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By Al Neal
“Extra, extra! Read all about it!”
This iconic, almost timeless callout was typically accompanied by the sight of a ramshackle newsstand providing, sometimes but not always, the strongest cup of coffee and the most recent happenings with copies of every local and national newspaper in print on the day.
So common a scene, for those of us who can remember, it became part of our cultural heritage. We’ve seen and heard it mimicked on cinema screens countless times. Who hasn’t heard of the “Newsboys?”
Local newspapers, provided daily by dedicated staff, gave us insight into the activities of the world around us and provided readers an opportunity to better understand and balance out political thoughts and opinions. They created opportunities for dialogue during election season and forced us to sit, read, and absorb information away from shiny distractions.
But the local paper is dying; in many places, it’s already dead. Struggling for years against the power of television, declining print ad revenues, and the advance of a technological world where click counts determine value, the remaining local and regional newspapers are in a fight for survival.
If COVID-19 doesn’t get them, capitalist consolidation—driven by some of Wall Street’s most powerful hedge funds—will. In his book on the death of the New York Herald Tribune, arguably the better paper coming out of the Big Apple, Richard Kluger wrote, “Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism.”
In the era of mass disinformation and conspiracy theories under Trump, and the disastrous lingering effects left behind even when he’s gone, no truer words could best describe the...
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