You don’t know what you got until it’s gone

When I was 13 years old, I worked as a paper boy for a newspaper that no longer exists. It was called the News-Post. I delivered it across a hilly swath of Northwest Baltimore that included Belle Avenue, Chrysler Avenue, Haddon Avenue, Bowers Avenue, Cadillac Avenue, Parkview Avenue and the huge Seton Apartments complex. The job paid me $14 every two weeks, if I made all my collections and managed to nail down all those subscribers who tried to dodge me for the 50 cents a week. The paper cost a nickel on weekdays and 20 cents on Sundays. Sundays I hated. The papers were heavy with advertisements, which weighed me down as I trudged up and down all those hills. I cursed those ads, and those leaden papers. Now, looking back across 50 years, it’s almost as if I were cursing my own future. This newspaper goes out of business a week from today for the same reason the News-Post (later called the News American) went out of business more than two decades ago. The numbers no longer add up. The News often had the biggest circulation in town but, even on its bulkiest days, never enough ads. The Examiner can reach 259,000 homes – 337,000 on Sundays – but relies strictly on advertising for revenue. And, in this killer economy, while local advertising was strong, national advertising just wasn’t enough. Today we see it happening all across America. The slow newspaper death march across the decades now approaches the edge of the cliff. A year ago, analysts were reporting that independent, publicly traded papers had lost 42 percent of their market value over the previous three years. It’s gotten worse since then. A Carnegie Corporation report, titled “Abandoning the News,” declares that 39 percent of respondents under the age of 35 say they expect to use the Internet in the future when looking for news. Only 8 percent say they’ll rely on a newspaper. This indicates not only a trend, but a vast and troubling naivetŽ. Even the best Web sites are comprised mainly of journalism that originated in a newspaper. Web sites are mostly daily commentaries built on newspaper reporters doing the actual gathering of facts. Remove the newspaper, and where does the Web find its original information? Television? The question is asked facetiously. At their best, local TV news operations have a handful of reporters who actually leave the building each day in search of news. A handful of people to cover the governor, the legislature, City Hall, all the county governments, the public schools, the private schools, the religious communities, the courts, the cops, the neighborhoods, the cultural institutions, the business community, the economic crises. How do they do it? They don’t, actually. But they give us in-depth analyses of high-pressure weather systems advancing from Cincinnati, and a riveting helicopter view of fender benders on the Jones Falls Expressway. As everybody knows, the newspaper troubles have been coming for years. But everybody used to imagine television was the future. TV had pictures, and anchors with personality. The only thing TV didn’t develop was a stable of reporters – because stations were making money without hiring more news people, so why not pocket the money instead of blowing it on better journalism? Except that, in the age of cable and the Internet, the local TV news operations are going through their own convulsions. And their once-loyal viewers, particularly those with three-digit IQs, have ceased taking them seriously. In the modern world, dying newspapers are merely the canaries in the mine shaft of journalism. In case it’s not clear, nobody with brains is gloating over this. When serious reporting vanishes, so does the ability of citizens to understand the things affecting their lives. The world is a complicated and dangerous place, and we all depend on informed reporting to figure things out. There’s an old story that the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst once complained to Dorothy Parker that her stories were too sad. Parker reportedly replied, “Mister Hearst, there are two billion people on the face of the Earth, and the story of not one of them will have a happy ending.” The same goes for many institutions. And that includes Hearst’s News American, once located at Lombard and Pratt, precisely a block from the building where The Examiner now begins to breathe its last. The News American, Baltimore’s working-class newspaper, expired 23 years ago. The feisty Evening Sun vanished a decade later. Now we’re headed toward one daily newspaper, whose troubles are clear to everyone and poignant to behold. You have the dying of newspapers, you get the dumbing-down of democracy. We depend on information, on perspective based on facts and not political bias. But somebody has to pay for such an effort. And readers are drifting off elsewhere, and advertisers are broke.