Nows and Forevers

Even though I have worked as a journalist for a long time and know the state of the industry, a recent annual report on the industry shocked me.

A third of the newspapers in the United States have shuttered since 2005. That’s 2,900, which is more two a week. That’s not just afternoon papers, which are probably just about dead by now, but also entire daily newspapers and weekly newspapers. And I don’t think it counts the number of daily newspapers that now publish only a handful of times a week or moved completely online.

A third of all newspapers have shut? Wow.
Back when I started my career, this would have been unthinkable. There had been a winnowing of newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s — casualties of the rise of TV and the changing media habits, even then — but by the time I arrived at my first newspaper in the late ’80s, the bleeding had mostly stopped. I didn’t know it at the time, but the ’80s and ’90s were a golden age for newspapers. They were flush with cash, well staffed, and still full of post-Watergate passion for what the best journalism could be as a public service and a vehicle for storytelling.

As a reporter, I went off to workshops and conferences where we talked about writing and reporting and how to get better. As an editor, I tried to put those into practice and inspire my reporters and other editors to reach ever higher.

Even in the early 2000s, as the Internet began to buffet local and national newspapers, that worked. But then social media came and so did private equity and others who were interested more in squeezing profits out of newspapers instead of journalism. They squeezed all they could and then began to cut, and cut, and cut. They’ve kept cutting to the point where newspapers that once had hundreds of employees in the newsroom now have dozens. Or less. You can see that in just about every big city as well as every small city.

I see that first hand. The newspaper I work at has
been lucky, and we’ve weathered the storm better than others. I’m too anonymous to disclose how we do that, although I’m impressed and appreciative with their vision and scale. But we’re a special case.

Most other papers have long been eviscerated. There’s no time to do much of anything anymore.
I can see that in the newspapers I’ve worked for in my career. My first, in Connecticut, remains an independent and seems to be surviving if not exactly thriving. My second newspaper was sold from a trust to a chain, which owns a bunch of other newspapers in the region. My third paper was once a part of a national chain that’s no more and now is part of the company that swallowed up my second newspaper.

The papers I ran in another state, in very rural areas spread across hundreds of miles, they are shadows of what they used to be. The same is true of the newspaper I worked at in New York.

The other two publications I worked at in New York City, one online and the other what had been a daily entertainment magazine, remain although the latter has long since gone weekly in print.

And that’s just my career. I know journalists who have lost their jobs when their newspapers shutter. Two other newspapers in Connecticut just this week — the Meriden Record-Journal near my hometown and the Winsted Citizen — were sold to out-of-state conglomerates when the owners realized, in their words, that local news no longer could be sustained.

That makes me so sad, not just for the people who have lost their jobs but also for the communities that have lost their voices. Newspapers are not perfect servants. For a career based on accuracy and completeness, we haven’t always lived up to that role. But where we as a newspaper industry used to turn away from stories for space reasons, we’ve long since gone the other way and shunned many things for lack of staff.

At a time when we need more community, we end up having less. There’s no one keeping a watch on government and power, which is a tradition of journalism that must be preserved. And the supposedly egalitarian online community, whether it’s social media or online journalism, well a lot of that hasn’t been able to fill the gap.

And we’re all poorer for it.