Haven't posted much about my job because there really isn't much to talk about most of the time -- I edit stories (sometimes) and design news pages (most of the time). Not much posting material to pluck from there. But a page I designed last night had me thinking once again about how newspapers are going into the toilet, which is depressing considering I work for one.
Basically the page was a huge advertisement -- nothing reported by our writers, all pieces written as PR by whoever submitted them. And here's the kicker: We didn't even have enough content to fill the page and had to use one of our filler ads to get rid of the hole. How pathetic is that? This page is essentially offering free advertisement, and we can't fill the whole thing with content. Unbelievable.
Newspapers across the board aren't doing so hot, but it confuses me why local papers cannot do better. There are so many options for national and world news, but way fewer for local news. Where I live, the newspaper is just about the only source for news on everything. There's no Web site covering local politics/crime/education/etc. in my area. Local TV news covers too broad a range to matter more than the papers, and it's the same with radio news, except in very few cases. The newspaper basically has a monopoly on the dissemination of that information, and yet it struggles to fill an ad page.
I'm not going to pretend to know the business side of the journalism industry like the back of my hand, but shouldn't the biggest source of local news in a decently-sized area do better than that? The easy answer would be to say people do not care about news, but I don't think that is completely true (or, rather, I don't want to believe that is completely true).
I don't want to bitch too much and come off as ungrateful -- the Tribune gave me a chance when opportunities weren't even available anywhere else, and without that paper, I'd probably still be sitting on my ass, dicking around every day. If at the end of my five-month temp run the company were to offer me a more stable job, I'd accept it in a heartbeat. But I don't want to pretend there are not real problems there; unfortunately, the solutions don't seem quite as easy to see as the problems.
