The Press Guardian #11
David Michael Newstead | The Philosophy of Shaving
Cynthia Blake rubbed her eyes. Every muscle, bone, and cell in her body ached, she was so tired. She had been on the phone for hours, trying everything she could think of. To save the newspaper meant sacrificing more and more pieces of it, but what, if anything, would remain, she didn’t know. She kept reflecting back on her conversations with her former editor, Richard Dayu. It wasn’t until this moment that she realized how adeptly he had led the publication through difficult times: market downturns, layoffs, and unrest.
Today, the situation was far worse. That much was obvious. In the last year, they had gained more readers and wider recognition. Her team won a shelf’s worth of prestigious awards. Their journalists had written a dozen or more high-profile exposés showing illegality and corruption at the highest levels of government. Their work mattered more than ever to the country’s future. To Cynthia, those things felt like they should count for something, but the truth was that the Daily Review-Express was being squeezed from all sides. A few graphs on her computer screen summarized the harsh reality: revenue was declining every quarter. Their transition from print to digital was painful and, worse, less profitable. The paper was trapped in a vicious cycle that began with ads, clicks, and firewalls and ended with less money to pay fewer and fewer staff.
Now everything was on the chopping block: the weekly culture magazine, their arts and style blogs, podcast producers, freelance photographers, cartoonists, experienced data journalists, internships. Could more sponsored content help raise money? What if they devoted more time to the English language edition? Was there a more profitable way to balance their print editions with their digital platforms? Perhaps, they could do another round of layoffs. Even the building they operated out of was up for discussion, but should they really sell their historic, Art Deco headquarters downtown to stay afloat? These were the topics that now characterized Cynthia’s days and her nights and her early mornings with little else in-between.
Their soft-spoken owner, Mr. Yon Windels, was a proud Yaharzan expatriate living in London with enough money to pay for the battalion of lawyers that were holding the government at bay. The Regulatory Communications Authority (RCA) frequently leveled retaliatory fines at the paper and had rewritten regulations in an attempt to ban foreign ownership of news outlets even for dual citizens like Mr. Windels. At the same time, the Central Tax Office was starting their fifth audit of the paper this year. A week earlier, the regime ended a longstanding requirement that newspapers print public notices from government agencies. Overnight that shutoff a boring, but reliable source of their income. And this was just one of a dozen different strategies meant to break them and to send the newspaper into a financial death spiral. Cynthia Blake was fighting against the full weight of a regime determined to crush independent media nationwide and everyday she felt it.
She had started smoking again, not even bothering to go out onto the balcony anymore. Cynthia couldn’t get a good night’s sleep either, which caused one day to blur into the next. It all felt like one continuous meeting after that, a single unending conference call about journalism under attack. A revolving door of her reporters joined her on these calls to London, which often devolved into venting sessions or loud arguments. Under different circumstances, of course, ceasing publication of their daily print edition and switching over to a digital-only model would be a more academic conversation. But since the paper’s website and mobile app fended off constant hacking attempts, such a move actually made them more vulnerable to being shutdown and subject to an entirely separate and increasingly draconian set of regulations from the RCA governing internet publications. The newspaper had one foot in the past and the other in the future and was suffering terribly in both.
In the middle of those tough conversations, Cynthia Blake could practically hear Richard’s voice in her ear, sharing a sage piece of advice or a humorous anecdote that got them through the “bad old days” during the dictatorship. She tried to recall every key decision, the intense debates, and hard choices that kept this newspaper going for fifty years.
She was like a zombie by the time she finally trudged over to the coffee machine for a refill. She wasn’t even sure what day of the week it was anymore. God help us, she thought, what are we going to do?
“Cynthia!” Margaret called out, coming down the hall, “The meeting is starting. London’s on the line again.”
Cynthia paused and breathed deeply.
“I’ll be right there,” she said.
End of an Era: Rural Times-Tribune Newspaper Set to Close
Nathan Darms | The Daily Review-Express
It began in the 1930s as a pamphlet that helped farm workers organize against fascism. For decades, the newspaper was a pillar of journalistic excellence, telling the stories of the ordinary Yaharzans in every corner of the country. Today, however, the Rural Times-Tribune is a hollowed out relic at death’s door. Several years ago, the paper stopped producing much of its own content and eventually even these scaled back operations became too expensive for its new owners to stomach any longer. In its wake, the Rural Times-Tribune leaves a vast news desert of agricultural communities and small towns that are insignificant to TV anchors, but frequently a target for partisan demagogues and misinformation campaigns. And while the paper’s coverage typically focused on county fairs and youth sports, there was always a genuine quality to it, an authenticity that many publications could only aspire to. It was of the people and for the people. Perhaps, that’s why the Rural Times-Tribune connected with local readers for so long. And why it’s absence will be so profoundly felt. CLICK HERE TO THE READ FULL ARTICLE.
