The AP is blubbering about the death of small town newspapers.
I think newspapers, small town and otherwise, are being killed by two major factors. The first is the rise of the Internet and the ease of online publishing, which the media, print and otherwise, didn’t take seriously enough until too late. As we would have said when I was in business school, they thought they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business.
I also think the small town dailies are dying because they’re no longer really local. Note this line in the AP article:
“The Daily Guide, which traces to 1962, was a family owned paper into the 1980s before it was sold to a series of corporate owners that culminated with GateHouse Media Inc., the nation’s largest newspaper company.”
You can bet that “series of corporate owners” didn’t live anywhere near Waynesville. They didn’t give a rip about Waynesville, except for what they could extract from it. The story of small towns since small towns.
You can see the same thing happening in local television. Owned by big media conglomerates, outside of a few older folks who were there before the Internet, it’s a steady stream of new faces as each preceding group either moves up-market or out of the business. Is the news local? Some of it. Do the people covering the news have a grasp of what a given story means in the community? Highly doubtful.
Do I even need to go into the media’s overall political slant, news reporting with an objective and the whole “fake news” thing? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
So wave goodbye to the old media outlets, both the good ones and soon enough, the bad ones. I’m not sure what business they thought they were in, but apparently it was the wrong one. AP blubbering not withstanding.
