Newsweek, the Casper Star Tribune, and Journalism. A rambling

This must be a tough time to be a print journalist.  It would be a lot like being a wheelwright in 1920, or perhaps like a commercial saddle maker in the same era.  Your services would still be needed, but you could probably see the handwriting on the wall, as the profession declined from a valuable, highly skilled, necessary profession into one with diminishing prospects.  Pretty grim outlook, in some ways, and one in which you would have to sort of hope against hope that things would straighten out for you, even if it were unlikely that they would, or you'd have to move on in the profession to a diminished niche market or just some other career.  A grim example, I suppose, of this is provided by the fate of the big R. T. Frazier saddle shop in Colorado, which at one time was a major commercial manufacturer of saddles.  Frazier himself saw the end coming on and noted it publicly.  Apparently he was unwilling to adapt to the new era, however, and ultimately he took his own life.

I was reminded of this recently by two events.  One was the end of the print edition of Newsweek magazine, and the other was the semi pathetic excuse, in my view. for the Casper Star Tribune printing one of the periodic letters of Al Hamburg.  Both sort of signal to me the increased slide of the print media into an ever increasing spiral of diminished importance, unfortunately.

Everyone is probably familiar with the Newsweek story by now.  The weekly news magazine went into print in 1933, seemingly a bad year to go into business, but the one that it started in nonetheless.  It was started by a former editorial writer for Time magazine, which itself had been in business only a decade, and which was its main competitor by design.  The magazine has been published consistently as a weekly up until just now, and now its stopped, a victim of the Internet.  In November 2010 it merged with the cyber Daily Beast, and its last print issue will come out on December 31, 2012.

Newsweek is trying to put a happy face on this, but my prediction is that it is doomed.  I don't expect the cyber version to last long.  It also isn't the first glossy magazine to suffer at the hands of the Internet.  The New Republic, a magazine (with a more expensive subscription rate) that is older than Time or Newsweek, dating back to 1914, went from being a monthly journal to coming out every two months, I think, for pretty much the same reason, although I frankly think that it has suffered in part due to the ownership of Martin Peretz, which is reflected in its editorial policies. It was a better magazine in general before Peretz, but the Internet hurt it further.  It's still around, but you have to wonder how long it can make it either.  Time is hanging on, and seems set to, but still it isn't what it once was.  Such giants as Life and Look disappeared long ago, at least in their original forms.

Not all magazines have evaporated, of course, but this is a trend that cannot be ignored and its even more pronounced in the newspaper industry, where lots of newspapers have folded or at least greatly contracted.  The big giant newspapers, like the New York Times, have all been suffering in recent years and have all experimented with having an electronic presence.  And, while supposedly the very small newspaper (i.e., local) has been doing fine, a person has to wonder.

As for the Tribune, the Casper Star Tribune is Wyoming's largest newspaper, and the only one which gets statewide circulation.  It was, at one time, a real Wyoming powerhouse because of that.  It printed two daily editions, one just for Casper and another, very similar, edition which was available everywhere else.  Now, it prints just one edition, and that one seems to get smaller and smaller.  The paper is not locally owned, and has not been forever, although it even fairly recently bought the locally owned Casper Journal, and continues to print that weekly.  I can see why it does, frankly, as the Journal's weekly columnists frankly make the Tribune's look comparatively sad.  The out of state owner has had financial troubles in recent years, a not unsurprising fact given the general state of the newspaper industry.

The Tribune, it seems to me, has been a sadder and sadder newspaper in recent years.  Its gotten smaller for one thing.  It still does a pretty good job of covering the statewide news, but it just isn't what it used to be (although in fairness the televised news outlets in the state aren't what they used to be either).  The editorial page, however, seems to me to really be suffering.

For quite some time the main editorial features of the paper have been the daily editorial sandwiched between two national columns.  I guess I like some of the national columns, such as George F. Will and Froma Harrop, but some are pretty run of the mill.  I'm sure, given as they are national, that this view isn't shared by every reader.  But its the local columnists that just don't hold much, and the editorial doesn't either in my view, quite often.  The editorials are often on a subject that just isn't worth doing much more than scanning.  Probably all of the columnists have their own followings, but most just don't seem that interesting on the editorial page. . . the Journal's are better.  One in particular, Mary Billitier, is just a parade of the maudlin with over 50% of the observations of the relocated Californian being on her sad life.  While I'm sorry that her life is sad, reading the column is like watching a train wreck so I just read the first paragraph and generally move on, something that I now find I'm doing with most Tribune columnists.

Add to this the once mighty letter to the editor section of the Tribune has declined enormously.  The Tribune used to have an enormous number of letters almost daily, with the Sunday paper being particularly letter heavy.  Probably reflecting a decline in readership, the letters have become fewer in number and, even more unfortunately, the really repetitions serial letter writers now can no longer be ignored.  The Tribune has several writers who write in constantly, very often on what are essentially the same topics.  At this point, for all but the most recent of readers, they have to be writing for themselves, as a person can pretty much know what they're writing about just by reading their names.

Which brings me to my final point.  This past week the paper ran, boxed inside of a column on the letter, a letter by Al Hamburg attacking the character of the late Joseph Meyer, the late Treasurer of the State of Wyoming.  Joe Meyer recently died due to cancer.

I don't know anything about Meyer personally.  I'd frankly forgotten he was an attorney and had been the States' AG.  I probably learned more about him in a recent interview in a University of Wyoming journal than I'd ever known before, which isn't to say that I now know a great deal.  Hamburg, long time Wyoming residents will recall, is a perennial candidate for various offices including even the presidency.  Rather obviously he has no significant support for the offices he runs for (over 20 times) and a felony conviction for forgery connected with one such race, partially reverse, apparently disqualifies him from holding office in any event.  Hamburg, while far from the most frequent correspondent to the Tribune, is nonetheless a person that any Tribune letter reader would recognize.

Hamburg's letter regarding Meyer was frankly just flat out mean.  The letter criticized the late Meyer for not having served in the military during the Vietnam War (Hamburg served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars) and went on to reference Meyer's death from cancer and his cigarette smoking in a rather hostile light.  I've never been one who held to the maxim that a person should not speak ill of the dead, but this letter served no purpose at all and was simply mean.

The Tribune didn't need to run the letter.  But run it, it did, and it actually ended up emphasizing it by the editor writing a column on why he was running it.  While the editor's column noted how inappropriate the letter was, it chalked up writing it to a philosophical public forum policy.

Well, baloney.  Newspapers have not always pretended to be Roman forums and at one time were quite pointed about their editorial biases.  There is no reason for the Tribune to have printed a letter like Hamburg's, and there's also no reason for the paper to have allowed its letter page to descend into the sad state that it has, with so many repeat letter writers writing to themselves on the same topics again and again.  The fact that the paper has reached this state says a lot about the decline of the print medium.