In the very same month (January 2022) that the Times Herald-Record is hiking its online subscription price to $9.99/month, it has started producing papers just six days a week, instead of seven. This marks the first time the once-proud paper has ceased to be a daily since the mid-1950s, when the old Times Herald merged with the Daily Record. In the past decade, the quality and quantity of the TH-R’s journalism has steadily declined, along with the number of its local reporters. It failed to publish at all this past Christmas Day, for the first time ever — a new low in wretchedness that elicited an outcry of precisely zero decibels.
Almost all papers began seeing ad revenue and readership numbers slip, going back to the advent of evening news on television. Then came a little plateau as afternoon papers switched to morning editions; then, the crisis accelerated as readers began getting continuous updates, 24/7, about national and world news on the brand-new World Wide Web. At the same time, Craig’s List began offering ads for a tiny fraction of what an ad in the paper cost. Frantically, dailies began laying off reporters and even reducing their formats from the big (“broadsheet”) to the small (“tabloid”) size. Neither of these strategies stemmed the hemorrhaging of profits. To increase revenues, they tried raising their newsstand and home-delivery prices. That, too, backfired spectacularly, as it spurred families everywhere to ask themselves, “Why are we still paying for a paper, when we get all our news from (FaceBook/AOL/you name it)?” Many papers, like the TH-R, belatedly began producing badly edited or unedited online editions, with tragi-comic results and no idea how to profit from them.
So, yes, all papers have been in dire straits in the Twenty-First Century. But not all papers fell from such glory to such an abyss as the Times Herald-Record.
In the early 1970s, when I worked as a reporter in the TH-R’s main office on Mulberry Street in Middletown, the paper produced four editions per day, re-plating Page One for each with a new photo and new stories from Sullivan and Ulster counties; Pike County, PA; Newburgh; and Middletown (“Late Final”.) We also had a steady stream of late-night tourists from the U.S. and elsewhere — journalism junkies who wanted to see our state-of-the-art photo-offset (“cold type”) printing process in action. Number 40 Mulberry Street shook and rumbled as the huge, lightning-fast web press printed, trimmed and folded editions of 88 or 96 or 112 pages or more (far more, around Christmas-time, with the extra ads and inserts). Drivers waited at the loading dock to bundle and fling them onto waiting trucks. We copy-editors, done at midnight, would be able to read Late Final over coffee at the Colonial Diner around the corner at 12:30, where a dozen copies would already have been delivered.
Al Romm was a nationally renowned editorial writer; our daily was the first to call for Nixon’s impeachment during the Watergate scandal. Today, can you name the “editorial page editor” of the TH-Record? Neither can I. The once family-owned paper was sold, re-sold and re-sold to a series of ever-more short-sighted, bottom-line-addicted corporations and plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch, who was a Mr. Rogers compared with the current owner (Gannett, which was swallowed up by GateHouse Media, whose goal is to buy as many papers as it can and maximize profits by gutting newsrooms, trumpeting to investors the resulting “savings.”)
The press no longer rumbles at 40 Mulberry Street; last I heard, the building was for sale, with the idea that it could be subdivided and rented to several smaller, quieter businesses. Just a block away the street ends at, appropriately, a cemetery, and as you pass the old Record a sign says, “Dead End.”
Of late, the Record has been assembled each night in Austin, Texas, along with all the other rags that are part of the Gannett chain. Gannett’s flagship is USA Today, a paper that offers no local stories at all — just national pieces, or stories about “trends.” You may have noticed that most Record stories these days lack a local reporter’s byline, and say instead, “By the USA Today Network” or, “By the Hudson Valley Team.” Perhaps the saddest story about this sad story ran in the Record itself, at https://bit.ly/3KccnnQ. Check it out: It’s a nauseating euphemism-festival, complete with a headline that proves that its Texan copy-editors don’t even know the paper’s name.
In a few years, perhaps none of us will be able to recall it, either.
