Why this laid-off journalist doesn’t miss newspapers–and why you shouldn’t, either

After two months of no longer living the newspaper reporter’s life, I thought at this point I might weigh in with some thoughts about my dearly beloved ex, the Chicago Tribune. Except that there’s one problem.

I’ve read the paper once, maybe twice, since I was laid off. And truth be told, I don’t miss it. I don’t say that in a jilted lover sort of way, but as a person who has been liberated from the trivial tyrannies of the newsprint product.

While I suspect that my former bosses are paying focus group charlatans and con men oodles of dough to dance and sing about demographic categories such as Phony-ass Phamilies and Sunburned Suburbanites, I’m offering my own free observations as to why newspapers in general are on their way out. No need to applaud, you can thank me later:

1) After a few days, old newspapers make a big stinking pile in the house, which you have to then dump into a recycling bin and haul outside. True, papers are getting thinner and smaller, which means less back strain. But you’ve still got to haul the pile out, and it never ends. Who has time for that? With a Web site, you hit “delete.” That’s it.

2) Newspapers have zero interactivity. The content just sits there on a page. You can’t talk back to it or dialog with it or reshape it or watch it change in a real-time continuum … unless you enter another media form, that of the Web site. Though I have never seen a dead fish that could be wrapped in a computer screen.

3) Newspaper editors, and I’ve worked for a few of these cognitive giants, are deathly afraid of letting their writers telecommute. They think writers will be working on “other stuff” at home as opposed to newspaper stuff. Well, here’s breaking news: a) Those writers just do the other stuff at work anyway, and b) Any editor enlightened enough to say, “Hey, my writer is mature and I trust them to maintain their own schedule, so long as they get their work done,” will get that writer’s unending loyalty and productivity. You see this trust at Web sites like True/Slant all the time, but never at newspapers, which operate on the “I must see your warm ass in the seat” principle.

4) Newspapers, so finely attuned to waste and fraud in other areas of life, are mendacious enough to think they can deceive readers into thinking they are getting more for their dollar when they are in fact getting less. Time for a “where’s the beef?” investigative report on waning newspaper content.

5) Newspapers, so finely attuned to waste and fraud, never turn the lens of truth and scrutiny on themselves. So, when they award exorbitant bonuses to executives or allow greedy corporate types to bleed them dry, you never see much (if anything) written about it. When newsroom clout determines who gets laid off and who doesn’t, no one talks about it. These decisions are not made by a random computer program, people. But if you go to any paper and ask who formulated a big round of layoffs–and how–and you’ll be greeted with conspiratorial silence. And that constitutes bullshit, because no newspaper would ever allow such secretive procedures to stand pat, especially when reporting on, say, a government agency or ineptly run business.

6) Finally, this outstanding observation from recently-fired Washington Post writer Dan Froomkin: “Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. … There’s this increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. … There’s the fear of being labeled partisan of one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.”

Bullshit, by the way, is a word that newspapers cannot use, not even on the Internet. Which is ironic, considering how much corporate bullshit now governs those top-secret strategies for rearranging all those deck chairs on Titanic.