Living In a No Paper Town, Part Two

Update:  In my intial piece, I inadvertently edited out this phrase "a tireless Patch reporter."  As they say, when you edit yourself, you have a fool for a client.

COMMENTARY
 

“The decline of newspapers has meant that the political class has been getting away with murder even more than usual, because investigative journalism is expensive, and newspapers are poor.”

-       The Colonel, The Middletown Eye, Sept. 9, 2012

(DISCLAIMER: This is the first year, in all of my 60 years, that I live in a home where a daily paper is not delivered to my doorstep.  This concerns me.  But what concerns me more is that my lack of support may mean a future where important stories are not reported at all).

The Wolf Is At the Door With A Newspaper In Its Mouth

The daily printed newspaper has been driven to its knees by a perfect storm of forces over the past five decades.  In the sixties, evening TV news broadcasts began to nail the coffin shut, nearly eradicating every afternoon newspaper in the country (I used to deliver and report for one - The Hartford Times).  Escalating print costs, combined with increased labor, tax and transportation costs continued to hobble the industry.

But, the remaining morning newspapers were still cash cows.  They owned downtown buildings.  They turned tidy profits with print ads, preprints (those Sunday circulars),classifieds and decent, though eroding, circulation.  Those family and privately held papers, including the Middletown Press and the Hartford Courant, began to be gobbled up by the chains.  And the chains were devoured by larger media conglomerates and investment companies.

The accumulating debt began to smother the papers, which cut reporters and content to streamline operation.  But that only served to alienate readers.

Younger readers were harder and harder to find.  And when the internet convinced a generation that content wanted to be free (as in “unpaid for”), Craigslist, Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, rendered the print newspaper irrelevant.  The web provided the final nail to the print coffin.

Newspapers scurried after a digital model that, while moderately successful, has not been successful enough to subsidize the print operation.  And so, great papers began to disappear.

The Press is Pressed 

Most news veterans will tell you that most of the remaining print newspapers exist only to deliver those pre-print advertisements (circulars from WalMart and Target), that bring in the bulk of revenue these days.  When those retailers figure out another way to get you into their stores for Back-To-School sales, you can expect to see print newspapers go the way of the Apatosaurus.

What will Middletown be like without its own print daily?

As much as I love to sink into an easy chair with a newspaper in my lap, I'm ready to give up the print and paper habit.  It's not sustainable.  It's certainly not green.  And it is draining the life blood from local journalism.

As oldtimers will tell you, the Middletown Press is a shell of its former self (stand still long enough and one of those oldtimers will tell you about the glory of the D’oench years).  Can a newspaper with a single full-time news reporter really cover a town of nearly 50,000?  Not well, but readers already know that.

If the Press, and other legacy print papers would truly abandon the printing press, they might be able to hire more reporters, target coverage, deliver truly breaking news and survive.   Of course, there's the matter of huge leveraged debt (see Part 1).  But with any luck, the parent chain may be forced to divest its interest in the local papers which are not pushing profit to the bottom line.

The Final Edition

Can Middletown do without a print version of the Middletown Press?  Of course. 

What Middletown can't do without is another pair of trained journalistic eyes focusing on the topics of interest to our community.  Rumor has it that the new editor of the Middletown Press instructed the sole news reporter to focus on stories other than those that arise at municipal meetings. If it's true, it's shameful.

We need reporters who are paid a living wage, and who can have a sustained tenure in town so that they can understand the stories, the history of the stories and the consequences of the stories.  They don't have to know where the bodies are buried, but they have to know someone who knows where the bodies are buried.

Right now, Middletown is covered by a solid reporter for the Courant, another from the Press, volunteer journalists from this newsblog who provide insightful but uneven coverage, a tireless Patch reporter, with additional selected, hilarious, anonymous and usually biased coverage from the Middletown Insider.

Despite the shallow marketing boast that "we''re everywhere," TV news does not care about Middletown unless there's a murder, or an explosion or a serious controversy, and they can be counted on filing a painfully inadequate report, or a story that is flat wrong.

Still with all that "coverage," I sat as a member at this month's Board of Education meeting with no reporters present.  Hello.  The BOE spends $71 million of tax payer dollars every year.  We need witnesses to the actions we are taking.  We need the press to hold us to task.

And that leads me back to why I helped start the Middletown Eye in the first place.  All those months of meetings I attended with no reporters present.  What the colonel says is true.  The political class would rather not be monitored by a watch dog press.

These days they are getting their wish.

We can live without a printed paper in town.  But we won't do well if we are abandoned by the journalists too.