Upon reading the local daily paper today (and for that matter everytime I read it) I became frustrated, enraged, and (the final stage of my rants) despondent at the same time accepting that this weak and largely uninformative rag is as close to journalism as my small town knows. It was at this very realization that another crossed my mind.
For those of you who are blessed to be living in a town/city with thriving culture, a daily newspaper that harbors integrity, and/or sidewalks that stretch all the through town on the main street really don't need to continue reading this. Mainly because you will think I'm speaking of small town America 75 years ago or at best writing about some post-apocalyptic society that is trying to grow out of the ashes and rebuild. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
The town I live in has culture, here and there. The same goes for sidewalks. However, our newspaper has no journalistic, or any sort of, integrity. When I was living in L.A., I took a class on journalism, a basic class at that, but during those twelve weeks, ok so it was really four since I dropped it after a month of writing my ass off only to prove to myself that just because I write poetry I am not linguistically equipped to pull off any serious degree of journalism... I did walk away from that class with enough knowledge to discern high school yearbook writing from quality, gripping journalism.
The main problem with the newspaper is not the shoddy journalism, the lack of compelling articles, nor the banal photos with matching captions. No, our local newspaper would be "ok" if it were just for these let-downs. It's news that our paper is missing.
Let's get started with the breakdown shall we?
- From front page to back cover our newspaper is 28 pages, which could contain a wealth of information except that about 10 months ago they decided to change the format and cut the paper size in half. The sheets of paper are one half of what a normal newspaper uses.
- So if we subtract the front page (it's just headlines and photos, anyway) we're down to 27 pages of "news."
- On any page with news articles, half of it is taken up by ads; that means that we're down to 13 pages of news.
- There is one page dedicated to nation wide news; today there was just one article that was written by The Associated Press about a gun firing in a cockpit.
- There is no news about the upcoming elections with the exception of an editorial piece.
- There is no section for global news.
- The comics section takes up two pages and is comprised of the Annie's Mailbox, 12 different comic strips, a sudoku puzzle, and a crossword puzzle; while I love my Non Sequitur, I have difficulty understanding why this section is one of the largest. In fact, neither the Classifieds (the largest section) nor the Comics have ads. The Classifieds pay for themselves, and I understand that, but shouldn't our largest section be the Global news section, since that source would be the largest fountain of news to be found?
The school system in my town is also faltering, schools are shutting down, teachers are moving away, and every year more and more money is taken away from the education system. I don't think the people in this town even realize that because our kids don't see in this town (prosperity, honor, integrity, intellect) what we want to see in them, our bubble will continue to shrink out of the world's existence.
Goodbye for now.
Time to check npr.org for my daily news.
p.s. here's the link for our info laden newspaper. Their website actually has more news than the paper.http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/
