June 26, 2013 6:12 AM

Dammit, Jim; I'm a newsman, not a carpenter...or at least I used to be

The Oregonian, the state’s largest and longest continuously published newspaper, will curb home delivery to four days a week and lay off some staff as it reorganizes operations to emphasize online news. The newspaper will continue to publish seven days a week…. “Our print products will be driven by our digital focus,” The Oregonian’s publisher and president N. Christian Anderson III said in a staffwide meeting Thursday morning. “More than ever, we’re going to be a digital-first company.”…. Anderson declined to say how many of The Oregonian’s 650 employees would lose their jobs in coming months. Editor and Vice President Peter Bhatia told newsroom employees that the reductions would be “significant.” But he said there would be new hiring as well.

Last week’s news that Portland’s fish wrap, The Oregonian would begin transitioning to what seems an increasingly inevitable digital-only format hardly came as a shock. Indeed, the news was met with what can only be described as a collective yawn. At least in Portland, it seems as if The Oregonian was the last to recognize what’s been a trend for the past few years. In case you’ve been trapped in some sort of alternate Luddite universe, the newspaper industry has been on life support for years. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer went to a digital-only format a couple years ago. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News went the way of the buffalo some time back. It’s a trend reflective of the reality that actual, tangible newspapers will soon be found only in museums and libraries. The ad revenue-based business model becomes increasingly unsustainable with each passing year, and more newspapers nationwide will be forced to face reality. For reasons both financial and technical, print newspapers are increasingly anachronistic in our digital, 24/7/365, uber-connected world. What’s happening here in Portland will soon be coming to a newspaper near you…if it hasn’t already arrived.

The slow, gradual death rattle of The Oregonian impresses me as little more than a thinly-veiled attempt to let subscribers down easy. Initially the paper will be delivered only four mornings a week. How long until that’s cut to three? Two? Finally, none at all? Subscribers like myself are left to decide whether they want to pay for an ever more inferior product no longer even delivered to them daily. Those of us whose days ritually begin with picking up the morning paper off the front porch will realize before long that we can live without the traditional yin to our morning coffee’s yang. It’s not a matter of IF The Oregonian will cease publishing a print edition but WHEN. It will happen, and probably sooner than we think.

For people of a certain age, a morning paper has been a reliable party of everyday life. I delivered newspapers when I was a kid- The Minnespolis Tribune in the morning and The Minneapolis Star after school. I remember all too well assembling the sections on many an early and frigid northern Minnesota winter morning. There’s no nostalgia attached to it…because it SUCKED to have to be up even before zero dark thirty to deliver newspapers to people like me who took it for granted. It was my first job, and through it I learned a lot about doing something because it has to be done, no matter how uncomfortable or unpleasant. There are few things more uncomfortable than tossing newspapers onto porches when it’s still dark and the temperature is hovering around -30F.

Those trips down memory lane aside, the truth is that the traditional newspaper business model has been unsustainable for some time. The only question has been how long individual local papers could hold out. It’s quite possible that within 10 years, print news will be but a memory. I may cancel our subscription and look elsewhere for local news. Unfortunately, The Oregonian’s website is a horrible mishmash of poor design, inadequate reporting, and quaint provincialism. I read it because it’s free; if that changes, I see no reason why I’d pay for it.

I currently subscribe to the digital edition of The New York Times. For $20 a month, I can read the news on my iPad or MacBook. It’s immediate, it’s timely…and I don’t have to worry about newsprint stains. Such is the nature of progress. The newspaper will eventually go the way of the telegraph, the stagecoach, and Chicago Cubs World Series championships. When you consider what’s forcing newspapers into obsolescence, I’m not certain they’ll be missed but for a short period of mourning among folks of my generation.

Welcome to the future.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on June 26, 2013 6:12 AM.

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