Is a One-Newspaper Town a One-Horse Town?
©2009 by LeeZard It’s no secret; the days of the daily newspaper are numbered. Look around; cities across the country are faced with losing a major daily paper. It’s happening here in Seattle as well as in Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis and Baltimore. In city after city, newsrooms are going dark. Even the sainted New York Times is having trouble paying down its huge debt. Metropolitan areas that once enjoyed a plethora of hard-copy news coverage and editorial opinion are finding themselves left with just one voice – and, even that voice could be in jeopardy. It’s a sad state of affairs for an industry that is more than 300-years old. According to newspaper-industry.org: “The first daily newspaper was The Daily Courant in London, 1702. France's first daily newspaper appears in 1777, Journal de Paris, while the first United States daily was the Pennsylvania Packet in 1784.” There was a time when great cities bristled with newsprint. By the end of the 19th Century there were mo...