by Susan Demas
November 1, 2008

I used to be the last optimist about newspapers, but not anymore.

The Christian Science Monitor just announced that it’s essentially becoming an online publication, scaling back its print edition to once a week. The New York Times is bleeding red ink and is rumored to be ripe for sale.

And Gannett, the world’s largest newspaper company, is slashing another 10 percent of its workforce as its stock price plummeted to an 18-year low. The corporation owns dozens of newspapers in Michigan, including the Port Huron Times Herald, Livingston Daily Press & Argus and the Observer and Eccentric weeklies in metro Detroit. The Detroit Free Press evidently is spared, but has shed scores of employees in recent years through aggressive buyouts. Who knows if another round is in the offing.

Newspapers are dying. And it makes me sick to my stomach.

For those in new media, this is a moment for schadenfreude, like Wall Street titans celebrating when their tormentor, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, resigned in shame thanks to his little hooker problem. For some bloggers, the old media are getting exactly what’s coming to them. Newspapers are dinosaurs that have failed to evolve.

I’m afraid I can’t be so glib, even though I’ve escaped the daily newspaper grind. I have many friends left in the business, although fewer and fewer every year. I’ve seen firsthand how families are shattered by these cuts.

I have a deeply personal reason to mourn the press’ obituary. I got my start in newspapers when the editor of the second-largest paper in Iowa plucked me from a life of mindless PR for a moving company just a few days after Sept. 11, 2001. He could have chosen 60 other people, many armed with master’s degrees in journalism and a half-dozen internships, but instead he picked me to chase after fires, track down the governor and cull birth announcements.

When I moved to Michigan four years ago, I asked him why he hired me.

“Well, you could write and that always helps,” he said. “I used to think that you hired a journalist and then you worked on the writing. But now I think the opposite. I’d rather hire a writer and turn them into a journalist.”

That’s what he did with me. And that became my philosophy as an editor, as well. But now that debate is almost moot. Newspapers have far less space to fill, so there’s less room to be creative and develop a real voice. And few papers, of course, are hiring.

I wonder why anyone would major in journalism nowadays, when it seems that the only growth industry is in unpaid blogging. But the need for good reporters is only growing, given the depth of our financial crisis, an increasingly unstable world and a soaring population.

I don’t see anything filling that void, especially outside big cities. Media will always survive in New York, Chicago and L.A. Some of the bigger papers may well be bought out by nonprofit consortiums, which could drastically improve quality if they have a viable business model. But it’s the smaller cities and rural communities that will suffer most.

What’s next for Gannett, forever looking to cut costs, is to follow in the Monitor’s footsteps. The company inevitably will do a pilot program in the next couple years turning some of its 800 papers into exclusively online products. One of my old papers, the Battle Creek Enquirer, has to be a top target, since it’s a small publication in a blue-collar market. Gannett can see how well the concept plays. If it fails, the company can always shutter the paper altogether.

The beauty of online papers is no production workers, no carriers. It’s easier to streamline circulation and advertising into central offices. And fewer reporters, editors and photographers will be needed. That means less coverage, but this is a business decision, not a news call.

As the economy continues to tank and readership plunges further, more newspapers will disappear altogether. Those will probably be the small papers in small communities, and nothing will fill that void. No one will be around to cover the township board meetings, which few citizens bother to attend. I’ve yet to see a groundswell of bloggers willing to dutifully cover these marathon meetings, because, frankly, they’re not fun. But these stories are vital for the citizenry.

Without them, it will mean a radical shift in the balance of power between the public and politicians, although few will notice at first. Without the press to hold institutions accountable, expect more backroom deals and more politicians enriching themselves through their offices. And democracy will suffer.

So far, no one seems particularly alarmed by any of this. I know we in the media aren’t popular, even with those outside John McCain’s campaign. But that’s not our job. Our job is to hold officials accountable, to shine the light on business and governmental practices, to tell you what’s happened in your town everyday while you go about your business.

Perhaps it’s the kind of thing no one will truly miss until it’s gone.

Susan J. Demas is a 2006 Knight Foundation Fellow in nonprofits journalism and a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service.