May 14, 2020
The Long Haul

Day 56

Newspapers can not catch the Covid-19 virus but this pandemic is killing them off anyway.

The ink-stained broadsheets and tabloids that defined my youth and my career were disappearing at an alarming clip long before the virus touched our shores. Advertising revenue had evaporated and most small, mid-sized and regional newspapers have struggled to replace badly needed operating capital through online subscriptions.

In 1970 there were 1,748 dailies across the country. By 2018 there were only 1,248. The number will dip much lower before this crisis is over.

The newspaper wonks have long predicted that a few national dailies like the New York Times and the LA Times will survive intact. Others predict regionalization will support a few others. The Boston Globe set up a bureau in Providence, Rhode Island a year ago, a first step in what may be the creation of a newspaper for all of New England.

This is hardly breaking news. But for me, it is serially distressing, especially as I watch the long, slow, steady demise of the Providence Journal, my hometown paper as a boy. The Journal, now a Gannett paper, is on life support and losing its identify as a unique Rhode Island institution. 

Tragically, this week the Journal published it’s last editorial. Executive Editor Alan Rosenberg announced the paper will no longer endorse political candidates. This decision disturbed and angered me. More on this below, but first why do I care so much?

I learned to read on the sports pages of the Providence Journal in the mid 1950s. I learned to love the Red Sox on the pages of the Providence Journal. I reveled in the basketball  exploits of URI’s Charlie Lee and Ronnie Rothstein and the PC Friars Johnny Egan, Lenny Wilkens and John Thompson on the sports pages of the Providence Journal.

Baseball was my game; Ted Williams and the long-forgotten Jimmy Piersall were my favorite ballplayers. Williams had issues. He was aloof, disconnected from his fans and was regularly booed as he walked to the plate.  That distemper evaporated when invariably the ball he hit left the stadium. Piersall, a sturdy, hard throwing centerfielder, led the league with 40 doubles in 1956. Mickey Mantle won the MVP and the Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series that year. We did not hate the Yankees then, that came later.

I learned all this from the pages of the Providence Journal and its sister publication the Evening Bulletin. The Bulletin disappeared years ago in an earlier wave of downsizing when most afternoon and evening papers were shuttered, replaced by 24/7 cable news.

My first steady job was as a newsboy delivering about 40 Providence Journal broadsheets before breakfast every morning to homes in my East Providence neighborhood. In high school, the Journal covered my modestly successful high school sports career.

In college, as a journalism student,  I squandered an internship in the Journals’s South County bureau run by a former priest turned newsman. Looking back, I lament that I blew it. There was much to learn from that ex-priest but I was not ready. 

Even back then Rhode Island was mostly urban, a series of small cities connected by suburbs. It was hard to know when you left Providence and entered Cranston. There were rural areas but soon after you reached them you were in Connecticut or Massachusetts. The state has one core urban/suburban identity and it was revealed, refined and  renewed everyday on the pages of the Providence Journal.

The Providence Journal covered everything and it seemed to a younger reader its reporters were everywhere. It was not just sports, opinion and breaking news. Religious news was big as the state was predominantly Roman Catholic. If I recall correctly, the relationship between the paper and the diocese was always strained. And there were the comics, the funny pages as we called them.

The Journal reminded us everyday Rhode Island was a unique, vibrant, ethnically diverse place and most importantly not Boston or New York. Rhode Islanders were actually proud that the New England mob was run from the Federal Hill offices of Raymond Patriarca. 

Take that Boston!

After five years working at Vermont newspapers, I moved onto DC.

Many of my colleagues in the Vermont press corps however went onto successful careers in Providence. Kathy Gregg left Burlington for the Journal and has to be the longest serving reporter on the staff there today. Scott McKay left Vermont for a long career as a political writer at the Journal and in a second life works and writes at RI Public Radio. Candy Page worked in Burlington, Providence and Burlington again and is now enshrined in the New England Journalism Hall of Fame.

I care about the Journal, my bonafides have been established. So back to the blatantly dishonest editorial that got me so steamed. Rosenberg offered the lamest explanation for the decision to eliminate editorials.

Some newspapers, he noted, were once fiercely partisan and while that had faded they had “kept alive the idea that they should speak out, in their editorials, on what they perceived as the best interests of their community and country.”

He argued that editorials inadvertently undermined readers’ perception of a newspaper’s core mission: to report the news fairly.

 “ When the newspaper itself expresses opinions... it causes understandable confusion. Readers wonder: Can reporters really do their work without trying to reflect the views expressed in their employers’ name? Can they cast a skeptical eye on a politician their paper has endorsed, or a generous eye on one it has opposed? The answer is a definite yes but my email since I became executive editor shows that many just don't buy it.”

In other words, it is the readers fault. What a crock; his argument does not pass the straight face test.

If a reader is interested enough to read an editorial, they are smart enough to to know the difference between opinion and news. 

The change at the Providence Journal was made to save money. There is no other credible explanation.

It is simple economics; eliminating the editorial page staff reduces the news budget though the savings will be minimal because by the end the paper only had one editorial writer.

There is a second financial reason: newsroom bean counters in Providence believe cutting editorials might actually increase revenue. 

A client at a national food company explained this “sophisticated” economic theory this way: “We sell food to Republicans, we sell food to Democrats, we sell food to communists. We can not afford to piss any of them off.”

The Providence Journal no longer wants to piss anyone off. 

A newspaper’s job has always been to piss off about half of its readers half of the time. 

Editorial writers are supposed to use logic and reason and yes institutional prejudice to tell us what they think, hoping it will become what we think. We can embrace it or dismiss it or even get pissed off.

What is the problem? Oh yeah, money is the problem.

Will the Journal survive?  I hope so. I am not a subscriber so I am part of the problem. I live in Vermont, my interest and my affection is from afar. But I care. I hope it will not succumb to the mass, bland homogenization propagated by its owners at Gannett. But I am not optimistic.

Be Safe!