Even when I was working full-time in newspapers, I knew the industry was declining. It perpetually felt like the best time to work at a newsroom was about five minutes before I got there.
Because there used to be something like job security, or at least the knowledge that there would always be another paper to work at. There used to be more subscribers. There used to be more advertisers. Every paper I worked at over a 20-year career seemed to be fighting to keep people’s attention, and losing.
Make the stories shorter. Don’t continue them off the front page, readers don’t like that. Use more photos. Cover more pop culture. (Listen to this outside consultant we hired who’s never worked in a newsroom!) Put everything on the internet, people will still pay for the print version. The stories are still too long, make them shorter. We’re doing another round of layoffs, but it’s okay! Every reporter will have to cover an extra couple of towns, that’s all. We don’t need so many editors. We don’t need a books section or a theater critic or a movie critic. We’re increasing the subscription price but we can’t help that the paper is thinner than it used to be. We’ve lost a lot of advertisers. Blame the internet.
Why don’t young people read the paper?
I watched a lot of colleagues lose their jobs. Colleagues with kids in college. Colleagues this close to retirement. I had to reapply for my own job once, during a “restructuring,” and I got lucky while other people didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, newsrooms could be fun places to work. They tend to attract the quirky, creative, independent-minded types, the people who either view journalism as a sacred calling or need a steady paycheck until their novel or music career takes off. Every copydesk I worked on had its ridiculous in-jokes (“thank you for coming to work today” was an insult), its traditions (Hawaiian Shirt Day, Election Night bloody marys), its camaraderie (Red Sox vs. Yankees snark, post-deadline all-night poker games). I joined my first newsroom before I’d even graduated from college and I never regretted it. I never thought I’d be suited to any other kind of workplace.
But increasingly, I knew that I’d never be able to retire from a newspaper job. I’d never last long enough.
I left my last newsroom—where I’d made it to middle management—for too many reasons to count nearly 10 years ago and started freelancing. Less than two years after I left, the family that had owned that newspaper for generations sold it to a larger chain, and nearly everyone I knew there lost their jobs. I still can’t bring myself to read that paper.
I subscribe to my local weekly, but the chain that owns it has combined a bunch of different towns’ papers into one “regional” edition and seems to be quietly hoping no one notices. There are almost no stories about my town in this paper anymore. The story it recently ran on our Board of Ed was about the previous meeting, weeks ago, and not the one I’d just attended.
The Star-Ledger is the largest newspaper in New Jersey. It’s practically been an institution for generations. It just announced it’s eliminating the print edition and will only be available digitally. No, this is not a good thing. This is an ominous sign for its future.
(A few years back, North Jersey got walloped by an unseasonal snowstorm and massive power outages. My paper shifted its coverage to all-blackout, all-the-time, including suggestions for family activities with no electricity and recipes to make using only shelf-stable ingredients from the pantry. Readers loved it. They were so thrilled the paper kept showing up on their doorstep and kept them informed. I don’t see how a digital-only paper can do the same.)
It hurts my heart to see what’s becoming of my industry, even though I suspected it was going to happen. More to the point: No local news means you don’t know what your local government is doing. You don’t know about crimes in the area. You don’t know what’s going on with your neighbors.
A local newspaper is its community, in a lot of ways. That’s why I grab a paper whenever I’m visiting a new place—I want to learn about it. We visited colleges in two different states last weekend with our senior, and I found decent papers in both places, and yes that is a selling point for me.
What do we do about this? A couple of things. First, if you still have a local paper, subscribe to it. Even if it’s crap. (You can jot down some notes about why it’s crap and ask for a conversation with the editor/publisher. They really do listen to subscribers.) Second, attend your local meetings whenever you can. Your town ought to be livestreaming meetings if you can’t get there in person; the minutes from previous meetings ought to be available on the town website. You need to know what’s going on in your town—and county and state, by extension—and if a reporter isn’t going to give you this information, then you need to get it for yourself.
This country is already drowning in misinformation and propaganda and angry lies. We need to work together to turn the tide.
Marlaina Cockcroft 