Newspaper Death Watch: Not the Internet, blame these three people

When newspapers lost their idiosyncratic design -- including the Chicago Tribune's daily front-page cartoons, above, or the San Francisco Chronicle's distinctive sports section on green newsprint -- newspapers also lost some of their vibrancy and urgency and individuality, said former editor John Walter.

Wow. I stumbled across a very interesting column on Poynter earlier today. Poignantly, it was written by a former newspaper editor and discovered on his computer after he died. His wife gave permission to Poynter to publish it.

John Walter writes that big-city newspapers are dead. But, with a love of specificity and drilling down that characterizes a good journalist, he doesn’t lay the blame at the feet of vague terms like “industry shifts” “changing reading habits” or an “advertising slowdown.” Instead, he singles out three specific individuals who made influential changes at their newspapers, with long-term ramifications that have caused newspapers to die.

Now, you can (and I do) argue with some of his contentions. The changes that he cites may have been introduced by these three individuals, but there’s no doubt that if they hadn’t done it, someone else probably would have. They just happened to be first.

Still, the column is a fascinating read. To briefly sum it up, he blames the loss of newspaper competition on A.J. Liebling. He blames the loss of idiosyncratic newspaper design on Ed Arnold. And he blames the loss of a journalism-first ethic on Al Neuharth.

But although it’s not central to his thesis, he starts off the column with a lengthy reflection on why he — a former editor! — no longer even subscribes. It’s a low-key but searing indictment of the state of the industry. I mean, just read:

I canceled my subscription. This was because I discovered that I foolishly had been paying full price for a home-delivered subscription and didn’t know that if you started a new subscription, you actually got 50 percent off for 12 weeks. So, we canceled our subscription and then started it up again, and had 12 good weeks at 50 percent off.

Then I called to cancel my subscription at the end of the 12 weeks, and they said they really didn’t want to lose me as a customer, so I could have another 12 weeks at 75 percent off, and I realized what a fool I had been to take the paper for 50 percent off.

So I signed up for 12 weeks at 75 percent off, and when those 12 weeks ended, I called up to cancel, and they said, sorry, they weren’t offering the 75 percent off subscription anymore, but I could have the Wednesday through Sunday papers for the same price that I had been paying for the full week at 75 percent off, so I took that for another 12 weeks.

Then, just the other week, when they said I now had to pay full price again for whatever subscription I wanted — Sundays only, or five weekdays, or Thursday and Monday, whatever — I said the hell with it.

I sympathize with him. I’ll bet that if you offered free subscriptions — free home delivery, anywhere in the city, no cost ever! — circulation managers would be depressed at the low rate of subscriptions. There just isn’t as much interest in day-old news anymore.

Anyway, the column is a good read — a perceptive diagnosis, if not yet a cure.