Call It What You Want...

My local newspaper is forevermore denying me the joys of its errors (as I noted in this sterling entry, as well as many other times to my family and friends) as of a week ago, when it published its last edition and went out of business, an announcement that left the community "overcome with shock and sadness".

Now. While the above phrase does seem a little strong for the demise of the only local newspaper (no one died, there was no question about the survivors, there was no blood... you get the idea), I am disappointed. Granted, this is where I got most of my copy-editing kicks -- serving as an editor of the MOMCC magazine is a bit more professional and doesn't include the stupid journalistic errors like "Teen: Wreckless Driving is uncool" -- and I made a lot of cracks about the shameful errors that made it past the editors' eagle eyes.

But, at the same time, it was the local newspaper.

Yes. The big-city paper nearby took over publishing the long-time Noblesville paper (we refer to it in 1886) and includes it in its end-of-the-week papers, but that really doesn't count. Sorry, but it's true.

Having worked in a memorable small-town newspaper in my youth, I do feel some loyalty to the paper that does its level best in the face of low funds, outdated technology, and a town full of, er, characters. I subscribed to my local paper despite the glaring editing errors and in the face of occasionally substandard delivery -- from missed papers, confused vacation orders, wadded papers shoved into the box... you get the idea -- because I wanted to read the paper that was produced locally. I didn't want to have to wade through the classifieds for all of the big city nearby. I got some good stuff through the local classifieds. Gramps could use the local classifieds to locate all the best garage sales. Will he care to wade through all of the big-city ones to find the ones near enough to go to? (He's very committed, so he might. :) )

But the thing that really bugs me about this is the "oh so full of regret" column in the big-city-published tabloid included in the big-city paper last week. "A worthy competitor" had stopped publishing, and we're all the worse for it.

Yeah. Cry me a river. Never mind that we subscribed to the big-city paper for Sundays only to get the weekly ads, but perhaps a year after starting our subscription, we received word that, as they would be publishing our "local" paper as an insert three days a week, we'd be getting those papers, too. For free. Oh, and all the rest of the week, too. For free. So for the past three years (anyway), we've been receiving two papers every day. What is the average consumer going to do? They're going to stop subscribing to the one they're paying for (especially since it was sometimes laughable), and they're going to continue to get sort of local news from the big-city paper. This doesn't take an MBA to figure out.

Yet that big-city paper pretends to be sad for the end of a (five-year) era.

Yeah.

Eye thing their knot vary sory.

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