The Printer’s Devil

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Remember the famous French poem of World War II D Day fame? “The violins of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor.”

The violins of autumn are a bit late, but of late, during this winter of discontent, they’ve playing pretty energetically.

No doubt you’ve heard them. On the radio, on the TV, and especially in the newspapers; all you hear and see is about the miserable plight of America’s newspapers, their impending demise, and what the consequences will be on their communities when all the newspapers disappear.

Everyone agrees. Readers are distracted by the Internet, television, personal and family time pressures and the sour economy.

Newspapers are being forced to lay off reporters and editors and to cut back the number of times they publish.

Horse manure.

I’ve said it in previous posts. I’ll say it again. The problem with the American newspaper industry is the same problem that has afflicted the American auto industry, the American steel industry and Wall Street.

Rampant stupidity and greed.

Newspapers aren’t dying because readers are turning to the Internet, TV or communing with nature. Newspapers are dying because they’re committing suicide. They’re driving their readers to the Internet, TV or Mother Nature because they aren’t given them any better alternatives.

Sure, in hard times, people will drop their subscriptions as they go into economic survival mode. That’s happening now.

Sure, it’s easy — and fashionable — to blame TV, the Internet or the press of time on families.

But that allows CorpsNews to dodge the real problem: they’re unwilling to spend the money or effort to offer their readers anything worth reading.

I’ll ask it again. Why do readers buy newspapers?

Because they want to read what’s in them. And who does what readers want to read? Reporters.

I’ve written frequently about the sum total of CorpsNews management for the last 20 years: cost-cutting. Cost-cutting is surely one of the stupidest, laziest and least effect ways to manage a business, which is why it’s so popular in the newspaper industry.

That means skimping on reporters. That means paying them less than what most businesses pay their janitors. Reporting is an art form. It takes at least a million words and a whole lot of life and experience to properly report. But that never happens in CorpsNews Land because newspapers are unwilling to pay to attract the best candidates and to keep them for any length of time. Even the mediocre ones are pushed out of newsrooms by the rotten pay.

That means “news that matters to you” or “hyper local news coverage.”. The translation for both is the same: “News” that is not newspapering but newspimping — “news” that’s cheap and easy to print and which can passably done by the most inept and incompetent reporter and by manipulating readers’ emotions, it’s easier to hide that what the newspaper is not doing, which is real substance.

The tragic part of this is that most newspapers aren’t in financial trouble — although CorpsNews publishers think so and will tell you so. Don’t be fooled. CorpsNews generates colossal profits. Twenty- to 30-percent profits year-in-year-out are standards — as I mentioned in one post, a manager who turns in a 10 percent profit at a grocery store would be hailed as a genius; while a publisher who turns in a 10-percent profit at a newspaper would be disgraced. Even now it’s not that they’re not making enough money; they’re not making enough money.

The other day, I talked to someone I know who served as a publisher in CorpsNews Land. In surveying the long list of recent newspaper layoffs in the area, he sourly observed that CorpsNews isn’t anxious to offer reporters any of the goodies when their work generates tons of profits but CorpsNews is eager to make employees share the burden when things are bad.

So where does that leave newspapers?

As everyone tells you, newspapers’ future is on the Internet.

Horse manure.

I find CorpsNews publishers’ eagerness to embrace the Internet hilarious.

They’ve been able to get away with “something for nothing” and shafting reporters and readers for so long because they don’t have any competition in the cities they do business. They’re jumping into a medium where relatively few people have figured out how to generate the colossal profits that CorpsNews is used to, a medium that is highly competitive and a medium in which the CorpsNews doofuses will be slow, fat and dumb guppies in a pool full of sharks.

Or newspapers close. In years past, I would have agreed about the terrible consequences that occur to communities that lose their newspapers. More local government corruption. Loss of an important source of community information. A common identity — and many times, the only common identity in a community.

I’m not sure I would agree now.

I urge you to go to your local library and look at microfilmed copies of your local newspaper as it was published 100 years ago, 50 years ago, even 30 years ago and compare that with your local “newspaper” today. It will make you cry.

If it’s a CorpsNews newspaper, and most American newspapers are owned by CorpsNews, it doesn’t really serve the community no matter how loudly its ads proclaim it. Newspapers are just dog ticks, sucking as many profits as they can from their communities, while doing and paying as little as they can get away with. that matters to you.

If a CorpsNews newspaper folds because it isn’t sucking out enough profits, it’s no great loss to the community.

What will happen is what’s starting to happen. Amateurs are starting their own newspapers. In most cases, the newspapers are better both in reporting and in their values for the community. As newspaper critic A. J. Liebling once wrote, the greatest good a millionaire philanthropist can do for his or her community is start a newspaper and compete with the established paper.

Sweet violin music in any book.