Institutional Suicide? You Decide ...

I listened to an interesting discussion aired on NPR recently. The topic examined: the impending, long, slow death of the American newspaper.


Commentators kicked the can around explaining why readership is down. Advertising is way off. Production costs are out of control. Forget about paying attention to distribution.


NPR's panelists offered a solution.

Newspaper publishers ought to move all content to the Internet. One commentator actually asserted the owners of The New York Times are considering such possibilities.


Well, excuse me. I don't think they should do so.

Instead of hand-wringing about the pre-Net days, anybody who truly cares about newspapers and journalism ought to engage in serious soul-searching and ponder the real causes of why a vast number of people have turned to the Internet for their news -- and their backs to the print media.

My take on these matters is pretty simple, almost linear.

First off, daily newspapers have themselves turned their backs on their readership by sacrificing their commission to gather local news -- by local news, "read" city and town council meetings, schools, hospitals, churches and synagogues and mosques, police reports, fires, accidents, births, obits, weddings, entertainment & more.

News reporting about all that takes place within a community gives a place a sense of immediacy, uniqueness and relevancy. Covering all that happens, so that the community can measure its achievements -- and its shortfalls -- in black-and-white-and-full-color, conveys the concept that the community is, indeed, important.

When newspapers ignore and/or outright refuse to report local happenings, people will react predictably: they'll deem the newspaper to be arrogant and stop reading it.

I don't have to tell you that there is virtually no such thing as the locally-owned newspaper today.

Conglomerates, such as Gannet, have eaten up most of them. Publishers, today, are more likely than not men and women who lack knowledge and attachments to the communities to which they are posted by their corporate overseers. Publishers, like cub reporters, receive "assignments."  A five-year run for a corporately-owned newspaper publisher in one community is rare.

The same goes for a corporately-owned senior editors and reporters, all out-of-towners who bide their time and wish for employment with larger, chain-owned rags.

This is the ilk that refers to their newspapers as "products." This is the ilk that gives you a new "Friday Entertainment Section" that actually ignores local entertainment. This is the ilk that cuts back on page counts, narrows the column widths, and jacks up the ad rates. This is the ilk that charges a fee for publishing obituaries! 


This is the ilk that's concerned with one thing and one thing only: profit margins reported back to their chains.


Don Oat, Harry Noyes, Dean Avery, the Crosbies, the Harts and and host of other owners of "family-owned newspapers" would have none of any of the above.

Something must be done to protect the few remaining family-owned dailies that are in publication today.

Tax laws should and must be changed, to project publishing families from forced sales to chains. The law, regulation and our economy should protect and defend people who actually were born and who continue to live by publishing dailies within their communities, people who actually care about the content and quality of news and advertising they deliver to their subscribers. After all, they run into folks in their community every day, at Rotary, church, or out on the street.

They place value on the content, a value, in retrospect, that far exceeded the coins they pocket from each edition. Community newspapers are the glue that keep a community together. No one can ever place a monetary value on that.

The Internet was and is precisely the reason why today's newspapers suffer loss of readership and loss of ad revenues. Anyone can post just about anything on the Net, news included, making the posts and news items relevant, to say nothing about immediate.

It's simplistic for me to write this, but the Internet is nonsensitive (read: no ink on your fingertips), instant and antiseptic. Furthermore, the Net can be unreliable as far as some news is concerned because there are no editors (gate-keepers of factual truth) to vet the information.

Besides, you can't grasp Net news content in your hands and fold it to work on a crossword puzzle. You get the vacuous equivalent of the Mickie-Dee Buck Special:  without even paying a nickle.

Quick aside: I love to spend most of my Novembers in a small town in the Great State of Vermont. One of my joys when I'm there is to scoot down to the Valley Market at sunrise, before everyone else at the house is awake, to get copies of The Rutland Herald, a community-owned paper, and The New York Times -- both of them Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers.

The Herald is always on the rack, loaded with local political and government news, police/fire reports, obits, weddings, gossip, local sports, great editorials, and even better, folksier letters from readers.

The New York Times, alas, is another story. Whether it arrives at the Valley Market in central Vermont regularly is of no apparent concern to the Times circulation honcho in Manhattan.  Sad to say, the Old Grey Lady even bagged me on a Sunday!

If there is a penumbra of hope for the American Daily Newspaper, it must be back lit in a belief that members of a community will insist that their news outlet be locally owned, that the coverage emphasize local events, that tax laws will be changed where applicable, and that willing investors within a community will support the enterprise.