Newspaper Doom: Journal Couldn’t Hold The Front Page?
These are the headlines blaring out of newspaper boxes all over Santa Fe this morning.
From the Santa Fe New Mexican: “Councilors OK plan to buy CSF campus.” (Nice photo, too.)
And from the Journal North, or whatever it’s called now:
Ouch. That’s too bad.
I’m not at all familiar with the Journal’s deadlines, but I do wonder why an editor didn’t make a decision to hold the front page until the City Council vote, given the importance of the CSF issue to the Santa Fe’s future and overall economy. Maybe it would’ve cost too much money. Maybe everybody wanted to get home in time to catch the end of America’s Got Talent.
Worse, the Journal’s website—which could be updated at any time, mind you—still features the now-incorrect “hangs in the balance” story.
Seriously: Why? This is 2009. The story could be updated in five minutes.
Now, this might seem trivial: The Journal misses a story. Big whoop. Actually, for reasons that might not be immediately obvious, it’s pretty important.
Santa Fe is lucky to be one of the few remaining American cities with two daily newspapers. That may not be the case for very long, if one of them continues to operate like this.
For all their limited resources, occasional screw-ups and outright vapidity, The Journal and the New Mex serve to check and balance one another. (SFR plays that role, too, but the fact is, this paper has two full-time reporters—and comes out once a week.) I’d say on most days, the Journal beats the New Mex on depth. So it would be a real shame if the Journal rendered itself irrelevant, as it did with today’s top story.
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July 30th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Corey,
What were observing here is evolution in action. It is inevitable that traditional news”papers” are soon to be an extinct species. The pace of information flow and the capabilities of internet news delivery mechanisms today are such that most news delivery will be conducted using on line technologies before too many more years go by.
Traditional news media companies will have to learn how to adapt to this reality, or go out of business.
–Doug (Your non-traditional SFR Nambe Swine Flu Correspondent)
July 30th, 2009 at 9:49 am
I don’t agree with all of that, Doug, but I do agree that traditional companies must adapt. The Journal is not adapting—is apparently not even trying. That’s troubling, because it’s the biggest source of original reporting in New Mexico.
July 30th, 2009 at 9:57 am
The print copy being out of date is completely understandable to me and I can forgive the mechanical problem of production. I cannot, however, forgive the website being outdated. Someone is being paid to do that for the Journal and it took two minutes for it to be tweeted by 5 different people (just ones that I follow).
July 30th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
It will be interesting to check in ten years to see how many daily newsprint papers are still in circulation, and what the subscriber base is…
July 30th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I’m with you, Marlita—provided there’s a good explanation for not holding the front page. It could be, too, that the editor simply didn’t think it was a big enough story, which would suggest some questionable news judgment.
I don’t know the editor or the reporter, Kiera Hay, and I’d hate to make too much of this one story. But I do think this exemplifies a much bigger problem. If Santa Fe lost its second daily paper, it would hurt as much as losing a four-year college. And—much like CSF—it appears some of the Journal’s problems are self-inflicted.