My First Dream Fading Further Away

            An article caught my attention this past week as I surfed the interwebs for a while before heading in to work. The story talked of over sixty more layoffs at the Indianapolis Star newspaper, part of hundreds more layoffs from the paper’s parent company, Gannett. It was yet another step in the slow but inevitable death of the daily newspaper.    It made me think about a little kid with an old typewriter, and how things can turn around.         

            I received my first typewriter when I was in grade school. To this day it was the best gift I have ever been given. I knew early on I loved to write and the adults in my life from parents to my grandmother encouraged me. I had my ream of paper and the typewriter set on a box of comic books in my room. I’d sit on the floor in front of the box like it was a desk and with my index fingers I’d hammer out a newspaper that covered the events in our house. It came and went. As a kid that young, I’d do it for a while then lose interest and get into something else for a while, like playing baseball or riding bikes, but I’d always come back to it. Once I even tried to make it like a magazine, cutting up pictures to run with stories and dabbling in paginating.

            I enjoyed writing fiction too (my first full story was about a boy with a talking fish, written in second grade and yes - mom still has it), my dream job was actually to work for a newspaper. Well, it was more specific than that. I wanted to cover the Cubs for the Chicago Tribune, a job currently handled very capably by Paul Sullivan. It seemed perfect to me, go to the games, interview the players, managers and coaches and write what happened as a season unfolds. With that in mind I went to Indiana University, studied journalism and wrote sports for the Daily Student.

            I took a job in Jacksonville, Illinois and set about my plan of climbing the journalistic ladder from small paper, to medium-sized paper to the big-time. But funny things happen to plans like that.

            First, it turned out I couldn’t stand small-town living. Jacksonville had a population of 18,000, far smaller than even South Bend, where I’d grown up. While South Bend isn’t a metropolis, it was certainly a far cry some a town with one real main drag surrounded by seemingly endless farmland. There were only two sit-down restaurants in Jacksonville and one was a hole-in-the-wall diner designed for passing truckers. There was one video store, and two gas stations. The claustrophobia wore on me quickly. Also, I missed my girlfriend terribly, and she lived in Indianapolis. Plus, while I knew only a select few really make much money in journalism, I was struggling to pay the bills.

            With all that in mind, I decided to move to Indianapolis. It was a proper city, my girlfriend lived there so I wasn’t so lonely, and I found a job that paid a lot better than the Jacksonville Journal Courier. I figured I’d work some savings up and get back into writing in a year or two. But funny things happen to plans like that.

            As those years went on, I began to see from the outside how the daily newspaper as an institution was beginning to falter. First came consolidation. Papers began merging or shutting down. Very few cities have more than one daily anymore and most of them are the largest makets such as Chicago, New York or Los Angeles. In Indianapolis, the Star and the News were combined, and some jobs were lost. My chances of landing a writing job again got a little smaller.

            Then the internet as well as 24-hour cable TV news kept growing and growing, and newspapers took way too long to take any real notice. They continued to do the same things they always did, even though the climate had completely changed. No one really got their news from the paper anymore. Almost anything in the papers had already been reported on TV or on the internet. Papers were becoming extraneous, or even irrelevant, yet they did little to change with the times.

            Sadly, once they did change, they went the wrong direction. There are certain things a newspaper can do that the internet and 24-hour cable news can’t.

      First, it can be more local than the web. Internet sites are broad, and few have the resources or the interest to cover local events well.

Newspapers can be more in-depth. The internet and cable news are like an ocean that’s only two-feet deep. It is enormous. There are thousands of sites that claim to report the news, but virtually none do more than scream out a loud headline with a few paragraphs of shallow detail. They could care less if a local politician is getting a kickback, but they'll happily embed a link showing the latest drunken brawl at an IHOP. Cable news outlets only give short bursts to any one story and are more interested in sound bites and propaganda-style rhetoric than going in depth. They can cover a lot, but they don’t cover it very deeply.

Unfortunately, newspapers almost immediately tried to become more like the internet rather than focusing on the things that set itself apart. They cut back on local coverage and disbanded investigative reporting teams. They began cluttering the pages with more celebrity gossip and mistook it for news coverage (this bombed too as they were still unable to understand what they put in was hopelessly outdated by the time the paper was printed and distributed).

Circulation dropped, advertising fell away and newspapers started making cuts. My guess has been for years that print newspapers will slowly die off, although skeletal versions of them will putter along online or on new technologies such as tablet devices. I see nothing that’s making me question that.

 As for me, I found other avenues for writing as I realized that going back to newspapers would be like hopping aboard the Titanic. Sadly, there are hundreds now who have to find other avenues as well. Maybe they had typewriters as grade-schoolers too. Maybe they wanted to write about their favorite team, or be the next Woodward and Bernstein to shine the light on things those in power selfishly wanted kept in the dark. Others were working in circulation, sales, editing, or doing the hundreds of other jobs needed to keep a paper going. They had career ambitions, retirement plans, insurance for their families.

But funny things happen to plans like that.