It was very strange when Mayor Francis G. Slay recently launched on the Post-Dispatch. Elected officials typically specialize in saying safe things they think people will want to hear – not disturbing truths that everyone is secretly thinking. But when Slay said the Post under Lee Enterprises has become a chore to read and a drag upon the city, anyone who follows local journalism had to admit he was exactly right.
At least one watchdog agrees with the mayor. Civic Strategies of Atlanta evaluated newspaper coverage of the nation’s major daily newspapers and ranked the P-D dead last. The report basically said the newspaper is so lacking that it takes “imagination” to be so bad.
Local readers went through a similar experience with despair in journalism a handful of years ago, when The Riverfront Times was bought by an out-of-state publisher that immediately gutted it of its gadfly community spirit, replacing a liberal advocacy paper with a smarmy mix of Mad magazine and Cold Case Files. It’s hard to say why Slay decided to rant against the local daily at this particular time, but it’s hard to argue with his grouchy sense that local mainstream print media is at an historic low.
There is much to mourn in local publications being bought by publishers based elsewhere that don’t care about St. Louis or its newspapers. The decline in journalistic standards is disheartening enough. But also consider the growing distance between local journalists and the business of publishing. Reporters and editors at the Post and RFT have to pay heed to St. Louis, to some extent, but the business decisions about those publications are ultimately made in the Quad Cities and Phoenix, respectively. This may help to explain the irritating ignorance so many otherwise insightful local journalists betray when they attempt to comment upon the business of their own profession. In recent months (hope we’re not leaving anybody out), two bloggers, a scurrilous political gossip column and a mainstream columnist have all volunteered the opinion that the American’s political endorsements are for sale. Other than the mainstream columnist, Sylvester Brown, who still has a job at the Post, what all of these pundits have in common is that they once worked for pay in the local media and now they do not. Given that Brown, a competent writer, is a failed publisher, it’s a safe bet that professional bitterness is also an ingredient in his silly insinuation that the American was somehow paid off and co-opted in endorsing Russ Carnahan over Jeff Smith in 2004.
Message to all y’all unemployed journalists and failed publishers writing for a St. Louis newspaper operated out of Iowa: There ain’t no steady money in selling your political endorsement. It’s not needed often enough. It’s simply bad business (and stupid politics). And guess what? Politicians rival only journalists in being beggars and mooches. You ought to see the stand-off when a check is dropped on a table where a journalist and a politician have eaten lunch together. That check sits there a long time before one of them says, “Let’s go Dutch.”
There is one way Sylvester Brown and his fellow, business-challenged pundits can test their theory that our endorsement is for sale. Three easy steps:
1) File for political office.
2) Take out a full-page ad in the American.
3) Wait for our endorsement.
You’ll be waiting a long time.