The Printer’s Devil

Much has happened since my last post, including the demise of the venerable Rocky Mountain Post and the print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

It appears that the Rocky was one of those exceptions to my dictum that newspapers aren‘t hurting despite the economy and despite CorpsNews caterwauling about hard times. It looks like the Rocky was closed because it truly lost money. But I suspect it was not so much because its time was up or because of the economy as much as it was done in by another stupid-but-busy publishing theory that sounds great but has proven catastrophic — a joint-operating agreement (that‘s a post for the future).

The Post-Intelligencer, which from my view had cut back on the size of its reporting staff to the point of anemia, thought it couldn’t keep its print editions going so management cut the size of its shrunken staff in half and voila, is going to dominate on-line Seattle. If I’m not mistaken, the Seattle papers also shared a JOA.

Over the past few years, newspapers — and with a friendly assist from radio, television and Internet media — have assured themselves and everyone else that newspapers are dying and that they need to “transform” and get on the Internet to survive.

For those who follow this Web site, you know that transformation and convergence is pure unadulterated baloney. I’ve told you the real reasons newspapers are dying (committing suicide to be more accurate). I’ve told you that the idea that newspapers are losing money are bush-wa and that the idea that there’s no future for newspapers is fantasy — although stupid and busy publishers and publishing companies are doing their best to make it a self-fulfilling fantasy.

However, there are signs that newspaper executives are starting to panic because they’ve done so good of job of peddling gloom and doom that they’ve gotten their readers — and especially their advertisers — to believe them.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen newspapers carrying full- or half-page promotional ads featuring a letter from some national newspaper CorpsNews type saying that actually things are better than what they’ve heard and that obituaries for newspapers are premature. So much better, that the writer notes that newspapers are generating 10 to 20 percent profit — plus a bit of understatement that 10 to 20 percent profits (no matter how horrifically smaller) are better than other industries in this country.

Personally, I think it’s better that fantasy becomes prophecy and CorpsNews goes belly up. The faster the CorpsNews jack-leg journalists become new corpses the better off we‘ll be. One of the sad commentaries of American newspapering is that the amateurs who have taken control of papers in recent years are better newspaper people than the “pros.” The amateurs still believe that newspapers should actually print the news and try to do something positive for their communities. The pros run newspapers as products to generate obscene profits while cutting expenses to the bone and produce crap — but hey, it’s hyper-local crap — that no one wants to read. Their “commitment to communities” is a cynical gesture to hide the fact that they’re only there to suck as much money as quickly as possible out of their communities.

Random thought of the day
Speaking of jackleg journalism, I notice the Internet madness spread to a place I thought would have known better — the University of Missouri’s journalism school, which I had previously regarded as one of the nation’s best J-schools. Now I see the school has been advertising for professors to breathlessly carry on “convergence,” to go where no newspaper has gone before, telling compelling stories visually and digitally-designed and reaching new readers in “this new age” of Future News etc., etc. (I am, of course, being facetious. That’s not what readers want; and newspapers who have jumped whole-hog into the Brave News World of Digital Journalism have been dying to prove it.)

But in these Brave News World times, college journalism schools — those that still exist — haven’t done that good of a job of serving the news industry.

I have always said there’s little future in the Internet for newspapers except in limited circumstances and J-schools aren’t doing their journalism students (not that there are many of those any more) any favors by encouraging them otherwise.

But I could be wrong. Maybe the Missouri J-school faculty does know better.

Evidently, there must be some career opportunities in doing funny videos on My Face and You Boob.