3.01.2009

More bad news about news


Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper recalls getting "a feeling in the pit of my stomach" when he learned that the Rocky Mountain News was shutting down....



Although the Denver Post will still cover Hickenlooper's region, some cities -- most notably San Francisco -- are facing the prospect of life without a major newspaper. Others, from Philadelphia to Chicago to Minneapolis, have watched their papers slide into bankruptcy, while still others are being served by dailies with newsrooms that have shriveled by half.

[From Under Weight of Its Mistakes, Newspaper Industry Staggers - washingtonpost.com]

Let the finger-pointing begin.

The real culprit here is the same one that crippled all of our great industries, starting with textiles and manufacturing and extending to the auto industry and financial institutions: Greed.



The great pillars of the Fourth Estate are crumbling, one by one, because bean-counters and their Wall Street masters replaced the old ink-stained wretches, running the business for the next quarterly report instead of the next generation. Their mantra -- cut expenses, raise ad rates -- drowned out calls for innovation. The daily newspaper became a "product," produced by marketers who saw subscribers who were older, rural or low-income as liabilities. Quarter by quarter, they pounded the spark and quirks and charm and innovation out of newspapers, until they were left with bland bowls of homogenized pabulum.

-Paul Knue


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