I’ve been a journalist for more than 30 years now, and even as I work these days for the website of the national radio station here in New Zealand, a healthy dose of printer’s ink still flows in my veins.
I read today that the last newspaper I worked for in the US before moving to New Zealand almost 20 years ago is ending its print edition this month, “pivoting to digital” entirely as the kids say. The Roseburg, Oregon News-Review dated back almost 160 years. It’s a damned shame, and is surely likely to lead to more of these cursed “news deserts” that are spreading across America.
The current management is trumpeting the announcement as “the news is about to become free,” which these days, probably means it’s going to be overwhelmed by videos, AI-generated “content” slop, clickbait and regurgitated press releases. And of course, they’ve sacked the entire newsroom staff. Good luck with that free news, dudes.
I mourn this, because it doesn’t feel good in an age when the free media is under assault, disinformation is swamping us all, grifting influencers cosplay as journalists and the entire concept of objective truth has slowly crumbled.
The News-Review was a good ol’ paper, where I worked from 2002 to 2006 as the features editor. We had a great team there – an editor I really looked up to, who offered reliable, smart advice but also welcomed new ideas, encouraged us when we needed it and dressed us down if we (well, me) deserved it. While there was always a lot of coming and going – the average age of most of the 10 or so reporters was probably about 25 – the N-R felt like a “team,” like all good newsrooms do, covering our little corner of rural Oregon down the road from Portland and Eugene. Journos come and go and you sometimes lose touch but I’ve kept up with a surprising number of the team from the News-Review days – they were generally all good sorts.
It was, curiously, the first daily newspaper I’d ever worked on, having mostly done my time at weeklies or semi-weeklies. I loved the news buzz, the hustle to put the paper to bed by 10am or so (we were one of those mostly-gone afternoon rags), the juggling of local priorities from irrigation boards and logging companies with state and global news. Often on the weekends I’d act as the editor for the big Sunday paper, at the helm for breaking stories like Ronald Reagan’s death, the War in Iraq and the Space Shuttle Columbia exploding.
I also wrote a lot of long-form features then that were great practice for the eventual raggedy arc of my so-called career ending up at Radio New Zealand – stories I’m still pretty proud of now, like a profile of the local wildlife park veterinarian, an eccentric Russian painter, or interviewing Alice Cooper as he brought his shock-rock act to town.
It was a gorgeous place and the town where my wife and I had our child, so Roseburg will always mean something to me, but even then it was also thick with the kind of blinkered conservatism that’s led us firmly into Trump-land, all these years later. The paper’s been bought and sold and staff chipped away over the years since and the paper already cut to barely being printed at all. I’d check in on the website occasionally long after pretty much anyone I knew had left Roseburg, because an old newshound never quite forgets a familiar scent, long after he’s left the country, even.
The News-Review is hardly the first newspaper I worked at to fold, even – the college town free weekly in Mississippi that broke me into journalism withered away ages ago, another small paper in California faded away, even the big old New York City-produced national magazine I worked only publishes occasional special issues these days.
It’s not a lot better here in New Zealand, really – journalists have lost jobs, outlets have dried up. I’m very glad to still be in the industry I’m in and at a place I respect, but I do miss the rumble of the presses at the back end of the building, the painstaking proofreading of printouts of your pages, the clamour and rush of daily print deadlines instead of the perpetual motion machine the news is now.
A newspaper, in its day, provided context and coherence to the swirling world of the day’s news, wrapping it all up in a tidy package with crosswords, Blondie cartoons, Dear Abby, weird classified ads and frequently ridiculous letters to the editor. It was complete, for one day at least. Internet news, as great and useful as it is, somehow still never quite feels like the complete package in the end to me – you just keep scrolling, forever, don’t you? Maybe I’m just a physical media guy to my core.
And for those people in small town Oregon, many of whom probably haven’t read the soon-to-die paper in years and get all their news from their own internet bubbles now – I miss the things they won’t even know they’re missing, in a world without a newspaper.
Nik Dirga 