HoodaThunk?

Time and tide, they say, wait for no man. They apparently wait for no company, either. That businesses fail is a fact of life in professional circles. In fact, many more businesses fail than succeed over 5 years. Those that make it a century and a half are truly special and when they succumb to the various pressures in the market, it’s a sad passing, all else aside. Today, I read a story at Real Clear Politics by Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle wherein Ms. Saunders tells us all we’ll be sorry for wanting newspapers to go out of business. The comments section on that story tells the tale that Ms. Saunders has blatantly missed: that people don’t want newspapers to fail. People want the left-leaning PR machines masquerading as newspapers to fail.

The sad part about the market conditions facing the MSM today is that they affect all of the media, whether they’re the aforementioned PR arms of the Democratic party pretending to do actual reporting or they’re actually a news agency doing good work. Both suffer and, lacking the proper resources, both can fail.

Case in point is the Rocky Mountain News, referenced here at HoodaThunk? on a number of occasions. Today, their management broke the news to their employees that their efforts to stay afloat as a second newspaper in Denver had come up short. Tomorrow, Rocky Mountain News will publish their final edition after nearly 150 years in the news business. I don’t subscribe to their paper since I live near DC, not in CO, but I’ve come to find their reporting to be pretty much what people are looking for: give us the facts and leave the editorializing to the editorial page. We can figure out “what it all means” just fine on our own. We don’t need a reporter’s idealogy standing in place of news reporting. The Rocky Mountain News appeared to live by that credo, for the most part, and that’s what’s especially sad. There are people in Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York who would love to have that kind of professionalism working for them at their local paper.

We don’t want true newspapers to fail and I would suggest that if you’re living in a place were an honestly fair newspaper is published, you should subscribe to them. Show them you value their work by paying for it. Here in DC we have the notorious Washington Post. There are good parts of it – I’m thinking of the LoudounExtra section and certain blogs (Living in LoCo), particularly – but the paper is, as a whole, a left-leaning shill for the Democrat party. We have an alternative, here, in the form of the Washington Times, a far more balanced view of the facts and news than the Post has ever been in the 2 decades I’ve lived out here. I’ve been waiting for the Times to start offering a Sunday-only subscription so I coud dump my Post subscription for a paper whose reporting I trust. That doesn’t appear likely to happen soon, so I’m going to look at this more seriously and see if subscribing daily wouldn’t be a good thing after all. I value their work and I should prove it by coughing up the cash.

My hopes and prayers go with the people of the Rocky Mountain Post. I’ve been through a couple of company failures and it’s not fun. The stress, the wondering if there might have been something more to be done, the fear of “what now?” especially for those with families depending on them are all experiences I don’t wish on good people who gave an honest business an honest shot. It’s my fervent hope that they land on their feet and, whether this takes them out of the industry or merely moves them to the industry’s next evolution, that they come through this stronger, brighter, and just plain old better than before. Good luck, folks.