Stephan: This little personal story may seem sad, but of little importance, in the midst of the crisis the country is facing. However, I see it as much more than that, I think it is telling us something important about a major trend I see developing: the death of local hometown newspapers. Is that really as important as I am saying? I think so. The loss of local press means the loss of local oversight of politicians, local powerbrokers, criminals, and local corruption. It means the things that bind a community together and make it healthy are lost. And local press is going out of business all over America.
But, you say, isn't all that local stuff covered by Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, and all the other social media? I am sorry, no. Gossip is not investigative journalism. A free press is essential to democracy, and along with all our other losses this one will have implications that are hard to predict except to say they will be profound.
Rich Jackson, a 54-year-old journalist who worked as the top editor of The Herald-Times
On Wednesday he was laid off. On Friday he was living in a Motel 6.
Rich Jackson, a 54-year-old journalist who worked as the top editor of The Herald-Times, a Gannett-owned newspaper in Bloomington, Ind., received the bad news in the parking lot next to the paper’s headquarters. He was also told he would have to vacate the apartment in the same building, where he had been living for 10 months.
Unable to go the newsroom, Mr. Jackson started a blog. He called it The Homeless Editor.
“In terms of writing, I always look for key words, and you couldn’t have better than those two,” he said in a phone interview.
His first four posts have gotten 20,000 page views — high figures for a solitary blog. They describe how, as he put it in one entry, “I went from someone to no one in 30 minutes.”
The apartment where he had been living was once reserved for the owner of The Herald-Times. If you stand facing the newspaper […]
