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A once great institution dies a slow death
Perceptions by Gerry Warner
Remember that old country tune, “Take this job and shove it?” Well, that’s how I’m feeling now; only I’m not talking about a particular job. I’m talking about a whole industry, an industry that supported me for many years, but is now in its final death throes before our very eyes.
Newspapers! Good ol’ print on paper. The industry that brought down a president, exposed an unwinnable Asian war, showed the heroism of a one-legged cancer survivor running across Canada and announced the birth of your first child is now lurching around the ring like a dazed prizefighter ready to hit the canvas.
And it’s damn sad.
What got me on this tangent was a CBC Radio interview this week where a guileless spokesman for the Toronto Globe and Mail tried to explain to CBC’s wide audience why the paper cut delivery to Salmon Arm after announcing earlier it was cutting service to Prince George and other locations in Eastern Canada. Prior to the interview, CBC interviewed several disgruntled Globe readers explaining how much they missed their favorite newspaper including a Salmon Arm woman who said she was driving 40 km to Vernon just so she and her family could get their weekly dose of the Saturday Globe. It was a weekend ritual, she said. They would put on the coffee pot, pull the paper apart and divide up the different sections and just sit down and read. And frankly, in my mind’s eye, I can see them doing it because it’s the same weekend ritual in our house and I’m sure thousands of others across Canada.
This is brand loyalty that any company would kill for yet you know how the Globe rep responded. The Globe is available on “multiple platforms” for people to enjoy, he said.
Multiple platforms! I almost gagged and was so appalled with his response that I shut the radio off and refused to hear any more of his digital diarrhea. Multiple platforms! We’re talking about newspapers for God’s sake. You know newspapers. They started a hundred years or so after Gutenberg invented the printing press and in various shapes and sizes they’ve been around ever since. After Dick and Jane, the first thing I recall reading was the newspaper and I eventually made a modest career in an industry that can boast titans that go all the way back to Dr. Samuel Johnson, William Randolph Hearst, Woodward and Bernstein, and God forbid, Conrad Black.
And now a spokesman for the most respected newspaper in Canada is telling us that all the news fit to print is available on a postage stamp screen in our hand brought to us by barely literate “citizen journalists” who have difficulty counting to 10 and “tweet” instead of talk. This may not be the end of the world but it’s getting awfully close to it. At least for the newspaper world.
Don’t believe me? Well consider this from a recent article in Wikinomics:
“It’s clear that newspapers are in a death spiral. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and the San Francisco Chronicle may not last the year. The New York Times’ debt has been downgraded to junk.”
The last time I was in Vancouver, the word on the street was it will soon only be a one newspaper town. Look at our little burg. Both (print) papers are owned by the same company and share the same publisher. How long will that last? How much longer do you think we’ll get the Globe? The Alberta edition at that. Well, I guess there’s always Facebook, Twitter and the National Post, which continues to deliver to all Canadians and isn’t a bad read itself.
But I have a message for the Globe.
If you’re really so hung up on your “platforms,” go all the way. Stop the presses.
Retreat to cyberspace. The geeks will love you, but your demise as a newspaper won’t be lamented. As T.S. Eliot once so memorably said, you’ll go out — “not with a bang but with a whimper.”
– Gerry Warner is a retired newspaper journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions are his own.
