By Jim Hagarty
Are “dead-tree” newspapers in trouble?
I have no access to credible data with which to answer that question, yes or no.
But as someone who spent his career as an “ink-stained wretch” in a day and age when ink was actually bought by the barrel, I have an observation or two, from personal experience.
I haven’t bought a newspaper in a couple of years. Not many years ago, I might buy two national dailies a day, if there was a big political story in the news. And I read the darned things, wall to wall.
Being cheap, I mostly made do with the free papers in the coffee shops. I would spend an hour or two at my table, papers all spread out, soaking up every word.
Now I go to coffee shops and walk right by the papers. Their news will be old and their commentary mild, focused mainly on being careful not to piss off advertisers who are becoming as rare as top hats in Tennessee. When the readers leave, the advertisers eventually follow them and it’s only a matter of time.
And if the newspaper in industry has lost me, a lifelong lover of the papers, my guess is they are in trouble.
But a more worrisome development is this. I have a son, 20, and a daughter, 18. They are up on the news. They love the news and follow it almost as much as I do. And as far as I know, they have never bought a newspaper in their lives. I don’t know if they ever will. They follow the news electronically, as I do these days as well.
We have two papers coming into the house. A free weekly which nobody even looks at. And a daily, my old stomping grounds, which we pay $18 a month for and keep getting, partly out of loyalty and partly for the fact that it is still the only credible source of local news. But today, opening it up is like opening a big bag of potato chips only to find it is 80 per cent air. When I was an editor there, 16 of us toiled away for good paycheques and produced some pretty good journalism. Now there are five people in the newsroom.
We do subscribe to a weekly newsmagazine but it mostly gathers dust. It is as good as it ever was but there is just to much competition at our place with four active laptops in the house (and a couple of standbys), four smartphones, and four plugged-in TVs with a few others waiting their turn.
When I was five years old, my parents took a photo of me standing beside a gigantic workhorse in our laneway. The horse was on its way off the farm and was our last one. We used to have several and they pulled all the farm implements for generations.
I need to have another photo of me standing in our driveway with the delivery boy when he brings us our last newspaper.
Probably some day soon.
