Impending Death Of A Newspaper

Today my local newspaper here in Portland, 'The Oregonian', announced it will only be published as a paper edition 4 days a week, beginning in a couple of months. Just as when I lived in New Orleans, the only local print edition of the daily newspaper in the city in which I live is dying. Hmmmmm I wonder if I caused this. Newspapers seem to die where I live. Regardless, it is distressing. Local newspapers are a long standing tradition that are, in my view, essential to informing the citizens of the area where the paper operates.

On-line versions that seem to b e replacing printed ones are slimmed down, entertainment pieces devoid of real or important news. They are essentially entertainment, not news organs.  The nonsense 'The Oregonian' spouted to justify cutting back its printed newspaper came with an unconvincing rationale statement. "Our print products will be driven by our digital focus. More than ever, we're going to be a digital first company. The major driver of this change is the devastating loss of print advertising.  They're not maintaining their share in what is the biggest ad boom in history."

What 'The Oregonian' means is they can eventually make more money selling ads for an on line version than the printed paper. I wonder if the decline in advertisement sales for it's printed version is because people prefer digital news, or if the lousy job 'The Oregonian' did in printing news made the advertisers give up on investing their money for newspaper print ads. Too, on line newspapers have smaller staffs, do little investigative journalism and are more entertainment oriented pieces filled with fluff and gossip "news" that syndicated services sell. 

People like me who read real newspapers every day will greatly miss having their newspaper delivered to the front porch each morning. I read a newspaper every day in it's entirely and think the hour I spend doing so is time well invested. It makes me better informed about issues and community issues where I live. But I will not spend more than a few minutes to read a degraded on line version. I find those newspapers to contain far too much fluff. An analogy of the two might be that a printed newspaper is a Shakespearean play and the on line version a comic book.

'The Oregonian' will fire much of it's staff when it switches to all on line (that should happen soon after the idiotic four day a week print experiment fails) and make a whole lot more profit for doing it that way. It's much cheaper to fire staff and instead buy and print nonsense from syndicated sources.  An on line product that serves no one in the community leaves the community less informed and proves that silence is not golden. Rather it is what those who are behaving badly (particularly the politicians who will not have to worry about being accountable when the printed newspaper is gone) in the community will rejoice in being able to more easily hide their deeds because serious investigative journalism is not present.

Too, the way we most get information on the web is to look for what we think we want to know.....to confirm our perceptions, prejudices and misinformation. But when I read a daily newspaper, there's often a headline about something that hadn't occurred to me. And that format calls me as a citizen to some new issue or problem that I would not have shopped for online or listened for on the radio. On line entertainment newspapers kill our curiosity to know and do something about what is truly important to the community in which we live. Real newspapers make us engaged in our community. Issue based reporting from the newspaper is essential to civic life.  I fail to see many issue based reporting in the digital versions of the newspaper.

The value of a newspaper is not replicated by other mediums, even with advances in technology.  Just look at how people use cell phones today and ask whether their ascendancy over land line phones improves lives. Seems to me the cell user of today is far more anxious and addicted than phone users in pre cell days.  In an age when more and more consumers read little of anything, much less newspapers, can a newspaper in digital format make enough money from digital advertising to pay for quality reporters to cover local news, sports, investigative, etc.?  Likely not. 'The Oregonian' will over time probably morph into an aggregate news product with a few local pieces from contract writers, not staff. 

Uh.....looking more like those gossip newspaper headlines we laugh at when standing in the checkout line of our supermarket. Can a general purpose news organization like 'The Oregonian' make enough money from digital advertising to pay for quality reporters covering local news, sports, investigative, etc.? Likely not. 'The Oregonian' will in time probably turn into an aggregate news product with a few local pieces from contract writers, not staff.  It will  make itself irrelevant to and not be considered a real news source. I wonder what the publishers of 'The Oregonian' are thinking about their readers. Maybe it's whether their readers are dinosaurs that needs to be exterminated?  

May another newspaper and we dinosaurs rest in peace.