![]() That’s two 40-year-old papers in two major cities: kaput. (They’re calling it a hiatus, but when has “hiatus” ever meant “coming back better than ever!”?) ![]() The other is San Francisco’s SF Weekly, bought last year by a real-estate investor who reportedly only saw the Weekly as a bonus in the purchase of its sister paper, the SF Examiner. One is Richmond’s Style Weekly, another casualty of hedge fund Alden Capital’s acquisition-and-vampirism strategy of media consolidation. I write about all this because the two alt-weeklies where I spent most of my career announced they were shutting down last week. Photo credit: Claus Tom Christensen / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) A Bad Case of Unbundling Everyone will always need these! Yes, as long as the internet never figures out how to sell drugs, sex, or post classifieds, we’ll be fine. Things are gonna go great, I thought.īecause I worked mostly for smallish alt-weeklies dedicated to the city of their publication, I thought we’d be somewhat insulated from the worst of it since our revenues historically depended on “vice” ads - first for sex work and then cannabis and kratom - and the classifieds: seeking job, apartment, lover, couch. So I saw up close the beginning of the collapse of journalism’s business model, triggered by the Web 1.0 folks who had just blown up their own. I think of it as the “ Grey Gardens” period of journalism - the great, rambling Fourth Estate beginning to slide into disrepair. Everything was just a little more shabby. The publisher’s golf vacations were more modest. The enormous pull-out ad for the local good-old-boy’s car dealership was shrinking. We were still close enough to lingering Clintonian prosperity that the pre-internet structures were more or less still in place: big offices, decent-sized staffs, healthy circulation, and respectable readerships.īut the ad money had already started hemorrhaging. I have had the immense good fortune to be part of the sub-generation of journalists who came of age just after the first dot-com bubble burst.ĭuring that era - this was the early aughts - I worked with older reporters and editors who could wistfully tell of the Good Old Days even five years before, when salaries were good, budgets were ample, readers didn’t yet know what Twitter was or that democracy would somehow hinge upon what we reported, thought, and wrote.
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