Dead tree newspapers survive on inertia, and people older than me, and I will be 69 on Friday. It does not help that papers like the Washington Post did their worst to convince half the nation that they despise them. I canceled my subscription to the Chicago Tribune in 2008 after they endorsed Obama. I quickly realized that I did not miss it at all, as by that time I was getting almost all my news over the net. Newspaper subscriptions for people who grew up without them have as much relevance as buggy whips.
The Peoris Journal Star is no better thsn the WAPO. Every article dealing with national news or politics is basically an editorial. And the once a week editorial page is reliably leftist.
My sympathies would be with the technical and support staff and some of their supervisors and managers, not with the people who produce the editorial matter.
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Many moons ago, I ran for public office. I discovered two things about the media in our section of the country. One was that the higher you went on the print media food chain, the more asinine were the questions you received. Small town papers asked questions soliciting information. The city reporters were pointlessly antagonistic and rude and had no interest in anything substantive. TV reporters were fairly polite, radio reporters less so. Not long after, I happened upon a column by Michael Kinsley critiquing questions asked by the White House press corps which comported with my experience. The median vintage of the reporters I was speaking to was (I’m guessing) the 1946 cohort. For a generation before Craigslist began wrecking their revenue streams, being a jack-wagon got you promotions.
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Another thing to note here is the social research on occupational groups generated and published by Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter during the period running from 1980. They surveyed those employed by a dozen or so organizations which distributed content nationally. You’re familiar with one of the observations – that the ratio of Democratic voters to Republican voters was about 8 to 1. I can understand that people with certain characteristics (such as a talent for playing with words and images) are attracted to a certain sort of politics. Still, how did you get that kind of skew? Fred Barnes offered about 25 years ago that for 15 years he’d worked for a liberal opinion magazine and then a conservative one. The interns they employed did not differ as to the quality of their work. The former received frequent recruitment calls from metropolitan newspapers. The latter received none. He noted the media in that era were jabbering about ‘diversifying’ the news room, but going out of their way to avoid hiring anyone of conservative sympathies. I’m remembering at the time that Laurie Garret of Newsday cut her teeth working for the red haze Pacifica Radio and Sarah Pettit of Newsweek had been hired off the staff of the staff of Out (a gay publication).
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We had a Newsweek subscription when Jon Meacham decided to attempt to retain readership by turning it into an opinion magazine. What their readers discovered was that the opinions of their staff of reporters and editors could not be more uniform and banal. (A piece of stupidity which sticks in my mind was Howard Fineman writing a polemic attacking Sarah Palin and comparing her to Richard Nixon. To anyone remotely familiar with either, such a comparison sounds unreal. You did not have to have an observable relationship with reality to land a plum job at Newsweek).
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As older cohorts retired and it got more difficult to earn a living as a reporter, the people they were recruiting were just the dregs and the people who remained from an earlier era were those willing to put up with the dregs (Anderson Cooper, I’m looking at you). Among the dregs would be the latest Ochs scion to run the New York Times.
My experience as well Art Deco. I haven’t had a subscription to a newspaper since 1980. Even pained me to subscribe to the New York Times for my mother. Some people in the Detroit area lost their minds when the Detroit News was purchased by the company that owns the Free Press citing that there wouldn’t be any conservative voice in newspapers of the Detroit area. I corrected them that there hasn’t been any conservative voice in the Detroit area for at least 10 years and really much longer. I don’t have a dog crate that needs lining so the only use for newspapers was to help light fires and you can use kindling for that.
USAid is defunded and leftist propaganda sources start laying off people. I’m sure these are just two unrelated events.
WaPo tried to move toward the center, and received a lot of push-back from TDS-afflicted employees … While I wouldn’t wish unemployment on anyone, I do hope these layoffs targeted those employees who were triggered by being asked to consider publishing something akin to “Trump is not literally Hitler“.
Anything around the Legacy Media is a sorry mess, the quality of writing continues to deteriorate, and it will get worse, as hard as that is to believe.
But newspapers had a good run, they were a morning ritual for most of the country. I used to envy New York back in the day when they had, what seemed like, ten thousand newspapers. I still miss the huge Sunday paper, reading through that massive mound of missives, while watching sports. So many good writers came from the papers, now I can’t name one.
On a different note, support your local paper, if you have one that isn’t a leftist rag.
Most of you in larger cities do not have this option, but small local papers do exist that are not aggressively leftist. Lefty centrist, but I can get through that to get local news and issues that are not getting collected elsewhere anymore…
Where, oh, where is the modern Sousa, to compose “The Washington Post Dirge”?
The Washington Post cut their sports desk. Wizards and Commanders fans, once located, may convey disappointment.
I was a reporter and edfor a series of papers for 20 years from 1986 to 2006 – first a small town weekly, then a diocesan paper, and finally a small daily that was already on its last legs.One of the worst but probably inevitable trends in print media during this period was consolidation and outsourcing – newspapers that used to have locally based and often generational family ownership, and were staffed by residents of the communities they covered, were sold to national chains and had copy editing and headline writing done remotely. A local reporter’s story would have its headline written by a copy editor in another city or state who had no knowledge of the context, for example. Pretty much every surviving daily paper in downstate Illinois today looks like a clone of USA Today and echoes the mainstream media party line on most issues. I don’t even bother looking at the local papers online anymore.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the WaPo Sports page was nationally renowned. Apparently, they squandered that along with their news credibility, somewhere along the way. The online attempts to create a worthwhile national sports reporting platform have, so far at least, failed miserably, IMO.
I’ve seen some coordination between local sports talk radio or college football conference websites, hints of things like that. But so much of the emphasis in modern sports coverage is fantasy teams and tracking stats. You probably need deep-dive tables along with stories and interviews, as well as fan chats. And it’d be hard to create an organic network for all that when some teams just lack supporters.
I don’t know. But reading about yesterday’s game in the paper isn’t going to come back as long as video-sharing exists.