Two melancholy indicators on the dismal state of metro newspapers:
Dominic Papatola, a good friend of mine who nonetheless can be fairly described as the top theater writer in the Twin Cities, is leaving the Pioneer Press for a job at the Bremer Foundation. He's a fantastic and funny writer, an even better reporter, a perceptive critic and a newspaper guy to the bone. Would he be leaving the Pioneer Press if the metro newspaper world were different? Obviously not.
And will Papatola be replaced? You must be kidding. Why does the state's second largest newspaper, in one of the nation's most vibrant theater towns, need a full-time theater writer? As the paper's arts editor says, "we haven't yet worked out how" theater will be covered after Papatola leaves in mid-January.
The Pioneer Press and Star Tribune gave up on classical music a few years ago and readers like me have grown accustomed to the idea that the metro papers don't care about classical music anymore, even though the Twin Cities, again, is one of the top U.S. metro areas for music. But if the Pioneer Press really thinks it can write off decent theater coverage (and maybe the Star Tribune would do the same thing, if pressed), it's profound evidence of how puny the paper's ambitions have become.
Let's just say this is my particular interest in the metro papers -- good classical music and theater coverage. I have plenty of other news interests, but let's just narrow it to these two areas. The strong, beat coverage of classical music already is gone, and apparently theater will go the same way. There'll be lightly reported preview coverage, without the insights and sourcing that a beat reporter provides, and Papatola will contribute a weekly freelance review -- maybe the publisher will even open his wallet and spring for another freelance review per week. There'll be some calendar items and voila! Theater coverage!
So again, if these are the interests I have in the Pioneer Press and they're gone, what else is no longer in the paper that others care about? A ton, obviously. They've lost a lot of good people from the newsroom, and like thousands of other journalists around the country who've lost their jobs or taken buyouts, those people actually produced news. They didn't disappear without a trace -- the work they did is no longer being done. Just because it's no longer in the paper doesn't mean it didn't have value or wouldn't have value now if it were there. Those stories, investigations, photos and graphics are just not happening. Without the gloomy perspective of an insider, you might not appreciate how profound that lost journalism might have been.
Which leads me to melancholy news item No. 2: The Washington Post, which not long ago aspired to being a national newspaper, is closing the last of its U.S. bureaus, in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The half-dozen reporters in those bureaus will be reassigned in Washington and three news assistants will lose their jobs; not a huge personnel shift, but in terms of nuts-and-bolts reporting from those cities, and as a metaphor for the incredibly shrinking ambitions of the Post, it's tragic. As Post reporter Howard Kurtz writes,
What is lost, however, is the knowledge and experience of reporters who come to understand the local issues, personalities and culture of other regions by living there.
Brauchli, a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, acknowledged that "unquestionably there are advantages to having someone on the ground at times." But, he said, "We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience. Nor are we a wire service or cable channel." Maintaining that The Post's strength is to report issues through a "Washington prism," Brauchli cited recent examples of education and economic reporters filing major dispatches from other cities to illustrate national trends.
There was a time, not long ago, when the Post and most metro papers aspired to more. Those days, as we know, are gone.
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