PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Does anyone care if newspapers go under these days? Especially in a time marked by the prevalence – if not, on occasion, the perversion – of social media.

As newspapers die around the country, some might not care.

I care.

If only because I started my professional career as a daily newspaper reporter and developed a love for the media.

A couple of sobering perspectives caught my attention this week.

One was from Les Zaitz, a former Oregonian newspaper reporter who also, at one time in the past, ran the Keizer, Oregon Times. He now serves as editor and CEO of the Salem Reporter, a journalistic endeavor that aims, on-line, to replace the nearly defunct Salem Statesman-Journal.

Here’s what Zaitz wrote:

“Last week was not a good week to keep up with news about my profession. Headline after headline, tweet after tweet, told the same story: Local news is in trouble.

“More layoffs. More consolidations. Less news.

“Most of the news involves major news chains. I doubt many local readers are too worried that corporate owners aren’t getting as fat as they once did. And with the explosion of online sources, the loss of a news outlet or two might not seem like much.

“But it does matter, and significantly.”

Here’s why, according to Zaitz:

“As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: Less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.”

To buttress Zaitz point, I have been struck over the years about how little attention Salem’s remaining newspaper, the Statesman-Journal, has paid to state government which, until the newspaper moved its offices to the south, was just about five blocks from the Capitol.

Easy to walk down the street and monitor representative government in action. But, over the years, the Statesman-Journal paid less and less attention to government news, which, in many ways, gave rise to the still-new Salem Reporter.

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post, caught my attention with a story she wrote on the decline of newspapers under this headline:

The death knell for local newspapers? It’s perilously close.

Sullivan said local newspaper survival “is of crucial importance to the future of the nation” because, she contended, citizens need to have sources of independent analysis of issues that matter to them where they live.

She reported new facts.

• Gannett and GateHouse, two major newspaper chains, finished their planned merger, and the combined company intends to cut the combined budget by at least $300 million. That will come on top of unending job losses over the past decade in the affected newsrooms of more than 500 papers.
• The McClatchy newspaper group — parent of the Herald and the Charlotte Observer — is so weighed down by debt and pension obligations that analysts think it is teetering on bankruptcy.
• And the storied Chicago Tribune on has fallen under the influence of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has strip-mined the other important papers it owns, including the Denver Post and the Mercury News in San Jose.

What happened to newspapers? Well, several developments combined to make staying alive difficult.

First, newspaper advertising began plummeting about a decade ago, given the rise of social media sites. Today, some newspapers try to re-generate some of the lost revenue by hosting advertising on their on-line sites, thought that pales in comparison to what they could generate in newspapers delivered to front doors.

Second, the impact of social media had its own, huge adverse affect on newspapers. New generations if citizens were taught to depend on on-line sites, not newspapers. And, if truth be told, even older folks like me often go on-line to read newspapers I used to hold in my ink-stained hands.

And, third, a number of reporters became their own stories rather than reporting news for citizen. In that way, they sucked the life out of dispassionate, fact-based reporting – and that, alone for me, raised questions about the efficacy of journalism.

Can anything be down about this foreboding trend – the loss of true journalism?

Only time will tell, though the future is not bright.

For me, I will continue every day to read venerable, journalistic products such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times. By sifting and sorting through good writing in those newspapers, I will be able to continue to hone my own perceptions.

But note that each of these newspapers is a national publication, which, to state the obvious, does not focus on local news where I live in Salem, Oregon, or in Oregon as a state, for that matter.

So it is that I wish success for purposeful local journalism commitments such as that illustrated by the Salem Reporter. I subscribe and hope that others will, too.