We Interrupt This Rant

Everything that's been said here having being said:

This could be the month when the newspaper business as we know it dies.

Newhouse says that if it doesn't get concessions, it will sell The Star-Ledger and close the Trenton Times. Well, there's still The Trentonian. Whoops, it's owned by Journal Register, which may be in technical default. So the state capital of New Jersey could wind up without a daily newspaper and simply get whatever attention NJ.com gave Trenton local news without having a Trenton newspaper to support. (That's assuming NJ.com still exists, if Newhouse sells the Star-Ledger. Why would it?) There would still be some journalism being done, but would anyone who isn't already involved in government or civic activism really care? (UPDATE: While the New York Times story said the Trenton Times would be closed, the Star-Ledger story says the papers would be sold "as a unit." Whom to believe?)

Gatehouse, which owns 98 dailies and was a Wall Street darling not 18 months ago, is down to selling for peanuts and is seen as likely to default. Journal Register is selling for less than a peanut. Both of these companies not only own dailies, they own tons of weeklies that are usually the only sources of news for their communities. The only sources. There's no citizen journalism in Cinnaminson. There might be someone who would want to rant about trash collection or fourth grade teachers. My biggest problem with online journalism is those who see no difference between news and ax-grinding, indeed who feel there should be no difference. It's all information, it's all content, and none of us needs mediators. If you think it's just peachy to have someone who was fired by the city and failed to be elected to the council as the main source of local political news, that it's just another voice in the debate and that readers know enough to discount the bias, you have a faith in discernment and involvement that makes the concerns about the New Yorker's Obama cover look small.

Newspaper companies have churned over the years. Remember Ingersoll? Panax? Daily newspapers have disappeared from troubled markets. Remember the Metro-East Journal in East St. Louis?

This didn't use to be a problem because someone would have bought these papers. But who will buy them now? Who will step into the void, as the Belleville News-Democrat did in East St. Louis?

People have been talking about how some metro newspapers may not make it. Forget that for today. Lots of county-seat newspapers, which were immune until now, are owned by companies that may just blow away. This is not just going to two-day-a-week publication and updating the Web site and saying your main problem is going to be older people who won't see online obituaries. This is, gone. Look on Topix or Yahoo News for "Palmyra, N.J." or "Norristown, Pa." and see what you get, and from where.

This is not just the disappearance of classified advertising to the Web or the migration of readers, who in print still greatly outnumber those on Web sites. This is not small-town merchants who can't afford to advertise in metro papers. These are small-town or small-city papers. This is newsprint price rises and high-priced gasoline and collapsing retail sales and big-box stores that don't advertise. This is newspapers getting declining shares of local online advertising. These were decent bets for which loans were taken out in 2006 and that have gone bad. This is panic, and its result.

And there's nothing one can do about it, short of lots of people falling on their swords. But somehow, I don't think that this is what those predicting the glorious death of printed newspapers, replaced by a cornucopia of online information, exactly had in mind. One can imagine how one would replicate most of the functions of the Los Angeles Times online in some form or another and make actual businesses out of them, because of the scale of the market and the Times' emphasis on national and world news and stories affecting a vast region. One can imagine creating a Web site in Los Angeles serving an affluent neighborhood or one filled with goo-goo activists and making it into a business.

One struggles to say the same of Trenton, Ewing and Hamilton. At that point, it's someone's hobby. We have not yet come to terms with what happens when local journalism becomes a hobby.