This is the story of a friend I’ve never met. Not in person, at least. He’s a former newsman who has been a reporter, photographer, columnist, and editor. There are a lot of us out here in the wild.
We met via the Internet in 1999 or early 2000, when the old Honolulu Star-Bulletin was fighting to keep Gannett from shutting it down. During the 18 months or so that the Star-Bulletin was struggling to survive, he introduced himself to me. His newspaper out in the middle of America was also in a direct head-to-head newspaper war with Gannett, on the one side, and the financial realities of the great death spiral of local news, on the other.
My friend turned me on to Richard McCord’s book, The Chain Gang, which chronicled Gannett’s tactics used to destroy competitors and create one-newspaper cities where they had previously supported two newspapers.
And, as I soon discovered, he’s a cat person.
Fast forward. The Star-Bulletin was rescued by Canadian newspaper publisher David Black, but I became a newspaper refugee when my job was eliminated in the cutbacks that followed. And several years later, Gannett bought my friend’s newspaper and, within a year or so, closed it down, leaving him in the unemployment line.
I kept track from a great distance of my friend’s attempts to stay in the world of journalism, moving from one tiny newsroom to another over a period of several years. When that led to a dead end, he turned to other ways to try to earn a living, as have thousands of other former reporters and editors across the country. We had still never met, but I knew exactly what he was going through.
And then he and his wife hit a bump in the road, more hard times, with the range of issues facing so many Americans. And then he did something very, very difficult. He asked friends for help out of the tight financial jam.
I responded as soon as I heard, sending a little cash to the friend I’ve never met. It seems like the least I could do for another refugee from the newspaper wars who offered his support from a distance back nearly 20 years ago when I really needed it.
With so many newspaper jobs lost over the past 25 years, I know his situation is far from unique. Two years ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported newspaper employment fell nearly 60% between 1990 and 2016, down from nearly 458,000 to only about 183,000. And continuing the fall. That’s a whole lot of unemployed journalists.
Both the big picture, and my friend’s personal plight, are sad reflections of the decline of newspapers and of local news.
Hang in there, my friend. I hope that one of these days we’ll get to meet under more pleasant circumstances.
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Am told that Trump’s trade war with Canada (premised on “national security” grounds) has resulted in a 30% tariff on Canadian newsprint, the building material for those “enemies of the people” in print journalism. Can’t help but feel this will give an extra spin to the death spiral you describe. In the digital age of social media, advertising outlets proliferate as print circulation declines. Sad.
It was very nice of you to respond to your friend’s plea for help.
A very kind gesture that was no doubt greatly appreciated.
As for The Chain Gang, it was hardly the scathing expose of sleazy Gannett tactics that it’s been made out to be and should have been.
While it was indeed critical and informative, it also depicted a stagnant competing newspaper on cruise control with a feckless owner who was not entirely straightforward with a flabby and entitled staff that did not exactly recognize the threat and declare war on the Chain Gang with both barrels blazing.
That said, Gannett was terrible for Hawaii and dispatched some awful bosses here who were totally unqualified and innappropriate, including a few who shamelessly lied to readers and forever besmirched the memory of a troubled paper that already had plenty of bad baggage but was nonetheless a community institution.