Will death of corporate newspapers spawn local efforts?
Posted: March 17, 2009 Filed under: Publishing | Tags: Commercial Appeal, Hearst, news, newspapers, Publishing, Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer 7 Comments »One by one, our newspapers are dropping on the stoop of death. Partly because of the changing habits of readers. Partly because they are owned by corporate conglomerates all about profit, not truth, all about shareholders of the company rather than shareholders of the community. I hope, as newspapers thin out, new opportunities will arise for grassroots journalism and publishing, for a good local paper owned by locals who are perhaps seasoned journalists finished with “working for the man,” whether by choice or by pink slip. Perhaps there will be more Franklins and fewer Murdochs.
I like print. When you put something in print, you can’t readily change it. There is added weight to every word. Online, what you say one minute can be fixed the next. I’m guessing that this can lead to sloppiness. Revisionism. Virtual news.
Regardless, the newspaper is a habit. Just like coffee. The walk out to get it. The rustling and folding. The smell of it on a damp morning. Reading an online news source? Too much like the office. Too much like work.
For me “the paper” is the Commercial Appeal. Surely not the best paper in the world. But it is our paper, our town. And should it die, I’ll find whatever the next best thing is. And I will sit in my den and read the morning paper with my coffee in hand and my bride on the sofa nearby until there are no papers left to read. I will not give it up, this tradition, this morning breakfast of thought, understanding, community, and–in our groggy, early morning way–conversation about the stuff that matters.
I had never thought about the corporate conglomerate influence as a factor in the decline of readership. As one who has headlines of several papers sent to his Google reader, I am more part of the problem than the solution. I have always assumed the internet (“changing habits of readers”)was the main reason for the decline. I have not only quit getting news from the paper.I have also quit getting it from television. The reason for that has very little to do with my reading habits and more with the quality and overly obvious bias of what is being “reported.”
I do however get the small, weekly newspaper from a previous hometown in the mail every Thursday and look forward to it greatly. I look forward to it, not so much for the news, but for the way the news is presented–that “breakfast of thought” that you mentioned. Though in my case it tends to be more of cocktail.
I don’t think ownership by big media has reduced readership. I do think it must reduce efficiency and make papers less likely to be profitable. And I think that a big media company is only going to see our local paper as a small cog in a much larger financial wheel. Certainly the value they see in our local paper is not the value we see in it.
Here is a small-world story for you: my husband’s grandfather, the original Ross B. Young, was the founder of the Memphis Press (later the Press-Scimitar). Also, what Bill says above about the small, weekly newspaper from his previous hometown resonates with me. We have a tiny summer cottage in Highlands, NC. The Highlands newspaper, which arrives in my Knoxville mailbox weekly, is hands-down my favorite. I know (or at least know of) many of the folks in its stories, and find the content truly interesting.
Interesting ALTOS! And weren’t both the Press-Scimitar and the Commercial Appeal owned by Scripps Howard when the Press-Scimitar was put to death? Scripps didn’t see the value in it, not when they could hold the same monopoly with just one paper.
Yes, I’m sure that is correct. I think bad things happen when a two-newspaper town becomes a one-newspaper town.
I too love the newspaper. I look forward to it each morning at 5:30 with the jolt of caffeine that I suck in to try to kick start the day. Lounging ever so leisurely on the den couch I enjoy the feel of it, the smell of it, and the joy of whining to my husband that he needs to toss over the next section or else I won’t get to see it until 8 o’clock that night when I finally have finished my workday and can return to the comfort of the couch. It may be biased, but at 5 in the morning I just want the news with whatever slant it may come with. News is always colored by the person who delivers it, but it is still black and white.
[...] papers go online, perhaps even thrive there, they can still do their job without ink. Maybe. But as I have said before, I don’t want to read the news online. I mean really read, page by page, article by article, [...]