It’s not  uncommon for a newspaper to write the obituary for a famous person while she is still alive. It seems ghoulish, but it’s actually done out of respect. They want to give a thorough and accurate account of the person’s life at the same time that they’re announcing her passing, and these things are best done without the pressure of a tight deadline.

It would be uncomfortable, to say the least, to know that someone was writing about you in the past tense while you’re still very much active in the present. It’s a feeling that newspaper folk must be getting all too familiar with.

We’ve all read the obituaries being penned to mark the passing of the local daily. But unlike the octogenarian actress or the terminally ill statesmen, newspapers are still in their prime, and in terms of what they offer to a community, quite vital. If local newspapers are in their waning years, and they’re clearly in declining health, it will be a big loss because there’s nothing posed to take their place.

The thing with metaphorical deaths in the marketplace is, they’re rarely attributable to natural causes. There’s almost always a killer, in the guise of a competitor, who is clearing the way for a bigger share of the take. That’s why many view Wal-Mart with a level of disdain usually reserved for the likes of your Pol Pots or Mussolinis.

The thing being blamed for pushing newspapers into the grave is the Internet. All of the free information available on the Web is causing people to let their subscriptions lapse, which in turn is causing businesses to take their ads to where all of the eyes are. This makes sense if you’re talking about national news, but where are you going to find local coverage if you don’t have a local daily to provide it? There simply isn’t anything, online or offline, poised to replace a local newspaper. So they perish at our peril.

The newspaper itself, the paper and ink, might become an increasingly unpopular and unprofitable medium through which to deliver news. But a newspaper, as a news reporting organization, is indispensable to a community. TV and radio lack the resources to provide the depth of coverage that a newspaper does. National news gathering organizations aren’t interested in covering local issues and events. And we bloggers, while certainly adept at commentary, don’t have the means or the will to break stories.

Jennifer Jason Leigh played snoopy newspaper reporter Amy Archer in the Hudsucker Proxy, but is otherwise irrelevant to this post.

 
Several weeks ago, a Springfield-based agitator who is never without an informed opinion on any local matter, told a radio host that he never reads the newspaper, and instead, gets his information from the Internet. So where is he finding that information?

In light of yesterday’s news concerning the resignations of the SJ-R’s top three executives, I’ve had to rethink my theory that local newspapers will survive because there is no credible alternative to what they offer. Perhaps we will have to settle for less local coverage and more imported news. But wouldn’t that only serve to push away even more readers?

You may have disagreed with some of the editorial stances the SJ-R has made in the past, but at least they were  leading the debate. They’ve also provided a public voice, through letters and online comments, to many people who would otherwise have gone unheard. You could argue that many of those people should go unheard, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s good for a community when discourse takes place in a public square-type environment. That’s what will be missed if the death knell for local newspapers is indeed ringing.