Drawn-Out Death

When it comes to newspapers, I'm locked into a love-hate
relationship.

The love part? I flat-out love them. Always have. As a kid in
New York, I came from a mixed marriage - Mom read The New York Times
and Pop read the Daily News. Between the two, newspapers made the
world real to me.

I love the investigative, "gotcha"
stuff - when it's backed by real reporting. I love the "comfort
the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" ethos. I love the
opinions, especially when they're counterintuitive. I love the feature
stories about people and things I would never encounter on my own.
Style, sports, scandal, travel, inventions, obituaries - the whole
world all in one place, all for under a buck, all new, every single
day. Newspapers are just a damned miracle.

And just because newspapers
always break your heart, now they're dying on us.

I was literally in shock last week when
the Times threatened to close The Boston Globe. New England without
the Globe is unimaginable to me. True, it ate its own with the
plagiarism scandals of the Nineties. And the Times has already fairly
well gutted it.

As former Globe
columnist Eileen McNamara wrote Tuesday - ironically, in the
Boston Herald - "From the moment The Times Co. purchased The
Globe in 1993 it has treated New England's largest newspaper like a
cheap whore. It pimped her out for profit during the booming 1990s and
then pillaged her when times got tough. It closed her foreign bureaus
and cheapened her coverage of everything from the fine arts to the
hard sciences."

And here comes the hate part. While it was
doing all that pimping, the Times also gutted my journalism career.
I covered western New England for the Globe for more than three years.
I often led their New England section - when they still had one. I
wrote travel stories. I wrote magazine stories.

Then came the
Internet, and I started learning how truly dumb newspaper management
could be. The Globe, through the Times, required all us freelancers to
sign contracts giving away our copyrights. Instead of offering us a
few cents more per piece, they fought us all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court to steal our work. They lost, by the way. But the
freelancers of my generation lost our jobs.

Then newspapers began
giving away all their work for free. It left a lot of people
scratching their heads. In the mad rush to have a presence on the
Internet, newspapers actually gutted themselves.

When combined with management greed, this lack
of foresight became deadly. For years, newspaper owners were skimming
off profit margins of between 25- and 30 percent. And they weren't
putting any of that money back into their products. Instead, they were
using the money - and more that they borrowed from Wall Street
-to buy more papers, build buildings, create empires and fly around
in private jets. The Times buying the Globe wasn't the half of
it.

When your ownership is the "afflicter" rather than
the "aflictee," the "sticking up for the little guy"
ethos goes down the drain. Newspapers became monopolies engaged in
consoling the wealthy. At the end, you got Judith Miller and the Times
pimping for the Iraq war and the eight years of undisturbed and
unexamined corruption of the Bush-Cheney administration.

My beloved newspapers
became the "MSM," the scorned mainstream media. Coupled with
scandal-driven, testicle-free television news, they earned the
contempt of everyone with eyes to see and a lick or two of common
sense. Even National Public Radio became toothless.
So, an inability to "monazite" the Internet,
corporate greed, a passion for the status quo, a corrupt and
unregulated Wall Street - what else could go wrong?

I'll tell you. Journalists are only
writers looking for their next big story. So we all started writing
about the death of newspapers. First one or two articles appeared.
Then came a flood. There's even a Web site for these stories: Jim
Romenesko (www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45) posts them every day.
Talk about self-fulfilling prophesies!

Most people in the industry think newspapers are dead and good
riddance to them. But there are tons of ideas on how to save
journalism The Internet, obviously, is where the future lies. But no
one has yet come up with money to pay for real Web journalism - for
example, the Globe's pedophile priests print investigation cost over
$1 million.

Things on the Web tend to fracture into
niches. Celebrity gossip over here, progressive opinion over there,
right-wing opinion here, there and everywhere. and no one paying
someone to examine the state budget line by line and report on where
our money is going.

Love and hate. Crocodile tears and real
tears. I love the Globe. I hate the Globe. I'll miss the Globe. But I
won't pay $4 for the Globe on Sunday when I can read it all on-line.
And I won't bother to read it all on-line. So I'll miss a lot of
what's in the Globe. We will all miss newspapers.

A death in the family is always a tragedy.