Another newspaper bites the dust, and the autopsy once again says ‘death by stupidity’

Cuter than heck, but not worth a buck-fifty for a poorly printed picture

It has been more than a decade since the metropolitan daily in your community ended the pretense that they were fighting for you against the forces of inept government, indifferent big business, and other institutions that require a watchdog. The day of muckraking, crusading journalism ended when publishers determined that it took less effort and expense to simply provide biscuit recipes, reviews of rock-and-roll concerts, and wire-service photos of newborn baby puppies. This menu of lame trivia failed to win over audiences, but investors liked it just fine when profits improved.

Now, dumbed down well past the point of no return and abandoned by advertisers and audiences, these same newspapers are too disengaged and besotted to fight for their own survival. Small wonder that readers aren’t even bothering to say, “The hell with them.” They’ve simply walked away.

I was visiting the San Francisco area a couple of months ago, around the time Hearst was threatening to close The Chronicle, and now I’ve just returned from Boston, where the owners may be determined to shut down The Globe, and, as a trained reporter, I can offer this dispatch: No one in either community cares in the slightest about the threat of their newspaper disappearing.

The Tucson Citizen died a few weekends past. My bet is that no one cares, in Tucson, or Pima County, or anywhere else. Wherever you may be, around your office water-cooler this morning, everyone probably knows what happened to poor Susan Boyle, and how much the Star Trek movie earned at the box office, and what the overnight ratings were for the concluding episode of some lame TV drama, but no one will have ever heard of the Tucson Citizen. When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s print version croaked recently I had intended to scribble down some thoughts — worthwhile and revealing thoughts, I might stress — about an internship I once had there, back in grad school. Never quite got around to it. Had a lot more important things to attend to, potatoes requiring mashing, several bicycle tires to inflate, and all.

I’ve spent my entire life reading, employed by, studying and caring about newspapers (in which case, you’re probably right to make that sarcastic aside about it not being much of a life) and I still can’t manage to get worked up about the industry’s decline.

I’ve been corresponding recently via e-mail with a fellow who used to own some big newspapers, and a much larger number of small ones, and he tells me that there are great challenges in the business, such as distribution logistics, and high fixed labor costs. I wanted to keep the conversation pleasant, but, come on now. Talk about missing the point. The biggest problem newspapers face is plainly that they are just plain irrelevant to anyone without a financial stake in their well-being.

There just isn’t much left to newspapers for anyone to care about. All the sensory aspects that used to be an integral part of the experience of reading a newspaper have been stripped out, such as the foul-smelling ink that would leave stains on your fingers and clothing, and the paper residue that would cling to your lap. If you happened to be walking past a newspaper printing plant late at night, say the old Globe and Mail offices in downtown Toronto, when the presses were running, you’d feel the rumble of the machinery, and when, at 9 p.m., you paid the vendor for the next morning’s paper, it could still be warm to the touch: literally, hot off the press.

Disappearing before your eyes

It didn’t matter that the paper you’d just bought wasn’t worthy of any prize from the New York Art Directors’ Club. It wasn’t meant to appear sleek, functional and friendly, like an I-phone. You were supposed to adjust to it, folding the broadsheet pages in halves or quarters to accommodate the output of the printing apparatus, or else lying on the floor on your stomach to scan the pages. Who does that now? The pages have been trimmed to manageable size, the typefaces plumped up with collagen, the designs cleansed and sanitized.

As noted a few blog posts back, the Marriott hotel chain plans to discontinue dropping newspapers in front of guestrooms this season. This decision has not caused Marriott stock to plummet, and I doubt that Bill Marriott’s days have been taken up with fending off complaints from deprived hotel guests. It’s not as if he was out removing TV sets from the fiberboard armoires in each of his properties, or emptying the vending machines of Pringles or OnYums. I’d like to see him dare to try that stunt.

Whoa, Nellie. Where have the reporters gone?

No, Bill Marriott’s safe to kick newspapers while they’re down, because newspaper publishers are far too stupid to fight back. In the heyday of the press, promotion managers would try to boost circulation by creating appealing gimmicks, such as cash giveaways, and bingo games, and other tactics to appeal to casual readers. Editors would send reporters out to create news, a la Nellie Bly. Editors, again — because you didn’t really have art directors until fairly recently — would concoct eye-grabbing headlines, or select striking photographs, or determine a way to stand out from other publications: hence, the salmon-colored Financial Times, or the late “Pink” Toronto Telegram.

