We're not going anywhere
“Every time a newspaper dies, even a
bad one, the country moves a little closer to
authoritarianism. …” Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune.
Last year will go down as annus
horribilis for newspapers. Papers large and small across the
country cut jobs and curtailed reporting. The
New York Sun folded, the Tribune Company may be
facing bankruptcy and the Rocky Mountain
News, E.W. Scripps’ largest newspaper, is for sale.
The wholesale slaughter of jobs and
entire publications in 2008 put an exclamation point on a
trend that has been building for years. Anyone with an
interest in media knows that the instant gratification
offered by the Web has played havoc with newspaper
readership. Add a falling standard for literacy and a
recession that has seen advertising revenues drop by more
than 20 percent, and the result is a devil’s brew for
disaster.
Where does all this bad news leave our
little weekly publication? Shopper-News is right where we’ve
always been, doing our best to report both
community-oriented news and broader issues.
We’re not encased in a recession-proof
bubble. We feel the economic pinch as much as any
organization struggling to stay in the black. But we have
some advantages over our larger industry brethren.
First, you can be sure that no one
working for the Shopper-News is in it for the money. If this
ship ever sinks, it won’t be due to bloated salaries.
We also fill a need for news specific
to a community. Our five “zoned” editions now include
Halls/Fountain City, Powell/Karns, Bearden, Farragut/Hardin
Valley and Union County.
We cover the service club meetings, the churches, the
schools, the parades, the local achievers, all the “soft
news” which contributes to a community’s identity.
And then there’s the take-no-prisoners
local government reporting. More than once I’ve been told
that our newspaper is very political for a weekly. If “very
political” means hammering away at corruption and
incompetence, we plead guilty.
This newspaper has been the only local
publication to consistently hold Mayor Ragsdale’s feet to
the fire. We had the impudence to call for his resignation,
as well as that of former staffer Cynthia Finch.
We roasted the mayor’s budget as
overly optimistic, and we continue to believe that events
will bear us out.
We’ve called out County Commission,
the BZA, the MPC and the Industrial Development Board on a
number of issues. We took a hard line on the misuse of TIFs.
The Shopper-News was the only
newspaper to state unequivocally that the county’s proposed
nursing home sale to Hillcrest was a rotten deal for
taxpayers. Sources tell us that some who backed the deal
blame us for its collapse. Good.
We’ve reported on
shady dealings in the county’s community grants program and
take-home vehicles for county employees handed out like
candy. We questioned the cost to Knox
County
taxpayers of a proposal for some current and former county
officials to join the state retirement system. We’ve
continued to discuss the unresolved questions that surround
the county’s arrangement with Natural Resources Recovery.
We’ve won some battles, lost others,
but the conviction that all too often the emperor has no
clothes remains strong. We aren’t going anywhere.
Write to Larry Van Guilder at
lvgknox@mindspring.com. You can read
Larry’s blog at http://tabloidboy.squarespace.com/blog/.