The Shredding of Midwestern Newspapers

A couple of months ago, I was talking to a friend in Illinois who noted that she could not find anyone to talk to at the newspaper in Springfield, the state capital. All the reporters and editors were gone that day and the paper was just running Associated Press wire stories in its pages. In the year 2000, by contrast, there were seventy people in the newsroom of the Springfield State Journal-Register, including several librarians and news clerks and an editorial cartoonist and an art director. It even had a multi-person news bureau over at the capitol to specifically cover politics and policy. In earlier decades, in short, it was easy to find someone at the newspaper to talk to on the phone about breaking news or some other pressing matter. In 2007, the State Journal-Register was purchased by GateHouse Media, which promised "hyperlocal" coverage of city and regional events, but that is not what happened. The newspaper has instead been "decimated by staff cuts."1 There are now fewer than ten reporters and editors in the newsroom and that includes two sports reporters and a photographer. The printing press was sold for scrap. GateHouse also sold the once-impressive downtown offices of the State Journal-Register, which, in a bit of ominous symbolism, are being transformed into the county morgue.