This week, I learned that my weekly Q&A column has been cancelled, the victim of "reduced revenues" and editorial budgets strained to the breaking by events in Japan and the Middle East over the past year. My editors, who were kind and apologetic, explained that the freelance budget at the paper has been basically squashed entirely. Of course, they didn't mention bankruptcies, terrible decisions by shifting owners and corporations that demand Wall Street-level returns from an industry that should rightly be seen as a public service. But, they didn't need to: We all know about that.
We also know that newspapers are dying. It's just that the death rattle has become increasingly pronounced as the months have flown by in 2011.
Our local San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Pasadena Star-News is now owned by hedge fund managers whose priority is the bottom line - period. As a result, reporters and editors have undergone a painful series of layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs at the papers.
The L.A. Times, one of the nation's best examples of daily journalism back in the day, has not fared any better. I remember having lunch in the Los Angeles Times cafeteria back when I was a downtown reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News (friends got me in the door) and always being wowed by the thrilling glimpse of a big-time news operation.
When I went back last year for a holiday party, I was shocked: rows and rows of empty, debris-strewn desks piled up around the edges of cavernous news rooms where a tiny group of layoff-survivors still worked at desks huddled together in the center. Carpets were literally threadbare, walls badly in need of paint. Many offices and departments, formerly filled with busy writers and editors, were simply shuttered, the rooms dark.
And this is at the newspaper that won the Pulitzer Prize last year for public service.
This article, by former New York Times correspondent Christopher Hedges, lays out the dire situation of journalism in all its sad, stark reality.
The whole piece is worth a read, but here's how he concludes:
The death of journalism, the loss of reporters on the airwaves and in print who believed the plight of the ordinary citizen should be reported, means that it will be harder for ordinary voices and dissenters to reach the wider public. The preoccupation with news as entertainment and the loss of sustained reporting will effectively marginalize and silence those who seek to be heard or to defy established power. Protests, unlike in the 1960s, will have a difficult time garnering the daily national coverage that characterized the reporting on the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and in the end threatened the power elite. Acts of protest, no longer covered or barely covered, will leap up like disconnected wildfires, more easily snuffed out or ignored. It will be hard if not impossible for resistance leaders to have their voices amplified across the nation, to build a national movement for change. The failings of newspapers were huge, but in the years ahead, as the last battle for democracy means dissent, civil disobedience and protest, we will miss them.
