Jon K. Lauck: Who Stopped the Presses?
The author of “The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest,” on what we lost when we lost our once great newspapers.
By Jon K. Lauck
I recently spoke to a friend in Illinois who noted that she couldn’t find anyone to talk to at the newspaper in Springfield, the state capital. All the reporters and editors were gone that day and the paper was just running Associated Press wire stories in its pages. The lights were on, but nobody was home.
In the year 2000, by contrast, there were 70 people in the newsroom of the Springfield State Journal-Register, including several librarians and news clerks and an editorial cartoonist and an art director. The paper even had a multi-person news bureau at the capitol to specifically cover politics and policy. A call to the newsroom then would be answered by a busy editor.
Today, crickets.
Who’s to blame for the decimation of hundreds of once bustling newsrooms and valuable newspapers? The internet? Social media? Corporate takeovers? Shareholder value? The answer is “yes.” To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “[T]hat thing is gone, that…
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