The real killer of newspapers is still at large

Newspaper killer is unrepentant and will not quit.

Bloggers are the mass murderers of newspapers

By Allison Hantschel, STING = I ‘m writing to you with a confession. I’m a killer.

My victims are many, and span the past decade from coast to coast in this country. They are old, young, beautiful, ugly; I’ve killed them for pleasure, and I’ve killed them for fun, and I’ve killed them because it was Thursday and my TiVo conked out.

There are too many to list in full, but I can’t help but give you a taste of the latest to feel the clench of my fists around their throats:The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Rocky Mountain News. The Cincinnati Post.

You see, I write on the Internet.

I — blog. Yes, I’m the one. The one who killed journalism.

It gets worse.

Not only am I a blogger, writing without an editor on the dreaded Internet, but I’m also younger than 40. That’s right, sin of sins, I am a member of that horrific generation that no longer reads, that gets all its news online or from Jon Stewart, that has deserted the serious and sober stylings of columnists for the squawkings of amateurs untrained in any journalistic principles.

You might as well put me in Journalism Jail right now.

I’ve been indicted on the pages of nearly every newspaper and magazine of note in the country. New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen called my kind “remoras.” “The Times and CNN and CBS News are the whales and sharks to which (bloggers) attach themselves for their free rides,” he sniffed. Back in 2005. When he predicted bloggers would, like vaudeville, go away.

At a Chicago “journalism town hall” in January, otherwise intelligent observers of the human condition sniffed at those uncouth practitioners of “amateur” news as not adhering to any sort of editorial standards, as if bigger papers and TV stations give credit to every community weekly from which they rip-and-read daily.

And I would admit to all of it, to every shallow, Gen-X blogger sin I haven’t committed, and lay down my laptop forever with protestations of remorse if it meant that tomorrow, newspapers would revive themselves triumphant, fighting, glorious as they once had been.

Watching otherwise intelligent media critics attribute the death of newspapers to the advent of the Internet is like watching police arrive on the scene of a man shot to death 40 times in the back from a distance of 20 feet and shake their heads at such a senseless suicide. The trouble with confessing to this series of print murders is that when I’m behind bars, newspapers will go right on dying, because I’m not the real killer.

I began my career in newspapers 15 years ago, and back then I was told there’d be no newspapers in a year, that this newfangled World Wide Web would be the death of us all. It was worthless ten-a-penny fear-mongering then and it is so today.

Since then, I’ve seen newspapers – including this one – looted by the publishers and executives who claimed to love them. I’ve seen skilled, healthy operations decimated by buyouts and layoffs designed not to save a paper but to make a prettier profit margin. Newspaper corporations took on untenable amounts of debt under the unconscionable assumption that their products would always be worth what they’re worth now, if not more, an assumption for which you or I would be pilloried if we made it with regard to our personal finances.

Marketing and distribution, two things few newspapers truly do well anymore, suffered for the executives’ sins, and a public that depended on and loved the paper was no longer told why it was important to them nor made easily available once they recognized its value. Newsrooms re-jiggered over and over to cover more of this and less of that, dependent on the whims of imported consultants, resulted in feelings of confusion and betrayal, and not just from readers.

I’ve seen just about everything happen to newspapers, in fact, but death by the Internet. If there was no Internet, if Craigslist disappeared tomorrow, if nobody ever blogged again, the greed, shortsightedness and selfishness that looks at a 40 percent profit margin and cries poverty – as was the case at some Gannett newspaper properties this year – would still smother newspaper journalism eventually.

And as for the canard that young people don’t care about the news, nor seek it out in print form any longer? Tell it to college newspapers, which enjoy readership numbers for which any city paper would kill: 92 percent of college students at a campus with a daily paper, according to a media marketing study released in 2008, read that paper in the past month. Compare that to 33 percent who read their community newspaper. And this is the Facebook generation.

You can blame the kids with their iPhones, or Craigslist with its free classified ads, all you like. It might make you feel better. You can talk about how sorry we’ll all be – and we will, no one more so than myself – when the last newspaper goes out of business. You can do that, if it makes you feel better. You can say it’s the bloggers, and lock me up and throw away the key.–

But when a newspaper executive can gut a company and walk away with tens of millions in compensation, when a publisher can expense tens of thousands of dollars in bar bills and say there’s no money for reporting, when money’s going out the door by the truckload and nobody’s even asking where it goes, it becomes painfully clear the real murderer is still at large.

The longer we sit and talk about all the blood on my hands, about how Google is stealing and people should be made to pay for what they read online, the longer we fight amongst ourselves, the longer the real killer has to make his getaway.

SouthtownStar columnist Allison Hantschel may be reached via her blog, www.First-Draft.com. She is the author of “It Doesn’t End With Us: The Story of the Daily Cardinal” (Heritage Books).