Hold The Presses

The decline in the newspaper industry can be summed up in one phrase, ad-revenue. The real kick in the gut is Craig's List. Newspapers traditionally relied on classified ads as their golden goose. Who would pay $12 for three skinny black lines when they could have a photo of their Honda Civic with low miles posted on the web for free? Couple that with the real-estate melt-down and dwindling car sales and the outlook for the Sunday funnies looks dimmer everyday.

The question is then who will pay for the news? The whole story is not free. Call your local paper and ask them to send a reporter to the town council meeting. Or ask them to investigate the city attorney.

"He owns three houses in the new development and the city wants to annex the neighboring wet lands, you say? Dig up what you can, John Q. citizen and get back to us. Maybe we can print your statement."

Gone are the days of lengthy investigative journalism, at least at the local level. We still have the Associated Press, and national papers like, The New York Times, but cable news is zeroing in, telling us what to believe in sound bites that are easy to digest.

If you have an axe to grind, there's always the net, our new Uncle Walter, but without a profit engine, journalists are rethinking their careers.

There is no danger of losing coverage of the train wrecks. Everyone has a camera with them these days, and the ability to upload a photo instantly across the globe, but every picture is not worth a thousand words. That is the work of investigative journalists. The question is how important is the full story?


Hold the Presses
by Sean Reynolds

The pressroom is as long as a football field. I walk downstairs to grab a copy of the paper, past the aging Goss press that presently needs a little more attention, a bit more maintenance. For some of my fellow workers, that’s a good thing. It means staying busy.

The page count is down.

In the morning the speckled linoleum shines like a prison, but, by mid afternoon, it will look more like a dance studio covered with black and red footprints. Rich lies on his belly and scrapes globs of ink from the dog house on the “A” unit. His legs splay out like a murder victim on the cold inky floor. His torso is swallowed by the sleeping blue monster. I lightly kick his ankles and he swears at me from inside the iron Goliath.

At night, downstairs in the reel room, the pressmen will feed the hungry giant with rolls of paper that weigh close to a ton. It pulls the web up at terrifying speeds to the pressroom floor, twisting and folding around stainless steel rollers, while generating tremendous amounts of static electricity. If you touch the ribbon of newsprint racing up from below your hair will stand on end.

But lay-offs are common these days. The real estate pre-print is smaller save the growing section of bank-owned properties. Classified ads are nearly non-existent. Subscriptions are falling. We're down to half of the work-force from a year ago.

Tony, with thick smudges of black ink, looking like dark bruises covering his arms, stands near the folder, a loud machine that separates the web into individual papers. It’s the place where, in the movies, some old pressman wearing a newsprint cap picks out a fresh copy from the conveyer and says, “Look! The murderer struck again,” or, “I can’t believe it, the Sox took the pennant.”

He asks if I’ve heard about the current round of layoffs, if it will affect us in production. I tell him I believe we’re safe for now, but that the mailroom is nervous. He’s a tall friendly Greek with an eternal smile, and he tells me he thinks things will pick up. When he says, “think” it sounds more like sink, and I smile as I walk away.

At the end of the long hall, Danny, with a clipboard in his hand, is on his way to the ink room to check the levels of cyan, magenta, yellow and key black. I walk with him into the cold cellar chatting about work and weekend sports. The large vats remind me of wine tanks. Although the liquid is dark, the aroma is far from merlot.

Leaving him, I pass two young men on the lay-down dock, where the steel jaws of clamp-trucks rotate rolls of paper onto their sides. Beau and Luis slice off the end-caps with sharp knives and tear open the wrappers. Gravity pulls the rolls toward the press halted by a pneumatic stopper rising from the floor with a whoosh. Luis pushes a button and they roll past. Staying out of the way, I grab the sports section from a wire mesh basket on the desk near the loading dock and walk back through the mail room.

It’s quiet.

Now more than ever. The extra jobs we used to run in the afternoon have been pushed to the pre-prints in the early evening. Instead of seeing a crew huddled along the insert machine, I encounter just a few mechanics greasing and repairing equipment. Nathan’s family has worked for the paper for two generations.

He says, “Hey dude! What are you doing down here?”

I reply, “Just trying to stay busy.”
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