Don’t act like it ain’t been coming for a while.
This turned into a postcard for that esteemed icon of journalism, the peerless Donna Ladd. I don’t always agree with Donna (indeed, sometimes I vehemently disagree with her), but I will always take her side in a knife fight, because she’s got Jackson’s back, and because when everybody else was leaving, she did the unthinkable:
She came back to Mississippi.
And, she’s making a newspaper work—because it actually serves the community. The Jackson Free Press has news, kultur, laffs (we love that Jackson Breland loves Jabari Toins), and investigative powers beyond that of our Gannett-funded, and oft-furloughed, daily. Newspapers aren’t dying because of internets: newspapers are dying because they quit offering a value.
Don’t you think I’d buy the Ledger every day if it had huge page-sized offerings from Frank King and Winsor McKay? Why would you think I’d buy it if you lay off Orley Hood and keep Rick Cleveland and Gary Pettus and Sid Salter riding the bench a week at a time?
I shan’t; I shan’t.
AND LO, THE CLARION-LEDGER SHALL DIE COLD IN ITS SLEEP, ALONE AND UNLOVED.
Indeed. When folks, such as myself for one, buy the local paper mainly for access to the daily sudoku and cryptogram, long-term existence is in jeopardy. But it is a challenge. Even Pretty Fakes becomes competition in a small market.
A-men, friend. So there are people with MBAs who think that the way to save a newspaper is to make it as bland and unoriginal as possible? To stock it with AP wire stories you can get for free on the web? I truly wonder about what people learn in business school.