Tuesday, March 24, 2009
What would it mean with one less paper in town?
Via Governing and Time is news of a study out from Princeton looking at what happened to the local political process in Cincinnati when one of its major papers, the Cincinnati Post, shut down. The punch line... with one less paper: "fewer people went to the polls, fewer people ran for office and incumbents were more likely to be re-elected. "
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5 comments:
Ick.
Without two papers, who's there to tell an editor, "If we don't get moving, we'll be reading it in the competition"?
Trust me: there's enough laziness in this business already; we don't want to make it easier to back away from a touchy story, or to blow something off.
People don't seem to grasp how much you lose when you lose a newspaper. I'm fearful of this transition. It augurs ill.
Too often, the Post in Pittsburgh reads like a chamber of commerce promotional rag, rather than hitting hard on the issues we need to face.
Today, they run a promotional story about the city's convention bureau - http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09086/958705-53.stm
- on the front page? - when they should be asking why the agency needs a budget of 11M and pays its director 300K to book a couple dozen conventions, less than comparable cities.
In local politics, especially until recently, they seem to take press releases the mayor puts out without asking why the city government's contracting and procurement "methods" haven't imporved since the young mayor took office, and in fact, appear to be the most questionable in fourty years - some of these deals are downright smelly.
-- Jess
Jess -
I found the convention center piece interesting--more conventions than ever are booking there and Pittsburgh is marketing itself as a budget-conscious alternative. Nothing wrong with reporting that, even on the front page on a Monday (a traditionally slow news day, coming off Sunday and all--you can only put the Steelers on the cover of the Monday paper so many times.)
Now back to your Trib.
I think too often the Trib is anti city. Cartoonishly so. That's not even getting into it's political antic as arm of the Arkansas Project and the let's make a story that Vince Foster was murdered BS.
-AM
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