My Local Newspaper Should Stop Publishing
We live in an age of hand-wringing. The death of the book. The death of the bookstore. The death of the newspaper. I worry and wring my hands about the first two a lot. While I love Amazon and my Kindle app, I still can’t say I’ve moved entirely away from printed books. There’s just something comforting about holding a book in my hand that I don’t get from owning it on Kindle.. I’m also deeply saddened by the disappearance of many great bookstores I’ve been to over the years. I used to plan road trips according to the location of independent bookstores.
But when it comes to the newspaper, I’m a lot less broken up. I’m heartened to see that the big papers, The New York Times and others, as well as the big magazines, (The New Yorker is a prime example) are figuring things out, moving away from the traditional format and coming up with rich and interesting content presented in digital form.
But then there are small-town papers. I don’t know. It’s like they don’t even try. Sometimes I think they might as well wear ski masks. They gladly take the money, but I don’t think they’re delivering the goods. Certainly not the goods as defined in this day and age.
Let’s face it. Small-town newspapers, once you divest yourself of those Norman Rockwell fantasies most of us carry around, are pretty grim. While we like to think of small-town papers being owned by folks in those small towns, you know, Mom and Pop operations, for the most part small town newspapers are owned by investment or management groups that oversee papers in several states.
Small-town newspapers all seem to run on a shoestring, and they don’t pay their reporters much. They hire bright-eyed kids fresh out of college who are looking for a start, any start, and can tolerate sitting through and reporting on endless city council and school board meetings until they can move up to a slightly more prestigious newspaper that pays slightly more in a slightly bigger town. Those who stay either have ties to the town or are coming down the career ladder and are deeply into drink.
I once lived in a very small town that, while too small to have its own newspaper, sold the newspapers of two nearby, slightly-larger small towns. The news in those papers contained bits such as, “Joe and Gladys Smith traveled to Rapid City recently to pick up their grandchildren who had flown in from Dallas, Texas. Before heading home, they stopped at Red Lobster for dinner.” While some might find this charming, I found it deeply depressing and yet another reason I wanted to move on and out of that town as soon as I could, which I’m happy to report I did.
Now I’m living in a town that’s considered big for Wyoming. The local paper, which comes out in the afternoon (a fella’s got to get his sleep) usually comes in at about twelve to fourteen pages. Most of the paper consists of stale news and columns they’ve picked up from the wire services. And a lot of times not even recent wire stories. I’ve seen stories that are three or four days old, thrown in, I guess, because they just can’t have a blank spot with “We got nothing.” Throw in the ads, comics, and classifieds and that’s 90% of the paper. That just seems lazy and like filler so they can produce something with bulk, thereby justifying their absurd subscription rates. Local stories are shallow and generally insignificant. It’s hard to find something that is “new” or interesting or of importance. It’s like they’re just not trying, insisting on holding on to a outdated vision of what a newspaper should be. Their “e-edition” is a digital version of their bad print edition.
In a time of instant access to news and the capability to produce hyper-local news, I don’t understand why papers like these continue to exist. And I hope that soon they won’t.
