Print journalism

The Internet is a wonderful invention; after all, it permits me to "blog."  But not all changes that the internet brings us are contributions to our cultural well-being.  One such change has been the increasing disappearance of the print newspaper.

Yesterday's New York Times (still in print, thank god) contained an entire section devoted to disappearing newspapers, one of which was Seattle's own Post-Intelligencer.  I subscribed for years to the P-I, which at the time was Seattle's morning paper; the Times was delivered in the evening.  But the P-I's first edition hit the news stands around 4 or 5 p.m. the night before its official date, actively competing  against the Times on the Times's own turf.   "Read the P-I, stay ahead of the Times" was  the P-I's clever slogan.

But the Times had the last laugh.  The Post-Intelligencer was a Hearst paper, better than many other Hearst papers, for what that was worth.  It was the senior paper, having been published under one name or another since 1863.  The Times was (and is) owned by the local Blethen family, and had been since 1896.  The P-I gave up competing in 2009, and now publishes only an on-line edition.  The Times switched to a morning paper, once the P-I was gone, recognizing that evening papers were disappearing across America.

Seattle, like most other cities, thus became a one-newspaper town.  The P-I joined the dust heap of history along with Portland's Oregon Journal, San Francisco's Examiner and its Call-Bulletin, and Los Angeles's Herald-Examiner.  With print readership down, one newspaper per city may make financial sense, but it makes reading the paper less fun.  Especially for people like me who, even as a student, managed to read the P-I each day with breakfast, and the Times before dinner. 

Paralleling the decline in metropolitan newspapers has been the decline in student newspapers.  At the university level, I'm now most familiar with the University of Washington Daily which, despite its name, since 2018 has come out only once a week in print format.  My undergraduate school's paper, the Stanford Daily, on the other hand, still publishes a daily print edition with weekly supplements for entertainment and for sports.  Its circulation is 8,000 and it is distributed at 500 locations on and off campus.  Its motto, at least when I was in school, was "The Peninsula's Only Daily Newspaper," although "daily" meant five school days per week.

But the newspaper that has meant the most to me died long ago.  My high school paper was the Lumberjack Log ("log," get it?  haha).  It was published every two weeks on the presses of our city's daily newspaper, and its distribution was eagerly awaited by a student body anxious to see their names and the names of their friends in print.

When I ask myself what aspects of high school were most meaningful to me -- meaningful in the sense of igniting my interest and having some impact on my future life, as opposed to merely providing me with credits needed for graduation -- I have no hesitation in pointing first to editing the Lumberjack Log and, as a somewhat distant second, taking part in school theatrical productions.  Work on the paper taught me not just how to lay out a page or copyread stories or act as a reporter, but how to meet deadlines, deal with the hopes and egos of fellow students, and produce a product that I could both take pride in and be held accountable for.  I still have a bound copy of all the Logs published my senior year.

The Log staff exchanged papers with a large number of other high school papers in the state.  Many were inferior to ours -- little more than mimeographed newsletters -- but many were much more impressive.  I used to pore over the papers from large Seattle high schools, marveling at both their technical superiority and at the more sophisticated student body their writing seemed to represent.  I will now give special recognition to the Kuay Weekly, a now defunct publication of a now defunct Queen Anne High School.  Queen Anne's building, high atop Queen Anne Hill, was converted to condominiums back in about 1981, when it seemed that everyone with families was moving out of the city.  Perhaps Queen Anne may someday be reconstituted in a new building -- if so, I hope the Kuay Weekly is revived.

As I say, at some point -- I have no idea when -- the Log, which had been a school institution since the founding of both the high school and the city in 1923, simply ended publication.  Probably from lack of interest from students who had grown less apt to read newspapers and less apt to be interested in extracurricular activities.  I assumed until today that high school journalism was essentially dead in all high schools.

But I see that all of the Seattle high schools in my part of town, at least, still publish school papers.  The Garfield Messenger, the Roosevelt News, Ballard's The Talisman, and Nathan Hale's Sentinal.  I can't tell whether these papers are all published in print format, or merely on-line, but both Garfield's and Roosevelt's do seem to be.  Their graphics are vastly superior to anything we had available to us when I was in high school.  I hope their writing is as good as their graphics.

The fact that Seattle school newspapers seems to be bucking the tide of retrenchment, seen in metropolitan papers -- while the Log from my home town has faded into oblivion -- may be another sign of the differing opportunities available to the affluent and the not-so-affluent.  Seattle is booming and its schools, if not rolling in money, are better supported than most large city schools.  My home town, on the other hand, like many other small, non-suburban towns, is in a period of prolonged decline.

But cities rise and they fall.  I have hopes that the proud name of Lumberjack Log will be revived at some time in the future, supported by a city that itself will be reviving.