Will the last journalist to leave newspaper business turn off lights?

By David McElroy · May 26, 2012

When are newspapers going to give up and quit printing? For four southern daily newspapers, they’re already halfway there, according to announcements this week.

The four newspapers — all owned by the Newhouse chain — are going to quit printing every day. Instead, they’re just going to print on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. The papers include the New Orleans Times-Picayue, The Birmingham News, The Huntsville (Ala.) Times and the Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register. The companies claim they’re going to have better coverage on the days they still print and they’re going to have improved online coverage as well.

Until I see the new products, I’ll withhold judgment about whether they can make it or not. I’ll just say that I suspect we’re going to start seeing similar “crazy” experiments from papers across the country.

I’m a former newspaper editor and publisher, so you’d think I would feel nostalgia to see things headed this direction, but I don’t. I got out of the business 20 years ago, and I haven’t bought a paper copy in years and years.

After I left my last newspaper job, I did serious planning about how to buy and run newspapers in new and profitable ways. I even tried to buy the second daily paper that was still publishing in Birmingham at the time, because I thought I could make it profitable. One of the plans I considered was cutting publication back to once a week and make that edition magazine-style, continuing to publish breaking news online in the meantime. As I look at what the Newhouse papers are doing, it sounds vaguely similar to my plans from 15 years ago, although they’re not going as far as I intended to go.

The biggest concern I have is that newspapers have traditionally done a deeper job of covering news than TV stations have on a local level. If newspapers are forced to give up their traditional role of being the entities covering the boring little meetings where political decisions get made on a local level, nobody else is going to. (Check on the morning meetings at TV news operations. They’re usually using that day’s local newspaper to see what’s going on that they should be covering.)

When I was a young reporter still in college, I sat through more boring meetings of city councils and similar bodies than I care to remember. We all hated those meetings, because little of note happened in most meetings. But we still reported what the governments were doing with our readers’ money — spending it for a new tractor for the parks department or paying more money for new furniture at City Hall or just arguing over what color to paint the new fire truck. It was boring to us, but I came to realize that many readers counted on us to be their eyes and ears. Some of those stories were important to our readers.

I honestly can’t see who’s going to take the place of what we used to do. Television and radio don’t have the time (or expertise) to do it. Who else is there? The only possibility I can see is for local bloggers to fill the gap and provide that coverage, but the coverage from so-called citizen-journalists tends to be very uneven. Much of the writing is bad and unfair. Covering news might look easy, but it’s something that requires training and a dedication to accuracy and fairness. Most people aren’t prepared for it, and they let their emotions get in the way of fairness.

For better or worse, though, the economics of news is forcing us into this world. Right now, some papers are going to the three-day printing schedule. After that, it might be just once a week. How long until they sell the presses — if they can find anyone to buy them? Unfortunately, the restructuring the industry is going through is going to put a lot of people out of work.

The people who are going to be the angriest, of course, are the 70-year-olds who will be calling to complain — on their black Western Electric corded rotary-dial landline telephones, of course. Change is very difficult for some people to accept.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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