D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2009
Editor's Note
Page: 2According to Hirschorn, experts estimate that a Web-only Times could support only 20 percent of the current staff. It's hard to imagine such a devastated newsroom producing much Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, much less serving as a vital watchdog of democracy.
On the local level, the damage to the community from the diminution of our information sources is harder still to quantify, but no less real. Even if I dutifully click on the Albuquerque Journal every morning with my coffee, it's unlikely I'll read as much of the paper onscreen without the serendipity of flipping through actual pages. My knowledge of what's going on in New Mexico and in state government will suffer — and I'm following this stuff for a living! More casual information-consumers may simply not bother.
It's not just the print universe that's shrinking. At the end of last year, Silver City's locally owned and operated KSIL radio ceased broadcasting. As our Business Exposure columnist Donna Clayton noted last issue in breaking the story of KSIL's closure, owner Steve Bumpous was known for his "own colorful, animated and up-to-the-snowflake live reports during Silver City winter storm activity." With the demise of Silver City's last locally owned and operated mainstream radio station, it's not just in weather reports that we'll be losing that personal touch. KSIL featured local DJs, local folks and local info with programming such as traffic updates, "Talk of the Town" and the "Kritter Konnection" that reported lost and found pets. It's hard to imagine some Arizona-owned station, streaming mostly canned programming, caring about your lost pooch or last night's town council meeting.
Even as the Internet makes it easy for folks in more remote corners of the US such as Silver City or Deming to keep up with happenings half a world away, the rise of the Internet and the conglomeratization of the media are choking the means by which we find out what's happening in our own backyard. We're lucky that at least the Albuquerque Journal and Daily Press are locally owned, with deep roots in their respective communities.
Not so the Sun-News. The Texas-New Mexico Newspaper Partnership, which operates the Las Cruces and Silver City Sun-News as well as the Deming Headlight, is an arrangement between two out-of-town conglomerates, MediaNews and Gannett. As Dennis F. Herrick describes the genesis of the deal in his book, Media Management in the Age of Giants, however, the partnership "actually was an agreement that handed Gannett operational control of MediaNews Group's five dailies and two weeklies in New Mexico." Less than two months after the partnership was formed, Herrick reminds us, the publisher, editor, production manager and others at the MediaNews-owned Sun-News were fired and escorted out of the building. They were replaced by executives appointed by Gannett and printing of the paper was moved to the Gannett-owned El Paso Times.
When push comes to shove in this economic downturn, don't expect Gannett and MediaNews to put the community's interests ahead of their shareholders'.
What can be done to preserve local information sources and these institutions so important to our democracy? Short of an economic turnaround, maybe nothing in the short term. Long-term, anticompetitive practices by newspaper chains need to be more closely scrutinized, along with cross-ownership of broadcast properties. Supposedly local commercial radio stations need to be forcefully reminded that they're profiting on airwaves that belong to the public, and held accountable to their obligations to operate in the public interest — or have their licenses yanked.
We can't turn back the clock on the Internet — and I'm as addicted to its instant info-gratification as anyone — but we can be more aware of its downsides. Not long ago, for example, someone on an email list was longing for the Craigslist classified-ads site to come to Silver City. Handy though it may be, Craigslist has drained away hundreds of millions of dollars of classified-ad revenue from newspapers — revenue that once helped pay for local news coverage.
On a personal level, you can support those advertisers who do help pay for local news and information — and make sure they know you appreciate their advertising. You can contribute to public radio stations like KRWG-FM in Las Cruces. Though Desert Exposure can hardly substitute for a daily paper like the Albuquerque Journal, you can of course let our advertisers, too, know that you appreciate their support, which makes this publication and others like it possible.
You can even join me in complaining to the Albuquerque Journal in hopes that its "pride" in serving our remote corner of New Mexico might cause it to reconsider. Some of us still want and value the "dead-tree edition."
After a couple of groggy mornings spilling my breakfast coffee into my computer keyboard, I've concluded that electrons just aren't the same when it comes to the morning paper. And let's not even talk about reading it in the bathroom. . . .
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.