - and to make election decisions about them - fully armed with both the nature of the crisis and the troubling nuances that have made it so intractable in the past.

To be sure, we have more still to do. We're already formulating plans for stories down the road that will further clarify both the problem and its potential solutions. Like our series, it will make good reading. But if it does little more than generate a temporary burst of general outrage, we won't be satisfied. And neither should you.

• Jim Slusher is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.