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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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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