Letters to the Editor
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Gannett is to newspapers what Applebees is to restaurants.
In Utica, New York, a city in decline with some 60,000 inhabitants, we have the Observer-Dispatch. It's what I call a McPaper, one of the 91 that is owned by Gannett. A USA Today clone. It reads exactly like any of the other 91 Gannett newspapers, and I bet if I were to pick up another of the 91 Gannett newspapers, it would look exactly like the Observer-Dispatch. You would scarcely know where you were by looking at the local paper, so generic are the Gannett newspapers.
We moved to the Utica area in 1997, and subscribed to the newspaper because we always did. We cancelled it after less than a year because it was junk and we simply could not take it anymore, especially when we could get the same stories from Yahoo! News, Excite, Google, or any number of other online sources free of charge. The O-D doesn't really inform us on any level, national or local. It sort of goes through the motions like a company of actors who already know their show has been cancelled. We feel as if Utica really doesn't have a local daily newspaper, and that's kind of sad. There is no soul in this paper - the only one in town - no feel for what Utica and Oneida County, New York, are about that a visitor might get from picking up a paper upon arrival here.
This is the problem, not that people do not have the patience to read the paper, or that they're too stupid, or too busy, or that their attention spans are too short. It's because the daily newspapers in too many locales in the United States do not offer anything intellectually stimulating about which to read. They either print fluff because it's non-threatening and unlikely to offend (or inform) anyone, and I don't have time for fluff, or they reprint the same old garbage like Applebees does when they open those plastic bags from Cisco and call it cuisine.
When I pick up a newspaper, I want the news, goddammit. I took journalism in high school, and I learned there that the most important content in an news story should be contained in the headline and the first couple of paragaphs. I shouldn't have to dig through a bunch of weaselly junk to get to the truth as if I were reading a Bush administration news release; it should jump out at me. It's called the inverted pyramid style; it's one of the most basic concepts of journalism. That is what allows people to scan even a major daily paper like the New York Times in twenty minutes, or pore over it for a couple of hours, whichever the reader is inclined to do. This is what seperates newsweeklies like Time from the daily paper. You don't need a whole new format for that. All you need is competent journalists who apply the fundamentals they supposedly learned in J-school. Unfortunately, these people appear to be in short supply nowadays - in America, not elsewhere. When I go to Canada, for instance, every dinky little town in Ontario has a daily paper, maybe two, that far exceed the Observer-Dispatch in quality. Do Canadians eschew newspapers like Americans do? I doubt it.