Sunday, March 15, 2009 | 2 a.m.
If I may be so presumptuous ...
I’d like to take you through the start of my day on Wednesday and Thursday — actually most days — of this past week. It involves an old habit I picked up as a child. It is called reading the morning newspaper. And, I promise, I will give you the short version.
Wednesday morning I sat down with the three newspapers I try to read every day. In order of importance, they were the Las Vegas Sun, The New York Times and USA Today. There are plenty of other papers I peruse, including the other local paper, but I do that throughout the day at work and, mostly, on the computer.
There is a certain excitement to reading the daily miracle — that’s what we always called it because it was, indeed, a miracle that we actually got it accomplished 365 days per year and did it for basically pennies a day to the readers. Turning page by page, you never knew what kind of news or information you were going to find inside, but what we did know was that we would always find something an editor stuck in there that we would never look, ask or yearn for on our own. It was the surprise on every other page that made the reading habit so much fun.
Wednesday, for example, the Las Vegas Sun greeted me with an excellent story about the Bill Weidner-Sheldon Adelson break-up at the Venetian. That might not be news anywhere else, but when thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in investment and the futures of millions of people — from employees to customers to shareholders — hung in the balance, I can assure you it was worthy reading.
On page 3 was the short story highlighting what many have called Gov. Jim Gibbons’ political cowardice. The room tax ballot question was passed by the people of Clark County, made part of the governor’s budget, enacted by the Nevada Legislature and then, without the blink of one hypocritical eye, will be allowed by Gibbons to become law without his signature because, you got it, he doesn’t believe in raising taxes. The Sun’s overall coverage has made clear for everyone to understand just how ill-served the people of this state are by our governor.
If the economy and politics don’t excite you, Sam Skolnik wrote a great piece about the prospects for redeveloping a Las Vegas landmark, the Moulin Rouge, the first integrated casino in Las Vegas. A must read for anyone looking for some institutional knowledge about yesterday’s Las Vegas.
My point is that the daily newspaper has all kinds of gems just waiting for the reading.
On Thursday the Sun was equally informative, although sad in the telling. Two stories — one about the Nevada Ballet Theatre and the other about the Las Vegas Art Museum — you know, the kind of institutions that define the cultural attainment of any community — told the tale of economic woe that not only has hit almost every household in our state but also has taken those two long-running institutions as hostages, perhaps never to be released from the grip of financial failure.
Just two pages later was a terrific column by the brilliant Tom Friedman, who was imploring this country’s leadership and everyone else to, finally, wake up and realize we are deep in the swamp and it will take Herculean efforts to swim to safety. Instead, he said, we are still playing at the margins. As an example he pointed to vitally needed Treasury appointees — the folks who are supposed to help lead us out of the muck and into a better future — who are being held up for confirmation because some idiot in the Senate placed a hold on their confirmation because someone didn’t pay taxes on a household employee 20 years ago! And we wonder why the people have no trust in government.
These stories and thousands of others that enrich our lives and inform our actions, come to us courtesy of the daily newspaper. And we have always been willing to pay for that privilege.
Whoops, I almost forgot to talk about a front page story in Thursday’s New York Times. It was a long one and it fell under the headline, “As Cities Go From Two Newspapers to One, Some Talk of Zero.”
Yes, the story was about the terrible financial condition in which most newspapers find themselves. So much so that we hear almost weekly reports of venerable dailies shutting their doors after a century or more of daily publishing.
So here’s the part that you will have to show to your kids and grandkids because if you ask them whether they read a newspaper, they will tell you without hesitation, “No, I read my news online.” It seems lost on them that what they read online is produced by daily newspapers!
The New York Times story made me wonder — with a great deal of trepidation — what would happen if we woke up tomorrow and our daily newspaper was gone.
Think about it. Radio news and talk shows would have nothing to talk about because there would be nothing to read that morning. Television news products would have little or no news since they look to the reporting from the hundreds of print reporters to fuel their own 30-second video treatments at 6 and 11 p.m. And, here’s the really hard part. Google, Yahoo and every other online news and search service you can think of will come up bare because they get almost all that news they feed you for free from — drum roll please — the daily newspapers!
Maybe some would like a world of tomorrow without the news — Pew Research suggests that barely half of Americans would miss the newspaper or think that it is important to civic life — but I disagree. I believe that our democracy, our country and our futures depend upon an informed and knowledgeable citizenry.
So the next time someone asks you how you get your news, please do two things.
First, understand the incredible expense and effort it takes to bring all that credible information to your doorstep or your computer screen or BlackBerry. And, second, think about how you would get that kind of news in the future if it were no longer generated from the newsrooms of America.
The answer is simple: You wouldn’t.
After the economy gets better, that is what will continue to keep me up at night.
