Newspapers dying. Does anyone care?

By GERRY WARNER
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
March 20, 2009
"Yes Virginia, there is a newspaper." But who knows for how long? Please forgive the liberties I've taken with Francis Pharcellus Church's immortal ode to Santa Claus in the New York Sun more than 100 years ago. But for those of us in the business and who are often accused of being the purveyors of bad news, the worm has truly turned. The joke is now on us.
Bad news abounds.
And for the ink-stained wretches of the fourth estate, much of the bad news is about us. We are failing. Some of us are dying. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last print edition this week. The presses at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, a 150-year-old, multi Pulitzer Prize winner, turned for the last time a little over a month ago. Newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Miami Herald, and the Detroit News are on life support. Time Magazine recently said eight of the top 50 newspapers in the U.S. could be gone in the next two years.
And, yes I know these are all American newspapers, but the Halifax Daily News ceased publication last year and the Can-West Global television and newspaper empire is in deep trouble endangering the future of papers like the Vancouver Sun and Province. And the Canadian edition of Time Magazine is no more, ceasing publication late last year after 65 years. What the hell is going on?
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out a few things. The Internet and Google are like arrows in the backs of all the big city dailies, and when you combine the deadly effect of these forces with the toxic cloud of the recession sweeping across North America and the rest of the world, there are many big city papers getting ready to write their own obituaries.
And the media titans have made many mistakes themselves like the day around 10 years ago when a geeky kid walked into the San Francisco Chronicle office and told them he had a better idea for how to do their classifieds. The Chronicle promptly showed him the door. The kid's name? Craig Newmark. And as the late Paul Harvey used to say, "now you know the rest of the story" about a famous list.
Some might say an industry that can make a mistake like that doesn't deserve to survive, but they'd be wrong. Keep in mind that despite all the on-line publications, zines and information floating around the blogosphere, the source of much of this information, especially the reliable information, is your local friendly, daily newspaper that has been doing this almost from the day Gutenberg invented the printing press. Certainly if you're not particularly concerned where your information comes from or its source and if you're inclined to conspiracy theories, believe in crop circles and alien visitations and prefer opinion to fact, by all means turn to the Net. It has just the right cult for you.
But if you believe that information must be followed by attribution and that a balanced news story with credible sources is worth more than electronic ranting by someone using the World Wide Web as a bully pulpit, you might be more inclined to pick up the Saturday Globe and Mail or the Sunday New York Times. And you don't need to worry about spilling your coffee on it either.
Having said all this, I have to admit I spend my share of time on the Net too. The tendrils of the World Wide Web have touched almost all of us now and they're not going away. Used properly or professionally, the Net is a tremendous boon to journalism and many other things as well. I'll never forget the infamous day the Twin Towers fell in New York and we at the lowly Townsman delayed the paper and Editor Barry Coulter used the Net to get a picture of the terrorist's jet crashing into the tower in a ball of flame while the rest of us "localized" the story with calls to the border crossings and reaction from Cranbrook residents to the horrific event. We were one of the few newspapers in North America that had a picture and a story of the towers falling the same day it happened. Most other newspapers in the country had gone to morning publication by then and their deadline was midnight the day before and they didn't print one of the biggest stories of the century on their front page like we did that day.
Yes indeed, those were the days. And they weren't too long ago. What's in store for daily newspapers now? I don't know. But I have a strong suspicion there will always be people interested in all the news that's fit to print as opposed to the "news" that comes over a flickering computer screen.
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