The minister's 'golden notebooks'

 Suppose you work at the newspaper and someone calls saying that 300 people have been laid off at the state university. The caller says the local economy is about to tank. The hardship will be worse than anything since the Great Depression.

What do you do?

The fact that 300 families will be without a paycheck is something the community should know about. The story should be reported in a way that lets people know that some of their neighbors are facing hardship. But if you know that the university has a little more than 10,000 employes and that the legislature routinely cuts funds for higher education, you are likely to see the 3 percent cut as something expected, rather than as a sign of the apocalypse.

Knowing something about community institutions — the names and numbers of administrators, the number of employees, the operating budget and sources of funding — is just a part of knowing the community.

In my earlier days, I thought it was a good idea to update all that basic information annually. The reporters had one more thing to do — collecting data, just the facts and figures, on institutions they covered.

We collected that information into an almanac, which the newspaper published annually. The reporters, after the work was done, liked having the information handy. I was surprised by the number of readers who found the little almanac useful.

I was reminded of that project by Rolland Allen’s account of the “golden notebooks” produced by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the 17^th century minister who dragged France’s finances and administration out of the Middle Ages. The notebooks were pocket sized. Colbert produced one on each of the major institutions of government. The notebook on the French navy ran to 120 pages.

Even people who don’t agree on much can agree on facts. Colbert thought that before you had an argument about whether the navy should get funding for more ships you ought to know how many ships the navy had.

I admire the thinking behind the golden notebooks. I wish they were a common feature of American life.

• Source: Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper; Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2024, pp. 214-5.