Metro paper meltdown

You may have a sense of foreboding, wondering about the future of your job.

It could be much worse. You could be a journalist.

How would you like to show up for work each morning to read and hear that your entire industry is so close to death that if it were a patient, the doctors would be talking to the family about unhooking the ventilator.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a 146-year-old gem, just went down. The Wall Street Journal has produced a death-watch list of newspapers most likely to lock the doors. High on their list is the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Many relish the demise of the big news media. Which is understandable to a point. People take some joy in seeing powerful institutions being battered and newspapers always have been targeted as too liberal, too conservative or too smug.

But be careful what you wish for. Buggy whip factories disappeared when cars replaced horses, which was a benefit to society. There is no replacement for journalism.

And there is nothing in the blogosphere to substitute for it. Beyond newspaper Web sites, most of what passes for news coverage of current events is analysis. Opinion is free. Journalism — sending reporters to council meetings, to the White House or to follow a long trail to corruption in government contracting — costs a lot of money.

The Post-Intelligencer has moved to an online business only. There will be precious little in the way of reporters from the P-I covering Seattle and the region. Instead, a few staffers and the public will post links to other news stories, post local events and debate issues. All of which can be useful and interesting. But as the big papers that did the yeomen’s work of covering state, national and big-city news disappear, there will be no news for those on the Web sites to link to or debate.

No one has the answer for the big papers’ demise; we all will lose if a new business model to support big-time reporting is not found.

The good news is that non-metropolitan daily and weekly newspapers, while facing challenges, exacerbated by the recession, are doing better, some even thriving. Most of the analysis of the state of journalism is based on the stability of about 100 of the nation’s largest newspapers.

Reporter Joe Kimball, writing on MinnPost.com, noted that small-town papers are still well read and healthy. The town of Slayton, population 2,000, has two weekly newspapers, as do some other smaller communities.

And despite the general perception that few want to read news, a National Newspaper Association 2008 poll shows that 86 percent of adults read a local community newspaper each week.

That’s not to say all is rosy, it’s just not as dire as most might believe.

The journalism model has never much changed and isn’t broken. A reporter covers an event, dogs sources, checks facts, seeks responses and does a story. The business model for journalism is a different story. The old system of print advertising and subscription payments is not working at all for major newspapers and will continue to force changes at smaller papers.

The music industry was not long ago on life support — their songs being grabbed for free on the Internet — until they were saved by Steve Jobs and iTunes. He figured out that millions of people would spend hundreds of millions of dollars if it was in small amounts to download the songs they want.

Many believe some similar model can be crafted to support journalism.

That will, unfortunately, be too late for many major newspapers that provide us with the things we need to know to be good citizens and a strong country.

Tim Krohn is a Free Press staff writer. He can be contacted at 344-6383 or

email him Tim by clicking here