I was shocked when I heard the news. I shouldn’t have been.
At the behest of its shareholders, Times-Shamrock Communications is selling off its 4 daily newspapers, including the venerable and Pulitzer Prize winning Scranton Times. The buyer is MediaNews Group, a subsidiary of Alden Capital, a soulless hedge fund with a reputation for being a soulless hedge fund. The Denver based organization is known for draconian cost cutting and an almost gleeful attitude towards emptying out newsrooms of actual human beings. It’s worth noting that there is nothing political about any of this. Alden Capital has no fixed ideology. This is balance sheet-shit, nothing more. They’ll squeeze as much money as they can out of these newspapers, and then shut them down. The employees are mere collateral damage.
We really haven’t progressed all that much since the days of the coal barons. We still call it progress though. We’re adorable that way.
In retrospect, newspapers were doomed the day the ghost of Al Gore invented the internet. Daily papers that used to bulge with local news and advertising now look as thin as church bulletins. Entire photography and sports departments were jettisoned. Circulations plummeted as online paywalls proliferated in a attempt to make up the advertising shortfall. Reading a newspaper “online” never caught on because the physicality is part of the experience. The way we unroll it and shake it and splay it out in front of us. The way we fold it into this or that section. The way it smells and how the news print would smudge on finger tips. I don’t want to lean in and read the paper. It’s made to be read leaning BACK. It’s the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
That being said, I haven’t seen a paperboy or girl on the streets in at least 20 years. Just last year the Times stopped publishing a physical Monday edition, which was when the countdown to today really started. The Scranton Times used to publish multiple editions 365 days a year. Now they hoped nothing big happened on the first day of the work week so stockholders would be less pissed at them. It was madness.
The Times was always considered a “liberal” newspaper, which is what Chuds in the 70s and 80s called any publication that wanted Nixon held accountable and didn’t have pictures of Ronald Reagan hanging on the newsroom walls. In truth, they’ve always played it pretty straight down the middle. Just because our area is stuffed with mouth-breathers doesn’t mean they get to dictate how (or even if) a newspaper covers something like their favorite President being impeached every other fucking day. Those sounding off even now about the paper’s perceived biases are the same ones who have made Talkback-16 legendary for all the wrong reasons, so please keep that in mind.
Of course my father spent most of his adult life working for the Scranton Times, so this news rubs me and my family raw. Reporter. Columnist. Editor. He was a newspaperman from his scuffed black wingtips to the top of his brylcreemed head. He’d tear off his garish suit coat and loosen his unmatched tie before he even sat down at his impossibly cluttered desk in the morning. By 8:07 AM he already looked disheveled. But his eyes were forever lit up. The only thing he ever loved more than the Times was God and his family.
His days were filled with the wild wonder of unpredictability. The only day he didn’t love was his last one, when he insisted on exiting through a side door so nobody would try to make a fuss. He was never the same without the Scranton Times. He was slower. Sadder. The place energized him. It was more than what he did. It was who he was. For that, I’ll always be grateful to it, despite the fact that he and his contemporaries were paid about as much as a high school janitors.
But even back in the early 2000s he saw the writing on the wall. He considered it dastardly for a great city to not have at least two newspapers. When the Scranton Tribune shut down is when he knew things would never be the same. He adored the camaraderie. He loved the built-in checks and balances that came with competition. But now that was gone. The story could wait. Bean counters were getting more involved with editorial decisions. “It’s time”, he told when when he decided to retire. “It’s not the same anymore”. When they put carpeting and cubicles in the newsroom, he asked for an office in the basement. He could not concentrate in a place he likened to a library.
Everybody used to wait for the paper to be deposited on the stoop (or perhaps in the bushes). It would be spread out on the kitchen table. Sections were pilfered. One devoured the obits. Another pulled out what we used to call “the funnies”. Some would reach for the baseball box scores. If the paper was missing, it could only be in one other place. An entire nation learned about Watergate and Iran-Contra while sitting on the toilet.
Today everybody is sitting on the toilet with a smart phone in their face, no longer getting news from reputable sources, but scrolling until they find something that buttresses their own prejudices. Today the most likely answer to the question “where do you get your news?” is “Facebook” and in the end not even the Lynett family could compete with that.
In a bit…
—tf
Sad...very, very sad. I miss the physical copies of multiple papers being delivered to our driveway each day. Now we're down to none... I know tecnological advancements have been good in many ways, but they have taken so much away from us. I miss the way it " used to be" Life was much less complicated back in the day.
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