The dying paper

Here is the living disproof of the old adage that nothing is as dead as yesterday's newspaper... This is what really happened, reported by a free press to a free people. It is the raw material of history; it is the story of our own times. -Henry Steel Commager, preface to a history of the New York Times, 1951

Today is May 25th. In six days, our local newspaper will be in print only three days a week: Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays. From my vantage point, such a moment is going unnoticed by most people. I dread looking on the Internet for my daily local news. I like the feel of paper. Just like I love my dictionary with the tissue thin pages and the precise definitions. Sure, I can find it all on the Internet, and I guess I will, but I will mourn. And what about all the people in this city who don't have computer access? They may not have been buying the paper anyway, but at least they could if there was a story about their neighbor or family.

The first successful American newspaper was published in Boston in 1704. Hardly a vehicle for free speech, it was subsidized by the colonial government. I love journalism, and I am sentimental for the history it records.

The dwindling of our paper means major staff cutbacks. Some of the reporters, who have been working here for over twenty years are losing their jobs, writing their last columns. Certainly losing a job isn't new in this area. It's been going on for more than a decade, exacerbated by the current economy.

What I mourn isn't so much the great paper. Because really it isn't. There was too much filler from the Associated Press to be great. But the court reporter who has covered crime and trials for a decade will be gone. The reporter whose beat was the school system, around for 13 years, gone. The church beat writer with 23 years of reporting in this city, gone. They were good reporters, not legendary. And more good reporters will be brought in to replace them we're told. But how do you account for the loss of knowledge and of history? You can't.

At the core, though, the shrinking of the newspaper adds to my growing sense that this city is dying. All of the stores and full service groceries have moved out. If you don't work in the medical field, there isn't any place to work. And last week we had the dubious distinction of having housing that had lost the most value in the past year--59% loss so that the median selling price of a house was $30,000. That's on a survey on 134 U.S. cities.

Kids who graduate from college in Michigan, don't return home to this part of the state. Most of them can't find jobs in this state at all---a few find jobs in healthies Michigan cities.

And still residents hold out hope--hope that GM will be the ticket out. I don't think so. The days of barely graduating from high school and getting a great job with awesome benefits working in the car factory are long gone.

I am not generally a pessimist, but a feeling of doom surrounds this place. Life-long residents don't know how different other towns are. And so I keep wondering if the slow death of our newspaper foreshadows a larger death in this place I call home. I hope not. I hope God has other plans.