No good news for news

It’s been a bad week for newspapers.

On Tuesday, the Hearst Corporation announced it would sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper whose design I fell in love with on a high school journalism trip in 2001. (It has since been slightly redesigned, and no longer sits atop a personal pedestal. The headline font is horrible!) Apparently the paper lost $50 million last year, and Hearst plans to cut a large number of staff to stop the bleeding until a decision is made. Last month, the company announced it may close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which lost $14 million in 2008, if it can’t find a buyer.

Yesterday, E.W. Scripps Company announced the Rocky Mountain News would print its last edition today. The paper had been on the selling block since December. Only one interested buyer approached. According to the Los Angeles Times, they backed away after discovering it would cost $100 million to keep the paper operating.

The Rocky’s folding leaves the Post as the only daily in Denver. For about eight years the papers have been published jointly. Interestingly, my high school newspaper staff stopped in Denver on our flight home from San Francisco. I got a Post, which announced on the front page that it and the Rocky had joined forces and agreed on a publication schedule to serve both papers: only Rocky printed on Saturday, and only the Post printed on Sunday.

(As we waited for the plane to Cedar Rapids, my journalism adviser secretly confided in me that he would not return to the Little Hawk the next year; he and his family were moving to Minneapolis. His departure, I believe, began that paper’s slow and painful fall from the Mount Rushmore of high school journalism.)

Last night, my dad asked me to guess who he saw “bagging groceries at Hy-Vee.” In the background I heard my mom say, “Tell him what he went into.”

“He became a newspaper reporter,” my dad said.

“Oh.” I knew immediately who they were talking about: a family friend who also wrote for the Little Hawk and had a successful and laudable career — unlike me — at The Daily Iowan.

“He told me, ‘I got into the wrong business,’” dad said.

I felt for him. It’s certainly a bad time to be a journalist. The Rocky’s closure leaves its 228 staff jobless in an ever-contracting industry. In college I remember seeing the rededication ceremony of a journalism department on C-SPAN. Don’t ask why I watched; I just found it interesting. It was somewhere in Texas, I think, and they were naming the department after someone at CBS (not Dan Rather). During the Q&A session, a student asked about the deteriorating state of journalism and its professional prospects. He mentioned a case at the San Antonio Express News were 300 people applied for the overnight cops and courts beat reporter position.

Three hundred! For those of you unfamiliar with newspaper journalism, the cops and courts beat — especially the night shift — is reserved for greenhorns, for reporters fresh out of college. Even back then, long before the advertising crash began claiming the lives of well-established dailies, there were signs the newspaper industry was in bad shape. Colleges were pumping out young and enthusiastic reporters, but there were no jobs for them.

At the time I had recently left the DI and changed my major. During the pause between the question and the answer — everyone on stage looked at each other as if they had just shared the same vision of the apocalypse — I remember thinking, “Poor suckers.”

A quote in the Times sums up my opinion:

“The fewer news outlets there are, the fewer stories there are,” said reporter Sara Burnett, 35. “There are all these stories out there, and these are stories that are never going to get told.”