Dec. 9: Without papers

"A newspaper is the first draft of history."

The above was said by our county archivist, who had been invited to a special meeting of an interested party who was interested in resurrecting our local weekly newspaper, which shut down three months ago. I was the editor of that newspaper.

Those of us who used to work at the paper appreciated the sentiment because it validated the idea that we did important work there. The problem, of course, is that so many people today - young people mostly - don't give a darn about print media. As one joyless soul told us when news of the paper broke: "I don't feel bad for you. Print is dead."

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In early October, I decided to start my own online weekly newspaper. It is a shell of what the old newspaper was, mostly because I am the only one working there. At the other newspaper, we had an editorial staff of three and we also had two people running the front desk, two people in production, and two in advertising. I am not making a whole lot of money on the online paper and so I am juggling my time among that, family responsibilities, and other money-making enterprises like doing magic shows.

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There are a whole lot of stories that I missed. A former politician who was found guilty of sexual assault had his sentencing hearing recently. I did not cover it. I didn't have the resources to get to the courthouse on that particular day. My online newspaper mostly covers what our municipal governments do, but we also have some feature stories in there to keep things interesting.

Still, if something doesn't change soon, I'm going to give that up too and then we'll be living in a real news desert.

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I guess I got into the newspaper biz when the industry was just starting to die, when the internet was taking over everything. About 15 years ago, my former newspaper would often be 30 pages or more. Over the past few years, it maxed out at 14 pages. In the end, a typical issue was 12.

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The best movie of 1999 was The Insider, which was about a former tobacco scientist who shared confidential information with the television news program, 60 Minutes, about the harmful nature of cigarettes. In it, one of the characters mentioned that television networks tend to run their news departments at a loss. They view the news as a civic duty, not a commercial enterprise.

I wish such altruism existed everywhere.

The problem is that there just isn't an ideal model of newspaper ownership.

I don't like it when a newspaper is owned by a corporation because they are indentured to their shareholders. They'll layoff a whole bunch of people so their shareholders won't take a dip.

I wish all newspapers were independently owned by local groups of business people who run them as public services. Even that model has some problems, but I think it's better than the alternatives.