Word on the street has it that The Arizona Republic, the only daily metro newspaper serving the fifth-largest city in the nation, is laying off most of its photographers and much of its editing staff. A few unseasoned reporters will be retained. In the fall, we’re told, the Republic is slated to morph into a tabloid. Those who will staff this downsized entity, the ghost of our right-to-work state’s flagship newspaper, will have no health insurance and a pension plan that will be, shall we say, commensurately downsized. Thus saith the paper’s present owner, the Gannett Corporation.
The Republic, having abandoned journalism years ago, no longer has much of a readership. It’s losing readers even as the population of the Valley grows. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t publish news.
This is no exaggeration. One year a mayoral campaign came and went with almost no mention of the candidates. Yesterday (we’ll give it this much), its print edition mentioned that unless Our Esteemed Legislators approve a budget within the next two weeks, the state budget will expire and state employees will not be paid on July 3. Having heard this from La Maya and having a vested interest in getting paid on July 3, I went to the Republic‘s online edition and found not…one…word about the possibility that Arizona’s largest employer may fail to pay its workers and that state government is, as we speak, preparing to shut down all nonessential services. The lead online story concerned the recent opening of a new ice cream store.
Turning this formerly major metropolitan newspaper into a throw-away tabloid will put it head-to-head with New Times, which succeeds because it has verve, sass, only the thinnest veneer of journalistic ethics, and lots of advertising. Lots and lots of advertising. New Times is entertaining but devoid of credibility. On the other hand, it does attempt to follow local politics. You can’t believe a word it publishes about local government, but at least it has some words!
Newspapers that abandon their mission to deliver the truth to the public and forget the importance of that mission have nothing to sell. For a long time the Republic has staggered along with dwindling advertising, but as readers lost interest in the paper’s content, advertisers lost interest in its ballooning space rates. Who reads the local newspaper’s classifieds when you can go to Craig’s List? What’s the point of pawing through page after page of irrelevant retail adds to clip a few coupons when you can download what you want from the Web? And why pay to advertise in a newspaper that nobody reads?
I canceled the Sunday Republic when I realized that the only things I was reading were the front page (part of it) and the funny strips; it felt ugly and irresponsible to throw away three or four pounds of advertising to read a half-dozen pages of ephemera. Just the thought of how many trees were pulped only to be tossed directly into the trash disgusted me, and I decided to stop abetting that kind of criminality. Not long after, I realized I’d rather pay to have The New York Times delivered to my house and so canceled the Republic altogether.
It’s a sad development. There’s a reason journalism is called the Fourth Estate. It’s an important part of the polity of a democratic republic. When we cannot get information about what’s going on down at City Hall or over at the State House, we as voters are in the dark. And our path through the darkness, as we have already seen over the past decade, is inexorably leading us toward tyranny.