Newspaper careers crumble, but public needs news

It has been 10 years since I was employed by a newspaper (this once weekly writing gig does not qualify as “employed”). But I cannot help but listen to the crumbling of the industry where I spent 33 years of my life.

The latest crash I heard came in the form of a blog post by David Menconi announcing his layoff from the Raleigh News & Observer. In that post, Menconi, who had covered the music scene for the N&O for 28 years, cited the largest percentage destruction of a newsroom I had ever heard about, an 84 percent cut in newsroom staff: “More than a decade of layoffs, buyouts and attrition whittled our once-mighty newsroom staff of 250 down to around 40 survivors.”

It’s more common to read of newsroom cuts of 25 or 50 percent as newspapers slash costs to compensate for drastically reduced advertising revenue. Newspaper advertising revenue had been declining nationwide for 20 years, but the 2008 Great Recession, combined with the whiplash-inducing switch from print to digital advertising (Google and other online amalgamaters are making billions while newspapers, which do most of the reporting work, are laying off the reporters who expose the news).

Nearly all of the newspaper employees I worked with or knew through conferences, training meetings and associations are no longer in the business. Print-only news reporters are dinosaurs as remaining newspapers try to shift their focus to online readers and the almighty millennials. A recent column in the N&O (which we’ve subscribed to for nearly 40 years) infuriated my wife, as she read between the lines that the newspaper doesn’t care about any readers over age 40 or anyone who prefers a print publication to digital. The columnist seemed to be saying, “You old folks are going to die soon, anyway, so we don’t care about you.”

I worry about my former colleagues and peers who gave their lives to reporting the news in print and now are cut loose to drown in the sea of online advertising and video news, but I also worry about what this means to American democracy. The framers of the Constitution established freedom of the press as a fundamental right for one simple reason: Voters who don’t read the news can’t make wise decisions on election day. Without thorough reporting by professional journalists, the public cannot keep watch on government officials and government activities. Democracy is based on an informed electorate. As the Washington Post’s new slogan puts it, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

On a trip to Wilmington last weekend, I picked up a copy of the Wilmington StarNews. Among the other news in the Saturday edition was a report on the retirement of Si Cantwell, an editor and reporter with the StarNews for nearly 40 years. In his final column, he reminisced about his life in the newspaper business, then made this plea to readers: “I don’t worry about print readership diminishing. I worry about apathy. I worry about citizenry no longer interested in keeping tabs on elected officials, who don’t care about school redistricting or tax rates or film incentives. We still care about those things at the StarNews, along with restaurant openings and local sports scores, and I believe we provide the best coverage of that.”

I never crossed paths with Cantwell during my newspaper career, but we are singing from the same hymnal.