My mother quit her job today, or rather “retired” as she put it. This was not a shock and a long time coming, as she was really only putting in one day a week. But it came on the heels of the dismissal of her boss. My mother has worked, for well over a decade, for a local newspaper, a community newspaper, one that publishes weekly and is a source of information for a segment of the county in which it resides. Her boss, the managing editor, had been with said paper for thirty years. The paper, supposedly, isn’t going to fold. Yet. That does not mean the receptionist doesn’t spend the better part of her day fielding off calls from creditors.
This, I suppose, serves as a microcosm of the troubles of the newspaper industry at large. The national epidemic writ small. There are many whose imprimatur is to cover The Death of Print. To wag fingers at the bloated budgets and unwillingness to “change with the times,” to “embrace the internet” and “re-evaluate their platform” or whatever catchphrase kindling is being assembled for the funeral pyre.
This is not a paper you go to for breaking news or hard hitting investigative journalism. They run stories on community affairs, local interest pieces, like interviews with high school valedictorians who are also spearheading volunteer efforts, or non-profit groups holding bake sales, and reviews of community theater productions. They run obituaries. They publish human interest stories, many of which sadly focus on veterans returning from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The paper is the kind of place where an irate advertiser or concerned—maybe sometimes unbalanced—citizen can stalk in the front door and demand satisfaction for their gripe, or perceived slight. Not great for the workday, but it also speaks to their place in the local conversation and their accessibility as a resource for their readership.
Perhaps the paper could’ve been ahead of the curve. They have a Twitter page but it sits fairly dormant. Their online presence is not robust. I suspect though even an entire digital overhaul of their “brand” would yield little success. Or could. The community the paper serves is not on social networking sites, does not necessarily go online to read the types of stories they publish. Even if they desire to, they lack the time or manpower to retrain their readership.
I embrace the internet (for the most part). I’m (usually) excited in discovering the ways it can be applied to the field of journalism and to the dissemination of news. History I’m sure will view this weird, jerky first decade or so of the 21st century as a transitional period and we may, as consumers of information, come out the better for it. But I’m not always the best at taking the long view, and I usually want and or need to root around in the personal and the immediate. So what I feel and sense and respond to is the fact that what was once a community resource is now shriveling away into obsolescence. A very talented, very dedicated woman—the managing editor— is suddenly unemployed in a heinous time to be without work; a woman whose health insurance and benefits came from the paper she oversaw for thirty years. A community that relied on a vehicle to cover certain segments of the lives of its population will likely soon be short an outlet. And it is not as if the main newspaper of the city *ahem* has any track record in honestly or correctly perceiving and serving the needs of its readers. Whereas personally, I know that my mother took, for the majority of her tenure at the paper, pride in the work she was doing. So did her colleagues. These are not people who whiff a Pulitzer around every news item, obviously, or deign that their writing should garner national laurels. But that does not mean that they all view their work with any less integrity.
In her email to me, my mother said the staff is still planning on having their annual holiday party. I cannot help but think it will, this year, have the tenor of a wake.
