The Last Word On Nothing

For as long as I could read, I have started my day with the morning newspaper. I’ve had a subscription to a printed daily newspaper, and oftentimes two, for all of my adult life. It was a sad day at my house when the Denver Post stopped delivering to our part of Western Colorado in 2009, leaving us with only one daily paper, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. (We also subscribe to an even more local weekly paper.)

And now, life as I know it is ending. Over the weekend, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel announced that it will cease publishing a printed paper on Mondays and Tuesdays. The Sentinel will still put out a paper on those days, but it will be availably only electronically.

I’m crushed. It’s not that I can’t read papers electronically; I already do that with national papers. Instead, it’s the thought of beginning my day without a newspaper spread across my breakfast table that gets to me. The physicality of the paper is an important part of the experience. As I wrote here previously,

A story in newsprint has a genuine quality to it — a paper’s signature columns and font make the words seem weighty and bona fide. It exists in the physical world, not just the cloud. A newspaper clipping can survive 100 years inside someone’s desk drawer or a shoebox in the attic, but the fate of our digital files seems less certain. Not so many years ago, someone advised me to back up my digital files on floppy disks and put them in a safety deposit box. Today, I would have a hard time accessing such files, but I can still read newspaper stories my mother clipped decades ago.

But what I mourn about newspapers is more than just their visceral pleasure. It’s the sense that I’m holding in my hands the news of record — the same accounting of events that my neighbors and friends are reading too. We may not always agree with the newspaper’s decisions about what to cover or how, but our sense of what’s happening in our community begins at a common place, one that attempts to provide an objective report. Of course you can also get this by reading the paper online, but on the internet you have more opportunities to seek out stories you want to read and skip the ones that are boring but important.

I realize that printed papers may someday become a thing of the past, but what makes the recent decline in newsprint so disturbing is that it’s being accelerated by an even more troubling development — an attack on the free press. In his letter to subscribers, Sentinel publisher Jay Seaton explained that the paper’s decision to reduce its print editions was made in an effort to reduce costs without gutting its newsroom or reducing its local news content. (Thank you, Jay Seaton!) The pressure to reduce costs, he said, resulted from an array of factors, including rising costs for everything from wages to health insurance. “But the explosion of the price for paper — our second-biggest expense — has been devastating,” he wrote. He went on,

Newsprint rates have been rising for years, but recently the U.S. imposed tariffs on Canadian paper in an effort to support an American paper mill. That mill (North Pacific Paper Co.) has decided to significantly increase its rates along with just about every other mill in North America to keep pace with the now-higher prices of their competitors from Canada.

Seaton never mentioned Trump’s name, but the tariffs he refers to are part of President Trump’s trade war, one that is threatening U.S. newspapers. A recent Wall Street Journal commentary declared, “Trump’s Newsprint Tariff Is a Tax on America’s Free Press.” It’s hard to see these tariffs as anything other than part of Trump’s war on the news media, which he has called “the enemy of the people.”

A free press is essential to a functioning democracy and attacks on it cannot stand. But it’s a mistake to focus entirely on defending national media. The erosion of local newspapers and media are just as important. Without a robust infrastructure of local news coverage, local governments and institutions have no one to hold them publicly accountable. And as political scientist Dan Hopkins explains in a new book, voter turnout and engagement is lower in areas with less local news coverage.

And that’s why I’m not going to cancel my subscription or write an angry letter to the editor over the Sentinel’s decision to continue doing their jobs in today’s politically and economically hostile environment. (For more on the media’s economic woes, take a look at what’s happened at the Denver Post, which is a story for another day…)

Instead, I’m going to keep subscribing and encouraging my friends and neighbors to do the same: Resist attacks on the truth. Support your local news organization.

1974 image of “subway riders lost in their own thoughts and reading the newspaper on the Lexington Avenue line of the New York City transit authority” via Wikimedia Commons.