At Julius Hunter’s book party this Saturday, celebrating the celebs he interviewed in his long and illustrious career as a local TV newscaster, our table gulped champagne and talked about media. As usual, the conversation devolved to
“… the Post-Dispatch.”
“Oh, the Post.”
Heads shook ruefully.
“God,” somebody murmured, with the shaken reverence usually reserved for hurricane damage.
Everybody misses the old Post. The one we used to bitch about because it was a shadow of its former self. Those of us between 40 and 60 try hardest to sound savvy and resigned about the way the Internet has supplanted daily newspapers.
The only problem being, it hasn’t.
On lazy days, I used to find great story ideas buried in tiny gray paragraphs of the Post. Now there aren’t many paragraphs at all. Friday, they laid off another 17 people, after 18 layoffs a month ago, and reduced the Washington news bureau to one solitary guy (granted, Bill Lambrecht's a fine reporter, but D.C.'s a big place!). Today’s top of the news list was an alert that severe thunderstorms had passed us by. A journalist friend cancelled her subscription in disgust, renewed in guilt, then found out they’d scrapped even the TV listings.
I look online for news now—where I find that noble effort, the St. Louis Beacon, emailing me links of the same New York Times articles I read an hour earlier. Granted, as readership builds, the veteran Post-toasteds who created the Beacon are finding more local experts to comment or blog on local issues. But they don’t have the resources for major investigation or even daily beat coverage. Precious few blogs, like Michael Allen’s and the ongoing documentation of a tiny city’s destruction, are well reported, but most are doing merely what I’m doing right now: riffing. It’s all a bit too meta. For years, TV and magazines and alt newsweeklies and digital media have all been shamelessly mining their content from the less glamorous, hardworking dailies.Then we’d go to flesh-and blood sources and documents to add our own contribution. Now we're six degrees separated from reality, quoting bloggers who blog about bloggers. Blog, blog, blog.
It's been fun in election season—more irreverence, more variety. But I shudder to think how much serious news is out there waiting for the archaeologists of the next century to dig it up. I've just lost a shortcut to story ideas, but we've all lost huge bits of reality. And it’s a phenomenon I am forced to complain about in a blog, because the Post, instead of cutting its paper costs and going online with serious reportage, is turning into a grocery circular. The public's keening sense of loss isn't sexy enough for YouTube.
—Jeannette Cooperman, Staff Writer
