Farewell to a former friend ...

Guess all of us of a certain age have had friendships that we once really treasured ... but ... for one reason or another (distance, drift, etc.) ... seen steadily fade w/ time until at some point the relationship no longer existed. Dolberry! has made the decision to drop our subscription to the News and Observer and I feel really conflicted about this.

I grew up in household where the morning paper was treasured. My favorite stories about me (are there really any other any kind of stories?) are the ones about how I was reading the newspaper at 3 or how I knew all the current batting averages of MLB players by the age whatever. It used to be a battle for me to get the Sports page before Dad could get to it. The comics section was a consolation prize if the Sports page was gone. In middle school and high school, one of the joys of waking up (besides the cold potato soup breakfast) was knowing that you were but a 4 minute shower, 45 second teeth brushing, and maybe 3o seconds of garb-assembling away from that day's Calvin and Hobbes. In middle school we had current events quizzes that Dolberry always nailed thanks to the newspaper. Even Dolberry's first public writing was published in the newspaper ... a hard-hitting letter to the editor against political action committees. (I'm still agin' 'em.).

By all accounts, the Louisville Courier-Journal was one of the best papers in a medium-sized city back in the day. (Now it appears to be mostly a mechanism to present Belk's ads.) I can't really remember if I had a Post-Dispatch subscription but do know I read it whenever practical. Of course the Chicago Tribune was an awesome paper for our days in and around the Windy City. And the News and Observer down here has been a great paper at least 11 of the last 12 years. Basically, I would guess that 50-75% of my days since Dolberry was five have started w/ a perusal of the newspaper.

Sadly, the newspaper industry contracted a fatal illness sometime over the last 10 years or so. It's been painful to watch. A few corporations bought up a bunch of newspapers and started careful monitoring of the profit margin often at the expense of quality. Many people started getting their news from cable networks or the internet. I think a lot of people (mostly younger) tuned out news for the most part ... staying informed via alternate media / social networks / more effective word of mouth. Circulation numbers started falling. Ad revenue dropped. Production costs rose. Further steps to reduce cost were made and quality suffered further. More people dropped their subscription. Rinse and repeat.

I probably would have kept ponying up the $200 a year for home delivery, but my once close friend started sending signals that he didn't really care about Dolberry! that much any more. And I don't really blame him ... he had to worry about other things ... namely survival. So, not to make it more acrimonious than it needs to be, but I didn't appreciate what my friend started doing:

1) Printing articles in our paper that were originally written for the Charlotte Observer. Dolberry does not care about the Panthers or the Bobcats or PGA events in Charlotte any more than I care about local events in Richmond or Atlanta.

2) The Monday paper became a mini-paper ... one that doesn't even last me the whole bus ride to work.

3) The number of individual voices (sportswriters, columnists, features writers) kept getting whittled down to where the paper seems 75% wire services. What's the point of a local paper that doesn't have a set of distinctive voices that you can enter in to a relationship with?

4) Most damaging to our friendship ... the newspaper quit getting the west coast baseball scores into the next day's paper. There are more "Late Yesterday" boxscores in our paper now than actual ones. Any game that ends after 9:45p is not getting in the next day's paper. I challenge anyone to offer up anything more useless than a 36 hour old boxscore. It's not old enough to be of historical interest and it's not new enough to be news. If you can't get the game in the paper the next day, just skip it.

But really, I'm not really angry about it. I understand why it's happened. But ... it's time to move on. This week I've been reading novels or work stuff on the bus and I haven't missed the paper. A 10 second glance at Google News keeps me up to date w/ all that anyone could ever care to know about cash for clunkers, homicidal maniacs, Russian-Georgian relations, or Paula Abdul. Meanwhile my favorite writers are available via the web: here, here (though he's retiring), here, and here.

So ... newspapers ... thanks ... I'll miss what we had.