Because I’ve taken the time to read my local newspaper today, I am well-informed.  I now know that everybody at the South St. Louis County Dierberg’s grocery store is excited that the winning Powerball ticket was sold right there.

But that’s not all.

Under “Top News,” I can read that the St. Louis Cardinals probably will not be signing a pitcher who was with them last year.

But there’s more: From a local trial, we now know how a St. Louis area man allegedly broke his girlfriend’s neck.  And there’s even more news: The colorful banner at the top of the front page reminds me to get ready for this week’s Auto Show at the downtown convention center.  Don’t forget the teaser at the bottom right: Buy Sunday’s paper and you can read an article about beer and the Bible. 

All of this important information on a single front page!  Can you believe that they make their reporters spend years at journalism schools in order to write things like this? 

If I were a journalist who worked for this newspaper, this front page would embarrass me.   I would keep it a secret that I worked for this paper.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch is not a locally-owned newspaper. It is owned by Lee Enterprises.  If you visit the website homepage of Lee Enterprises, you will see lots of web headlines about growing the revenue, increasing the circulation and controlling the costs.  You will not see the word “journalism.”  You will not see anything about the need to hire the best reporters available. Nor, at the Lee site, will you see anything about the need for investigative reporting. 

There isn’t any serious investigate reporting anymore. Not at most newspapers. Cutting investigative journalism saves papers lots of money and spares some of the paper’s advertisers considerable embarrassment.  It’s a win-win for the paper’s owners and advertisers.  The readers?  The community? If they don’t like it, let them go start their own newspapers, right?  That a newspaper contains no investigative journalism, though, makes it appear that there is nothing important going on in the community, even though, in truth, local newspapers no longer try to cover political and corporate malfeasance or misfeasance.  “Nothing to worry about in this city . . . Now just run along and buy something you see in one of our fancy ads.”

Most newspapers are not locally owned, not even the big newspapers in most big cities.  In Fighting for Air (2007), Eric Klinenberg writes that the lack of locally-owned papers and the increase in newspaper market share owned by a small number of large corporations correlates with the decay in quality journalism.  From 1990 to 2003, newspaper employment has dropped from 455,000 to 381,000.  “By 2000 only about 2% of cities had more than one paper and roughly 80% of all dailies were owned by chains.”  There are fewer stories, fewer local stories, fewer reporters, less access to local sources for local news… you end up with front-page stories that somebody (hang on to your horses!) won the Powerball drawing.   It is also important to note that fewer and fewer of the stories in the Post-Dispatch are actually written by local reporters-and absurdly large number of articles are now purchased from non–local news services.

When big chains take over a locally owned newspaper, they replace “quality local newspapers with cookie-cutter dailies.”  Here’s how Klinenberg describes the process with regard to newspaper chain Gannett:

Gannett’s business practices are infamous in the newspaper industry, but the chain’s public reputation comes from its a generic formula for mass-producing “reader-friendly” local papers: pair down new space on the page (the news hole) and cram with ads; replace hard news with wire copy and superficial local reports, how-to stories, quality of life and entertainment features, question-and-answer columns, and lots of “happy news.”

According to Geneva Overholser, columnist and former editor of the Des Moines Register, “the results are brittle and lifeless . . . Our newspapers do not read as if they are written and edited by people who feel the city’s pulse, who’ve long walked its streets, who love its quirks, know its history, and care deeply about its future–because, by and large, they are not.” 

But this decay in quality reporting was not caused because newspapers can’t afford to hire journalists who truly connect with the city.  Klinenberg once again provides the critical evidence: “Daily newspapers routinely generate profit levels that dwarf those of other businesses, including Fortune 500 companies…  According to Project for Excellence in Journalism, in the first six months of 2003 the top 13 publicly traded newspaper companies had average profit margins of 19%.”

Most people sincerely want to be well-informed and they try to be well-informed.  What’s scary, though, is that most people rely upon local media to be well-informed.  This is an old habit started (for many people) when newspapers tried harder to report news.  According to Klinenberg, “80% of consumers say their major source is local broadcast networks and their newspaper.” That is the likely strategy used by the 276,588 people who read the daily Post-Dispatch–people are trusting the PD to keep them well-informed.  “Of course I’m well informed.  I read today’s paper.  I know exactly where that lottery ticket was sold!”

The Post Dispatch, once a proud and trustworth paper, has been on a long slow slide for decades.  The deterioration of the Post-Dispatch has been noticed by every sober St. Louis resident with whom I’ve spoken over the past decade. What amazes me most is the constant flow of low-level, simplistic, pandering, inane, unimportant drivel that passes for news day after day.  Again, St. Louis is not a Gannett town; further, Lee Enterprises has only been running the show since 2005.  Nonetheless, Lee has enthusiastically picked up where right were the previous owner left off, the result being a smooth slide to the bottom.  The same way it is happening in most cities.

Many of the readers of the PD stay loyal because there is no alternative.  What else are you going to read, they might ask?  Would you rather read a newspaper containing the simplistic sorts of stories that could have been written by high schoolers, or would you rather not read a paper at all? 

As Eric Klinenberg writes, “It’s the journalism, not the newsprint, that makes newspapers necessary for self-governance.”  Reading a newspaper in the morning is part of a morning ritual for many people.  They do like reading newspapers, and the Post Dispatch is a “newspaper.”  After all, it says “newspaper” right on the front.  

Newspapers are mostly mental pacifiers now.  They keep us busy with all of the comics, sports, puzzles, recipes and non-stories.  They interrupt this suckling process only to feed us attempts to get us to buy things we don’t need. In short, with regard to their local newspapers, the residents of St. Louis (and most other cities) are victims of sophisticated bait and switch. They tell us that they are giving us the “news” we want, but they’re actually busy selling us things we don’t want.

Someone at the Post-Dispatch ought to look into this scam, but don’t hold your breath.