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/.