That was then. Now, the publishers are too whipped to fight, and too weak to even recycle the old bad ideas. Readers have understandably deduced that if all dailies are offering is an ever-decreasing portion of ever-more uninteresting content, it’s time to try something else for your information fix: a commuter rag, an entertainment-listings tabloid, YouTube, or a blog. It’s not that any of those things are inherently less boring than your morning paper, or, lord knows, that they have a better-executed business plan. As regards the newspaper, it’s simply that, as someone once observed of the rule of the modern Iranian monarchy, in the end, they just didn’t matter any more.

Yo, newspapers: Don’t disrespect us by talking about Baby Boomer stuff

I was doing a small bit of public speaking a couple of weeks ago, which is not my usual thing, and, needing to quicken the pace, I found myself blurting out a reference to “talking like the K-Tel Guy,” which earned some blank stares. The K-Tel Guy, as everyone must know, was Phil Kives, the Winnipeg entrepreneur who gained enduring fame by speed-yapping his way through TV pitches for wacky products.

Okay, the commercials haven’t aired for, let’s see, must be about three decades, if you’re counting, but Hair Wiz and Kitchen Magician — “It slices; it dices!” — must live on in our collective memory, right? 

The expressionless faces in my audience answered the question. I made a note to myself, to examine my aging stockpile of cultural references, which are likely to be increasingly obscure to the current demographic. 

Confirming my decision this morning is Ralph Keyes, who writes for the newspaper industry’s trade publication, Editor & Publisher. Mr. Keyes cautions journalists against their predilection for what he calls ‘retrotalk‘: phrases and references that are unlikely to be understood by those not of the Baby Boom generation.  

Many of the examples Mr. Keyes provides refer to TV programs of the 1960s, such as “Leave it to Beaver” and “The Andy Griffith Show.” He cites numerous instances where discussions of current public affairs lead serious commentators to invoke mentions of Eddie Haskell or Mayberry. He also explains what is meant by dropping those two names (Haskell, a synonym for insincerity; Mayberry, a locus of rubes), which probably shouldn’t be necessary when dealing with a halfway-informed reader of any age or origin. 

The problem, it strikes me, may not be as Mr. Keyes suggests, that this habit of mentioning antique texts poses too much of a challenge or an irritation to some nitwits. I was born well after the Golden Age of Radio, but understand exactly what is meant by Fibber McGee’s closet, and find Mel Blanc’s 60-year-old transcribed invocations of Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga to be unfailingly side-splitting. The erudite newspapermen of the past, say, Mencken or Liebling, were no less a delight because you couldn’t directly relate to their evocation of names and events of their childhoods. 

If Mr. Keyes is proposing that yuppie reporters and commentators are lazy and rely overly on the convenience of using TV imagery to make their points, I won’t argue. If his point is that newspapers have thinned the ranks of the kind of experienced desk staff who once might have noticed and corrected the overuse of cheap metaphors (such as “thinned the ranks”), he’s smack on.   

You're looking lovely this morning, Mrs. Cleaver

If, however, he’s proposing that today’s young ‘uns aren’t reading newspapers because they don’t know who Eddie Haskell is, I’d respond, in the style of Old-Time Radio, “Puh-leeze, Mr. Keyes.”

Newspaper readership is sinking for a bunch of reasons, some relating to a generational change, but that trend won’t be reversed by requiring reporters to quit talking about Bob Dylan and begin to cite the wisdom of P. Diddy and cohort. I’d say the problem comes down to contemporary newspapers containing little but crap, and readers who have moved on to rituals other than reading newspapers. 

Marshall McLuhan — and I’m sorry about referring to another Ancien Régime figure — said newspapers would endure because they’re like a warm bath. What he meant by that, I think, was that print is meant to be tactile, reassuring and comforting, something into which you’d always wish to immerse yourself. 

He was wrong. Stayed in a post-modern Hotel Indigo, or one of those funky new Hilton properties? No bathtubs; just showers. And to drive the message home, yesterday the Marriott chain, the lodging industry leader, announced they plan to stop the practice of plopping newspapers in front of the doorway of every guestroom. Somehow I don’t think they’ll revisit their decision if Rupert Murdoch promises to start wearing hip-hop gear and drinking smoothies.

Newspapers are your grandfather’s Oldsmobile, or perhaps Hupmobile. 

Mr. Keyes is certain not to like this, but I’ll offer one concluding bit of retrotalk in response to the plaintive question asked hourly by newspaper publishers of ex-readers, “What do you want us to do?” At the risk of alienating some, let’s quote Goldfinger, a character in a 1960s movie, the name of which you probably won`t remember: “I want you to die, Mr. Bond!”