I used to live in and around Philadelphia, from when I returned to Haverford at age 25 in 1971 until moving to DC in 1982. I remember a city with 3 major papers, the now long-deceased Bulletin and the two papers, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News whose ownership has gone from Knight-Ridder, to (temporarily) McClatchy to (in 2006) the group headed by John Tierney that is known as the Philly Papers. Today as I open my Washington Post I am saddened to read this article which inform the reader that group led by Tierney filed for Chapter 11 protection yesterday, joining too many other papers already in trouble -
Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, in bankruptcy court, along with the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Journal Register Co., whose papers include the New Haven Register in Connecticut.
So I look back at the decline of newspapers and wonder what is next.
I grew up in the 1950s in suburban Larchmont, NY. I remember a time of 7 major daily newspapers in New York City. The Daily Mirror and theHerald Tribune could not compete with the still extant New York Times and New York Daily News and gave up the ghost long ago. The "Trib" as it was known and two evening papers tried to battle the others and the burgeoning television news business by joining together, but that effort failed and we had seen the last of the World Telegraph and Sun and the Hearts-owned Journal-American, both of whose names indicated they were the results of previous mergers. And the Brooklyn Eagle, on which Walt Whitman had labored, folded in the mid-1950s.
We used to get the Times and Tribune at home in the morning, my mother or dad would bring the Telegram home on the train from New York City, and a devivery boy would leave the afternoon local paper, the Mamaroneck Daily Times, in which I had my very first Letter to the Editor when I was in Junior High School. On Sundays we would also get the Daily News and Mirror for the Comics for the two kids, for me and my older sister Judy.
I grew up loving newspapers - their smell, their feel. It was a delight to page through all the section, examining the various features. Some ran contest to try to increase circulation. There would be the first baby of the New Year, or the Daily News would have its Most Beautiful Child contest. And one could read different perspectives on the New York Sports teams, which until the late 50s included the Dodgers and Giants (and a minor league baseball team in Newark NJ called the Bears IIRC).
The population of the city changed. As the minority population increased, it saw the rise of ethnic papers, particularly in Spanish. Asthe population commuting by the Long Island Railroad exploded, a newish paper called Newsday grew up, and I can remember that at one point Bill Moyers took over as its publisher.
THE Inquirer is not yet dead. Tierney is trying to restructure its debt. But it has already contracted, having had several rounds of layoffs, dropping several national beats, closing foreign bureaus.
This WAS a great paper. Consider this:
In its heyday, the Inquirer had 15 foreign and domestic bureaus, and it won 17 Pulitzer Prizes from the 1970s through the early 1990s.
Evening papers no longer have the audience they once did. Their news was too out of date, a smaller percentage of people commuted by train, and evening news on television expanded. Those commuting in cars could listen to summaries on all-news radio stations, which began to arise in the 1960s. Here in the DC area we long ago lost the wonderful Washington Star. And in city after city, newspapers are struggling, closing bureaus, offering buy outs to long-time staffers, competing papers entering into joint operating agreements.
Yesterday saw a new era in DC. For the first time in my memory, there was no longer a separate book review section in the Sunday paper. The book reviews are now part of the Outlook section, with editorials and op eds moved to the end of the A section. Now only the New York Times still has a stand-alone book section on Sundays.
Changes are of course inevitable. But I feel a great sadness as the world of newspapers contract. Yes, people step in and buy up some, and then what? The New York Post was once a great liberal paper, now it is control by Rupert Murdoch. New papers arise, but somehow the Moon-operated Washington Times has never earned stature or respect except among the most conservative of readers.
I still read papers. On those occasions when I am in a different city, I will purchase the local paper, broadsheet or tabloid, to get a sense of the place, of what matters, although with consolidation into chains there are not only fewer dailies, the content is decreasingly generated on a local basis. Like many here I read a variety of papers online. Perhaps I should not be able to gain so much content without paying for it, perhaps that is part of the financial pressure causing such difficulty for newspapers. Perhaps I am therefore a part of the problem.
in 1998 when I would give my students an assignment to find a relevant news article and summarize it, the vast majority would clip something from a physical newspaper. Now? 90% of them print something down from the paper's website.
I suspect that the Inquirer and Daily News will both survive in some form, but as far less than they are even now, which is a major diminution from what, at least in the case the Inquirer, was not so long ago one of the great papers in the nation. That saddens me.
How many more papers are in trouble? I don't know. Perhaps Obama calling upon a reporter for Huffington Post makes sense, as increasing numbers of people turn to the web for their detailed reporting and news.
What is happening where you are? What newspapers have you seen fold, or diminish, or about which you are worried? I look forward to any insights you might choose to share on this topic.
Now please except this mea culpa: while I have daily delivery of the Washington Post, I read the story which inspired this diary online. Only after I post it will I wrap up and go outside and get the dead tree version from my front lawn. I will still leaf through the whole thing - it is easier and somehow more comforting to scan when flipping through pages.
What about you? How do you relate to the dimishing world of dead tree newspapers?
Peace.