I know, I know, print is dead. But it’s one thing to say it, and another to see the actual corpse. The Rocky Mountain Newsdied today, just a couple months shy of its 150th birthday, and even those of us who are more pixel-pushers than ink-stained wretches should pause to pay our respects.
The first daily I ever worked for, the Colorado Springs Sun, died under similar circumstances, the weaker of two publications in what had become a one-newspaper town. The Gazette murdered the Sun, then burned the body and scattered the ashes. And today, no Bibleburger under a certain age knows that the Sun ever lived at all.
My thoughts are with the men and women of the Rocky as they take those first hesitant steps on an even rockier road, the one that leads to the unemployment office.
I have a lot of time on the job, and have spent way too many hours of what we all know to be a finite lifespan, Jimmy Dobson aside, explaining to outraged citizens that news is what happens — it’s neither good, nor bad, it’s what happens (and oh, yeah, the bad news gets more eyeballs).
Even so, this selection from today’s Bibleburg Gazette has me thinking about relocating to Mars:
Babe dies of suspected abuse; sailor father back in custody
Officials: Army suicides at 3-decade high
Report: 3 calls before police get frozen body
Soldier accused in woman’s killing faces new charge
Colorado man accused of threatening to kill Obama
I spared you the links. There’s probably plenty of equally grim news in your neighborhood. But probably nothing as depressing as 587 pounds of weed ending up in the hands of the fuzz after some dipshit in an SUV stacked it on I-25 near Walsenburg.
I got pulled over there back in ’72, in the early morning hours, with 10 pounds of ditch weed in a brown paper bag parked on the back seat of a 1964 Chevy Biscayne, and I was back in that cop car entertaining those good gentlemen with my cocaine-enhanced wit before you could say boo. A wise guy with an eye toward the statute of limitations might say that the greatly amused audience demonstrated its brand-new radar gun, accepted a gratuity and let the miscreant go. But I’ve never been smart.
From our Better Late Than Never Dept: The NFL says requests for media credentials for this weekend’s Super Bowel are down for the first time in recent memory. According to Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher, two major dailies — the Atlanta journal-Constitution and the Hartford Courant — are not sending anyone to what is arguably the most boring game of this or any season, which is really saying something when it comes to American “football.” And The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News all are sending fewer staffers than in previous years, probably because all three have fewer staffers, period.
Says Chris Vivlamore, AJC pro sports editor, “Part of it is the cost and we want to do more local stories.” Good on you, Chris. How about taking a stab at covering something that hasn’t already been beaten to death on TV — like, uh, say, bicycle racing?
Meanwhile, here’s an interesting piece from American Journalism Review: Robert Hodierne catches up with a few ex-newsies to ask, “Is there life after newspapers?”
January should be struck from the calendar. What a waste of days. One day you’re singing the praises of global warming as you cycle along in summer kit, and the next you’re freezing your nutsack off and watching it “snow,” which in Colorado these days means greasing the streets just enough to keep the ERs and body shops busy.
I'm goin' down — down, down, down, down, down.
If I had any brains and a little money to go along with them I’d be camping in McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Arizona. Alas, I am short on both. Herself’s Subaru just got about four years’ worth of service all at once, and paydays remain uncertain as publishers try to find a pulse somewhere on the bike business.
The new owners of VeloNews have a mania for contracts that delayed my check for services rendered during January as online editor at large of the VeloNews.com website, and now we must negotiate a deal for the remaining 11 months of 2009. I’ve gotten along just fine for the past 20 years without a written deal with VeloNews, and so has VeloNews, but as the song goes, the times they are a-changin’.
Now we must set down at length in black and white what both parties already know — that for chasing typos around Al Gore’s Intertubes I will get a monthly paycheck and nothing else, and can be cut loose at any time with neither severance nor notice. Feh. When has it ever been otherwise? Cycling journalism is not a union gig, last time I checked.
And anyway, I learned a long time ago that a union card isn’t exactly a crucifix when it comes to warding off corporate vampires. The Newspaper Guild provided about as much protection as a thousand-year-old rubber when I found myself at odds with the management of The Pueblo Chieftain back in 1985. I negotiated my own buyout and got the fuck out of Dodge before they could sack my dumb ass. Before long I found an even worse job, at the Sentinel Publishing Co. in Denver, which laid me off two years later. No golden parachute that time, just six months of unemployment insurance.
My man Hal Walter is staring down that long lightless tunnel now, trying to figure out what’s next. He has a wife, child, mortgage and truck payment, in a changing world that seems to no longer need newspapers, so he can’t do what I did in January 1988 — give up the apartment, throw the dog and some essentials in the truck, and go looking for another newspaper job.
One more quick note on newspapers, if only to annoy those of you who are weary of my fascination with the topic. In a time when shopping locally, eating locally and drinking locally is finally in vogue, albeit a bit late, the American newspaper is a product that not only is made in the USA — indeed, made right in your own hometown — but is reinvented, redesigned and reconstructed on a daily basis, as Hal Walter notes at Hardscrabble Times.
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