Losers by Default

Dailies are environmental disasters. But we need them.

by Bruce Schimmel

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Published: Jun 11, 2008

Inquirer reporter Suzette Parmley must have drawn the short straw. What a disheartening assignment. Parmley was sent to cover the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies that City Paper hosted here last week. Her editor wanted something upbeat to lead the business section, something "breezy," she was told.

Otherwise, the news would have all been bad. Oil up, stocks down and real estate going for cheap. Bad news for enterprises that ingest energy and dispense pollution. Which is surprisingly many, including the industry that employs Parmley, the business of newspaper manufacturing.

Still, according to the Inky's headline on June 7, the "news is good on alternative papers." Parmley paints a flattering portrait of independent newsweeklies like City Paper. And ran a real nice photo of me, too.

So, please forgive my ungraciousness if I carp. Because Parmley's cheerful tale ignores some massive storm clouds. Like the ones hailing down on her über-boss, Brian Tierney — a marketing exec, whose company now runs the Inky and Daily News.

To Tierney's chagrin, it has just leaked out that his company has defaulted on its bank loans. And so, the banks, in turn, stopped payments to local investors, like sprawlmeister Bruce Toll.

So it must have been challenging for Parmley to do something chipper about industry upstarts who are eating her lunch. And it must be awful to work in a half-empty newsroom. To be bullied by Tierney — a right-wing huckster, whose marketing antics are an embarrassment.

Parmley started by asking me, "How's the mood around here?" Nearby, a couple hundred journalists were laughing over lunch with Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal.

"In this part of the newspaper industry," I said, "the mood is pretty good."

Then Parmley asked a question, which given her circumstances, must have been difficult: "As a publisher, what kind of people did you hire?"

"I looked for the strangest, most intelligent people I could find. The weirder, the better," I said, which was printed verbatim the next day.

Wearing makeup and business attire, Parmley stood out among the reporters here, who express their independence through a range of sartorial choices.

"I guess you would not have hired me?" she asked, a question that didn't make it into print.

Now, Parmley is a young Asian woman, and newspapers desperately seek diversity. But she was right. "No, I don't think I would have hired you."

The top-down mind-set of corporate media has a way of screwing with people's heads. At their best, independent weeklies foster, well, independence. If I had told someone to write something "breezy," I would have been told to go fuck myself, and probably in those words.

I then offered another observation that wasn't printed: "The daily newspaper is dying, because it's not green."

"You mean 'not green' because dailies don't make money?"

"That, too," I replied. "But mostly I mean that dailies are an environmental disaster."

Think about it: You chop down trees in Canada, and truck them to a mill. You ship tons of paper, thousands of miles to another manufacturing plant. Finally, you deliver a newspaper, most of which is ignored. And which ends up — if we're lucky — in a recycling bin.

Weeklies, of course, use the same paper and often the same printing plants as dailies. But while dailies turn into trash overnight, weeklies live for a week.

The daily is dying. And while that might mean a temporary measure of good fortune for weeklies, even the most eccentric of independents dread the daily's demise. A functional democracy needs the good reporting that comes with these dinosaurs.

But it's a sad fact that a daily's good journalism is essentially the byproduct of a very ungreen product. And that no one has yet created either a broadcast or cyberspace news model to do all that dailies do.

And that is bad news for all.

(bruce@schimmel.com)

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