Farewell, Newspapers?

I read the news stories yesterday that the New Orleans Times-Picayune and three newspapers in Alabama would reduce their print frequency to a few days a week and cut a few (a lot?) employees.  Our own local Telegraph of Macon, Georgia, has reduced the size of its Monday and Tuesday editions to the point you can almost see through them.

I tend to straddle the electronic divide--I'm comfortable with the internet (to put it mildly!) but I still have an attachment to hard copy newspapers, magazines, and books.  (I haven't yet surrendered to the suggestions of my friends and gotten a Kindle.)  But the story caused me to think back to old newspapers I remember that are gone.

When I lived in Florida in the '60s, we read the afternoon papers Miami News, Orlando Evening Star, and the Cocoa Tribune.  The News disappeared in 1988, the Evening Star (which I delivered for a time) in 1973, and the Tribune merged into its newer morning sibling Today, now Florida Today.  Then we moved to Houston, where we had the morning Houston Post and the afternoon Houston Chronicle.  Years after we left, in 1995, the Chronicle absorbed the Post and switched to the morning.  When we moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1970, we had the morning Illinois State Journal and afternoon Illinois State Register, both papers of some antiquity.  They have since merged into a morning State Journal-Register.

The carnage doesn't stop there.  In my mother's hometown of Mobile, Alabama, we had the morning Mobile Register and afternoon Mobile Press.  Now (since 1997) there's just the morning Press-Register, soon to be a three day per week paper.  When we lived in San Antonio, we had the San Antonio Light and the San Antonio Express-News.  The Light went out in 1993.

I don't know that there's an answer to this.  I don't want to be like King Canute and try to order the tide to stay out, but I fear that something valuable is being lost. 

I did note that the Times-Picayune and the Alabama papers are owned by Advance Publications, which has already done something similar to its papers in Michigan.  Here's a comment to an article in today's Washington Post on the reductions:

As an Ann Arborite, I've experienced the Newhouse [the billionaire family that owns Advance Publications] model first-hand. And here's what's not being mentioned, or glossed over, in the press coverage: they don't just reduce their print frequency, they completely shut down the company that published the old paper, fire all the employees, including every reporter and editor, tnen launch a "new" company to publish the online website and new "paper product" (that's what they called it here).

Some of the former paper's staff are offered jobs at the new company, at significantly reduced salaries. But the size of the newsroom staff is only a small percentage of the former newspaper's, and most of them are newcomers--some recent college graduates, others with less-than-stellar career paths, plus local "community contributors"--i.e. amateurs who write for little or no payment.

Here in Ann Arbor, that's meant a serious decline in reporting quality. In the couple of years since its laucnch, most of the experienced reporters who started at the new company have bailed--many to the Detroit Free Press--leaving behind a revolving dooor of inexperienced journalists, freelancers and amateurs.

Investigative and high-quality "beat" reporting have nearly vanished. The website's lead stories seem, for the most part, seemed designed to draw the most page views from outraged commenters, without regard to their importance, while the content-thin, twice-weekly paper product primarily reprints current web stories, and has become little more than a subscription-based "shopper" for carrying advertising supplements from major chain retailers.

All this may be a reasonable survival strategy for the Newhouse company, but here in Ann Arbor it's meant the death of anything resembling serious jounalism. That's what New Orleans has to look forward to.