We Could Wrap Fish In It?

Sooooo.... perhaps it is time to rant a little about the Past Dispatch. As a connoisseur of Diners there is very much truth to the fact that is a breakfast at a diner is likely only as good as the paper you are reading. Based on this it is my unfortunate duty to predict that within the year every St. Louis diner will be forced to close because everyone in the city will have ceased eating breakfast because our once humble paper has become a useless, unreadable, insubstantial piece of offal (look it up Davidson).
The Post (and to be fair most daily newspapers) has been on the slide for years. The idea that conglomerates should own these bastions of first amendment rights was a bad one to start with but for a long time they were money makers. When the big boys bought you they engineered efficiencies. Efficiencies started with consolidated editorial staff. They continued with slimmed down reporting staffs (lets do more with less people). They continued to more pool reporting. More letting A.P. have the whole story.

Then add revenue dove even more. These conglomerates had purchased these papers with a ton of leveraged debt. At that point, nothing else could happen. They started filing bankruptcy (both Chicago papers and many more) and then dramatically slashing costs by firing more people and screwing their delivery service to make the paper even less reliable. This was true for Mc Clatchy who came out of Iowa and with a small town savvy bought a bunch of daily’s which serviced the debt for a while until add revenue dropped and they are now getting slaughtered. Over the last year their stock has gone from about 11 bucks a share to slightly south of 60 cents.

This dramatic drop in share price is due to the fact that their business model is dead. This has led to desperation. The post has been cutting back for years and a lot of people have given up on it but I have held on bravely. Now getting the Post each day is similar to going to the nursing home to visit your grandma with Alzheimer's. You love her and the memories you had of her and you owe her visits at least out of respect but seeing her like this....well,.... it breaks your heart. The Post’s most recent offense was a “revamping” of the paper to make it “better”. This included cutting whole sections and reducing the broadsheet size a couple of inches so it is now a pamphlet edition”.

We could go on for days discussing the reasons for this but they include, over leverage, legacy families like the Pulitzers cashing out (which was brilliant by the way), and of course....THE INTERNET!. The total lack of imagination for all these newspapers to not be able to charge anything for their content on line is mind boggling and their inability to figure out how to make money on the net doomed the print newspapers too. Very sad. I am going to miss newspapers. I will miss the Post but it is a foregone conclusion that it will cease to exist and when it goes it will have diminished so much as to not be missed.
I will miss the old Post. The USA today and The Wall Street Journal will be survive for a while along with the New York Times and Maybe the L.A. Times. Perhaps they will figure out a way to come up with meaningful local editions.

I hope so. I cannot eat breakfast without a paper.