Newspaper Downturn
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
By Patrick Sangimino
Legend has it that U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was known to read the sports section first each morning. What would he think today, after the Washington Post announced it was cutting one-third of its staff, including its prize-winning sports section?
That it happened at all is borderline crazy. That it took place during Super Bowl week is downright criminal.
“We can’t be everything to everyone,” said Executive Editor Matt Murray in a note to staff members, according to the Associated Press.
Maybe not, but the Post was already everything to the sports world.
It was considered a cathedral of sports sections. It was smart. It was funny. And pleasing to the eye. It was there that we read some of the best sportswriters ever. From Dave Kindred and Sally Jenkins to Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon to Thomas Boswell.
The bean counters officially surrendered.
We used to think the newspaper industry was indestructible. Too big to fail, as cliché as that sounds. That was at a time way before Frappuccino had entered into the nation’s vernacular, when Americans started their day with a cup of coffee – simply black, with maybe a splash of cream – and the morning edition.
Yes, the morning paper. It was a breakfast staple.
This was long before Google became the bane of our existence, when we were still basking in the afterglow of the post-Watergate Era, when newsrooms were fully stocked with able and passionate reporters and the Sunday paper was the size of a Christmas Day ham.
How naïve we were. The early-February news that the Washington Post – ironically, the same paper that gave us Woodward and Bernstein, the investigative reporters who broke the story that brought down the Nixon Administration – was gutting its newsroom by one-third should surprise no one.
It was just a matter of time, methinks.
We feigned shock. The big question is why we pretended to be surprised by the news. American Newspapers have been hemorrhaging for years. Mass layoffs have been going on for too long. Once thriving newsrooms have been gutted, while others have simply gone out of business, creating news deserts in hundreds of U.S. cities.
Maybe it was that it happened to one of America’s legacy newspapers, the one that warned us in its banner each day that democracy dies in the dark. The truth is, we’ve been dying for years. This just confirmed the diagnosis. The New York Times has been in slashing mode for years, too. If the Times and the Post are going through it, then no publication is safe.
This is what prompted Dogs Chase Cars. The seeds for the fiction about the downturn in the newspaper industry through the eyes of a longtime sports columnist were planted a decade ago. While living in the Midwest, I could only watch as the Kansas City Star laid off dozens of reporters, many of whom I knew and competed against for stories each day.
They were dedicated, competent and part of an award-winning publication that took pride in what they created each day.
If it could happen to them, I fathomed, was anyone in our industry immune?
That point is driven home in Dogs Chase Cars. J.P. Pasquale, an award-winning sports columnist in Kansas City for 32 years, was a Kansas City legend, someone everyone read each day to get their morning sports fix. He’d watched as friends and colleagues got out of the business for something less volatile, but he was addicted to the daily adrenaline rush provided by the newsroom or press box environments. He bet on the newspaper industry to rally when the good times began to sour.
In the story, he is driving to the office with trepidation on a typical November Friday after being summoned by the bosses. He fears he is about to become the latest victim in an industry that has shed far too much blood in recent years.
The story takes place over a single day but flashes back to the seminal events, from the sporting events and personalities he wrote about to the people who were influential in his rise in sports journalism.
More than anything, it’s a cautionary tale about striking a balance between home and work life. It’s a story about the importance of relationships, especially the ones waiting for you at home. Unfortunately, Pasquale went all in on an industry for which he had unconditional love.
Was it worth it? Probably not. Considering that my job is predicated on fostering relationships, building trust, and cultivating sources, I’m a hypocrite. The relationships that should have mattered most in my life – family, friends, and a wife who always had my back until I turned mine on her – were cast aside. Worse yet, this was all done for a corporate structure that has reneged on the loyalty it expected unconditionally from me.
Newspaper publishers were arrogant in the 1990s. The times were good because the profits were great. So rather than investing in internet technology, they considered it to be a fad. They just figured America would simply continue getting its news as it always had: in the morning edition.
Today, I’ll pay the price for their arrogance.
Today, we mourn not the death of the Washington Post’s sports section or so many of its employees getting whacked. We cry for a time when life, like the daily paper, was black and white. The gray was there but was considered superfluous.
We bought into the concept that if you told a story objectively and wrote it well, it would find a spot on every front porch around. It was a simple idea at a simpler time.
It’s what we long for again. It’s why we weep today.
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