The San Luis Obispo Tribune just got us renewed on a promise of 7 daily papers a week and announced this week that they will skip Saturdays. Their latest previous outrage was the sexist ageist classist and racist way they treated the slaughter of a middle-aged male Asian chef heading to work in the early hours of the morning--slaughter by a female student at Cal Poly due to graduate in a few days who at 230 am drove into him head-on, skunked out of her gourd at 3 times the legal limit. The reporters quickly rounded up praise of her as a woman who wanted world peace and the paper never apologized for a follow-up (to our protests) which glorified the female student. SEXIST, AGEIST, CLASSIST, RACIST. This paper was doomed, dead from the top.
Now, I write as someone who for decades made trips to the NYPL Annex to turn through old papers or turn microfilm reels, who went to the Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, the Berkshire Athenaeum, and many other places looking for information about Melville and who in recent years spends hours a day in newspaper databases, some for free, some I pay for. I lament the death of American newspapers. I went to Liverpool, where I had to turn the reel with my little finger. I went to Colindale. Tolson the novelist has a great book on the Death, and the popular Michael Connelly has a good one on that subject. The subject is a tragic one. But this is suicide, incompetence at the top and bad hiring and no supervision at the bottom.
| The Warroad Pioneer, which served its Minnesota town for 121 years, recently printed its final edition, joining what researchers say are about 2,000 newspapers that have closed in the U.S. over the past 15 years. |
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| The story of its demise is part of a Times series examining the collapse of local news. Studies have shown that the loss of a community paper leads to greater polarization, lower voter turnout, more pollution, less government accountability and less trust. |
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