It's looking like a devilish future

"What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing.

"He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance ... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen."

-- AARON ALTMAN, "Broadcast News," 1987


A report out of Denver says that Dean Singleton, who owns the Denver Post, is taking advantage of the woes of the competing Rocky Mountain News to tell his unions that he needs to cut $20 million in operating expenses to remain competitive.

Here's what it means:

Within the next 2-3 years, Denver may just become the first major American city without a metropolitan daily newspaper.

The Rocky has been losing money for a long time and may not survive. Many newspaper owners would be happy to lose their competition, but that isn't enough for Singleton. He's using the weakness of his competitor to go after his own employees.

I was one of those employees for more than eight years at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, and I saw Singleton and his minions cut our staff from one that was doing an outstanding job covering its own area as well as reaching out to do important projects to one that almost disappeared as a force in its coverage area.

In 1999, we had two columnists, excellent Hollywood coverage and a strong sports department as well as top-flight local coverage. Our owner, Donrey Media, wasn't known for paying well, but we still managed to have a good, experienced staff.

Within five years, our staff had been cut by half and we were sharing coverages with the San Bernardino Sun, which previously had been our most bitter competitor. This is vintage Singleton. He combines all his papers in a region to save money. That means seven or eight papers in Los Angeles all use the same reporter to cover the Dodgers, or the Lakers, or USC football.

It also means less regional, national and international coverage, with the Associated Press picking up most of the slack.

It means less talk about getting the story or covering the news and more about "servicing our customers."

In Southern California, Singleton's people just announced that six different newspapers -- the Sun, the Daily Bulletin, the Redlands Daily Facts, the Whittier News, the Pasadena Star-News and the San Gabriel Valley Tribune -- are going to share a copy desk at San Gabriel.

It's "more efficient," which of course means fewer copy editors doing more work, and it will certainly mean editors who may never even have visited Redlands or San Bernardino editing stories about those cities.

Lower standards, bit by bit.

Flash over substance.

Several years ago, Singleton's minion who is in charge of all those papers gave us a speech about why the railroads vanished. They thought they were in the railroad business, when they were really in the transportation business.

He said we needed to be aware that we're not in the newspaper business, we're in the information business.

So if newspapers disappear in favor of Blackberries, laptop computers or PDAs, it's really no big deal as long as the folks who own the newspapers can still make money off them.

Sound like someone has been taking lessons from the Devil?

It isn't about covering the news, or holding out for the truth, or forcing government to be responsive to its citizens.

Nope, it's about keeping that revenue stream coming.

My old friend and editorial cartoonist Gordon Campbell says the current media is vanishing and the future will all be about "citizen journalists" blogging and posting the news on the Web.

God help us. How will anyone ever be able to tell the difference between truth and lies, gold and pyrite, silk and straw? Without responsibility for what they publish, folks can put anything out there and half the people in the country will believe it.

"Rush Limbaugh sodomized by amorous rhino"

I posted that in a satirical piece a couple of weeks ago, making very clear that it had never happened. But I would be willing to bet I could go almost that far with an outrageous lie and plenty of folks would believe me.

I've always wondered why newspapers are run for profit anyway. Why shouldn't they be not-for-profit, semi-public enterprises dedicated to the truth above and beyond the balance sheet?

Riddle me this: What other for-profit business has Constitutional protections?

If newspapers are going to survive in this country -- heck, maybe if telling truth to power is going to survive -- we need to get rid of the Singletons and force newspapers to be run for some reason other than lining people's pockets.

It isn't too late, but it's getting there.