This is the time of year where people reflect on their circumstance in life, and often times give thanks for their many blessings. The end of year ritual has not eluded me, as I sit here thinking about many aspects of my life as the holiday season begins.
For my work life, the past year has been a year of change. There is much thanks in my heart as I reflect on those personal changes. More on that another time.
Friends get together around the holidays; that isn’t breaking news by any stretch. Our personal circles expand and our lives change as we take new jobs, move on and evolve. While I look forward to the future and all that comes with it, it is also good to return to familiar times in past and the people that made a difference in our lives. You see this reflected in everyone’s social media feeds right now, with family gatherings as well as reunions of past co-workers and friends.
As I write this, it is Thanksgiving Day, the largest newspaper of the year as most exclaim. That is a true statement, if measured by weight, thanks to countless Black Friday inserts from local stores. The fact is today’s local newspaper is probably the high water mark for the year for revelance, for circulation and readership. And it has nothing to do with journalism. The largest newspaper of the year that I read was light on news, as most newspapers are anymore.
Politico had a story this week suggesting that individuals should stop subscribing to their local newspaper if they cared about local journalism. I don’t subscribe to that belief, but I do think the article made some great points. The biggest of those points being decision by many corporate owners and their decision to squeeze all the profits out immediately on newspapers and then the likelihood that they will abandon them once they are no longer profitable. In the article by Jack Shaffer, he wrote about Alden Global Capital but could have said the same about several chain owners: “Deliberately starving its newsrooms and shriveling its news pages, Alden’s “milk-it business modes” is designed to extract the value of a newspaper over time until the day—poof!—their papers vaporize and Smith and Freeman climb into their Scrooge McDuck vault to count their riches.“
This is a reality for more than just Alden owned newspapers and something I had mandated to me by a former boss. I sat in a meeting shortly before I left my last newspaper job where the corporate mouthpiece told me this was exactly the plan I was to execute.
The impact of this corporate ‘milking’ is evident with the daily newspaper you are reading, if you’re still reading. The newspaper is smaller; in width and page count. It is also evident by the dwindling amount of local by-lines you see. And for me, that milking was made evident in one of those social media posts that I mentioned earlier as friends gather to remember and give thanks together this time of year.
On Facebook today, I saw the reunion of the sports department of the now defunct News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I say defunct, since the decision to stop being a newspaper was two years ago and the decision to stop being a real newsroom ended just over a year ago. Yes you technically still find a website with one good reporter still doing the occasional story. But this is a good example of corporate milking as detailed in the Politico article. It was just all at once instead of the slowly disappearance that is happening at most newspapers.
This group from the old News-Sentinel had recently gathered for their reunion, to share, to give thanks and no doubt reminisce. Not everyone was able to make it, but most were in attendance. The talent of that staff was / is impressive, and would be hard to assemble again in any single city newsroom, no matter the size of the publication or the market they cover. Cheers to that crew who have moved on but have not forgotten their friendship or the impact they made on the community.
