Growing up, I assumed every major city would ALWAYS have a daily newspaper. Now I’m far less certain.
In the last year or so, dozens of U.S. newspapers have shut down, including major papers such as The Rocky Mountain News; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Christian Science Monitor. The chain that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune recently declared bankruptcy. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has just reduced its distribution area, and the parent company of The Dallas Morning News has announced companywide layoffs.
Various reasons are cited for the demise of newspapers, from the Internet’s ability to deliver news immediately (and free) to short-sighted greed of newspaper owners who have slowly scuttled news rooms.
I hope newspapers survive. I enjoy spreading the Sunday edition on my living room carpet, and I love reading the weekday comics with my 6-year-old daughter. Still, mine might be the last generation that waits every morning for a paper to be hurled into the front yard. I assume my tech-savvy grandkids will get a chuckle when I tell them, “In my day, news was printed, and then we waited until someone delivered each paper house by house.” I already sound like my 79-year-old father, whose first job as a 14-year-old in Illinois – in the days before modern refrigeration – was to deliver blocks of ice, house by house, to keep everyone’s ice box cool.
Here’s one sign that daily papers have lost their value. Just five years ago, if I left early in the morning – before the paper was delivered – odds were fairly good that before I got home a sneaky neighbor would snatch the paper off my driveway. Today, nobody steals my newspaper. The danged thing could lie on the driveway for a week and nobody would touch it; everybody is reading news online.
There is no dearth of articles and blogs announcing the end of daily newspapers. For a very funny column bemoaning all the “newspapers are dying” blog entries out there, check out this post by Paul Dailing.
In a serious article in The Nation, blogger John Nichols and University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney jointly state that daily newspapers “are disintegrating and are possibly on the verge of extinction.” The larger concern of Nichols and McChesney is that journalism as we know it is dying, leaving no guard dog to hold politicians and public administrators accountable.
I think people will always hunger for good investigative reporting in their local community, in some format. It’s unlikely that citizen journalists, amateur bloggers or well-meaning gadflies can completely fill the shoes of experienced reporters who provide this objective and accurate reporting. Rather, let’s hope that good reporters migrate to the Internet rather than disappear altogether.
Not everyone has thrown in the towel. The founders of www.newspaperproject.org defiantly state: “While we acknowledge the serious challenges facing the newspaper industry in today’s rapidly changing media world, we reject the notion that newspapers—and the valuable content that newspaper journalists provide—have no future.”
I hope they’re right, but I’m afraid that newspapers have become the melting ice blocks of the 21st century.
