The Decline of the Local – Rise of the Neighborhood – Newspaper
My sisters taught me to read before I reached kindergarten, and I was soon reading the local newspapers – the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Globe Democrat. When I was in college in Chicago I picked up the Sun-Times and the Trib daily. In San Diego I read the Union Tribune and the San Diego edition of the LA Times. I was an information junky, and mainlined front pages all the way down to the classifieds.
I still am an information freak, but I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in 10 years, and hadn’t read one from cover to cover since early this decade. Until recently.
Much of the problem with newspapers is that I have changed but the newspapers have not. While I have grown more conservative and interested in local happenings, the newspapers seem populated by frustrated J-school kids who dream of speaking truth to power. The would rather opine about the evils of the Bush administration or Republicans in general than report on local events.
Worse, the newspaper itself would rather run wire copy than pay even the pathetic salaries of j-school graduate. For example, here’s the “local” section of the Wilmington News Journal. Note how national and international wire stories are mixed in with the local. In fairness, that’s the website version, but that also speaks volumes: the site is a mess and looks like it was put together using a Microsoft FrontPage tutorial. The newspaper hasn’t figured out how to maintain an online presence.
A few weeks back a headline of that free neighborhood paper caught my eye while I was out walking the pups. Once again Delaware public schools are in a financial mess – even though we voted them a tax increase last year. As some of my recent writing has shown, I’m losing my patience with them, and don’t plan to suffer with them much longer – but I digress. The neighborhood paper had an article about school consolidation, and I picked it up.
I ended up reading the thing cover to cover – just like the old days. It was filled with ads (no surprise) but the writing was original and the stories all local. There were stories on local crimes that I wasn’t aware had occurred. There were local property transfers – to see how the local housing market was holding up. A section on the high school area sports. There was even an op-ed section which printed letters on topics of interest to the neighborhood – with one or two slamming Republicans but this after all is a blue state and Delaware Democrats just love credit companies and bankruptcy “reform” that they demand.
If I want to read about the happenings in Washington or overseas, there are plenty of sources out there to inform me. I’ll know what’s happening in Burma 12000 miles away yet remain uninformed about what is happening a mile or two down the road. But thanks to the neighborhood newspaper, that’s starting to change.
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