Newspapers RIP; Detroit Raises White Flag

I started my career as a newspaper reporter for the Las Cruces Sun-News. Before that I interned for The Modesto Bee, and I was the editor-in-chief of New Mexico State's student newspaper, the Round Up for two years.

The Round Up is/was/will forever be the best job that I ever had.

When I left NMSU with diploma-in-hand in 1997, I was as "print" as you could be. Man, did I love newspapering.

Read about how cult members become completely devoted to their cause, and that is how I felt about the institution of the daily newspaper.

It was my calling.

Veteran newsman Mack Lundstrom only intensified that love during my Dow Jones Newspaper Fund internship boot camp at San José State that summer. If you ever wanted to love a newspaper, just spend a few hours talking to Mack. He's still my hero.

Many fluke events led me away from the daily newspaper, but I have missed it nearly every day. And it has been especially sad to watch the industry die as the business model implodes.

But I have to admit that I wasn't ready for what I saw today on Twitter, posted by @MarketingProfs:

Detroit newspapers quit print home delivery: http://tinyurl.com/5k4vxj

What? How is that even possible? What? OK, maybe in 2018, but 2008? Twenty-bleeping-oh-eight?

It read like a headline from the Onion. But it was painful nonfiction.

According to the Wall Street Journal story:

The Free Press and the News would be the first dailies in a major metropolitan market to curtail home delivery and drastically scale back their print editions. Other newspapers are contemplating similar moves in response to the erosion of advertising and the rising costs of printing and delivery. In October the Christian Science Monitor said it will stop printing a daily newspaper in April and move instead to an online version with a weekly print product.

Insane. Just insane.

I get it -- and I'm even part of the problem with this blog, my Facebook and Twitter pages (follow me on Twitter). And I subscribe to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal only on Sundays. But I just cannot explain the gravitas with which this hits me.

Being in my mid-30's makes me feel antiquated and irrelevant, but this makes me feel as if I have one foot in the grave.

No home delivery -- even on most days -- is a white flag of irreversible consequence.

Internet, I love you. But you took just 14 years to deliver a coup de grâce to my first love. And for that I can never forgive you.

Say it ain't so.

Fourth Estate Checks Tyranny from Other Three

I believe in journalism. I believe in the Fourth Estate. I believe that there can be no open and free society without an active and vibrant press.

And I'm worried.

Because journalism looks quite ill. Gravely ill. It's always been a business about shedding light, but now there is not much business left. And without the dollars, the light goes out.

My wife forwarded me an article from Time magazine titled "The Nightly News, Not-for-Profit."

The newspaper industry is in a bad spot. Actually, run a correction on that statement — newspapers are in a "time to panic" spot. The business model is collapsing, ad dollars are disappearing, newsprint prices are at a 12-year high and the Internet is just giving news away for free. On July 2, the Los Angeles Times announced it was cutting more than one-sixth of its newsroom staff; the Tampa Tribune said it would cut 20%.

These are huge cuts just 11 years after I graduated with a degree in journalism. The work is just as important as ever -- even more important than ever given the current state of American affairs.

The Time article outlines that problem that investigative reporting is slow and minimally productive in terms of column inches. It's exactly investigative reporting that we need now.

The Internet has fueled the 24-hour-news cycle that makes it more important to have new news than to have solid news. I attribute most of the failings of journalism during the past decade to the rush to publish.

I firmly believe that Watergate could not have happened today. No editor has the resources to turn people loose for that long.

And bloggers are well meaning, but most are like me and have a day job that gets most of the attention. How many bloggers have time to do real in-depth investigative reporting?

We're in trouble if this ship sinks the rest of the way. And any talk of a new business model is just about that: dollars. The truth does not get mentioned very often.

As Duke University economist James T. Hamilton puts it, "Newspapers used to be owned by people who were willing to trade off profits for the notion that they were doing the right thing." And with profits disappearing, doing the right thing is becoming increasingly important.

Things I Miss About the Education Beat

Yesterday I remarked to a new acquaintance that I missed the education/health care beat at the Las Cruces Sun-News.

She asked what I missed.

Here's a slightly edited version of what I wrote:

• Mostly, I miss my editor, Harold Cousland. He died in 2001, unfortunately. Everyone should be so lucky as to have a first editor like Harold. He was positive and supportive. He was a great teacher. Harold hired me when I really needed a job in Las Cruces. I started with then cops reporter Keith Allen, and we became friends. Keith now edits the Sierra Vista Herald. Maybe he's looking for an education reporter.
  
• I miss the beat. I think the education/health care beat is the best in Las Cruces. City and county are awful because of [redacted to avoid libel], and I don't have the temperament to be a cops reporter. Because Cruces is growing, it is fun to cover education. ... Contrast that to Manhattan, Kan., where I got my master's degree. They were voting on which schools to shut down. That's more painful.
• I miss sitting in a boring ass school board meeting staring at an agenda wondering how in the hell I was going to find something about which to write. Then all of a sudden someone mentions that the new block scheduling at LCHS made it so not all of the kids could sit down at lunch. I wrote a little story, and controversy erupted. You feel like the Fourth Estate on those days.
• I miss the elementary school physical education teacher about whom I wrote a feature story. He changed lives. Same with the alternative high school teacher who made history come alive. Meeting those people inspired me.
• I miss sitting across from Mike Scanlon. He was a good mentor. I miss Frances and -- sadly I forget her name but can vividly see her face -- gossiping about obits and Sound Off.
• I miss the Organs and the sun. I miss feeling like I made a difference. I miss covering the health care problems of rural Hispanics. I miss driving to Sunland Park to cover some arbitrary thing that wasn't on my beat.
• I miss Ruth Padilla (long gone) from Memorial Medical Center. Whenever I flaked off a whole day and lost a story or whatever, I could always call Ruth at 3 p.m. and say "I need a story," and she'd have something respectably newsworthy.
• And although it was later on the sports beat, I miss the LCHS girls soccer team. One of those players from 1998 inspired me so much, we named a daughter after her, and we're still in contact today. She's teaching English in Spain right now.
• I miss walking up the street to eat lunch at that little hamburger place, which was new then. I miss the Corner Deli.
• I miss saying things like "never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel."
• I don't miss Safeway, working Christmas, or making $9.72 an hour. I don't miss memos about avoiding overtime, and I don't miss Charles Brunt trying to make me write a story about the teen dance club [I won and never sat foot in that place]. I don't miss corporate henchmen coming to town. I don't miss the weird upstairs men's room.
• And the green chile. I really miss the green chile.
  
• But, mostly I miss the good times. And we had some good times.