In San Diego, a newspaper page turns

When I started writing a column for The San Diego Union in 1978, my “hole” was 30 column-inches. When I wrote my last column in 1992, my hole had shrunk to 16 column-inches, and the paper’s pages themselves had shrunk as costs rose and revenues flattened. I took note of that in my goodbye column, saying newspapers were “trimming their newsprint sails, in an effort to stay afloat.”

The San Diego papers THEMSELVES had shrunk. In 1992, Helen Copley killed The Evening Tribune. They called it a “merger” of the Trib and the Union, but it was a mercy killing of an evening paper whose circulation had dipped below 100,000. Remember the first law of media: the media is a business. If the media doesn’t make money, it will go out of business.

So the newspaper media in San Diego was already in trouble in 1992, and that was BEFORE the Internet roared in from space and blew everything up.

It has been at least 10 years since, going out to get the paper one morning, I realized I was going out to pick up a dinosaur. Now the dinosaurs are actually toppling. Yesterday the Union was sold to a type of business called a “private equity firm.” I doubt if any of its principals can cite the First Amendment. The first analysis I read suggested that not the newspaper, but the land it sits on – 13 acres in Mission Valley, across the San Diego River from the Fashion Valley Mall – was the key factor in the sale. I can close my eyes and see a hotel there now. Hell, I don’t even have to close my eyes.

Surveys insist that Americans don’t care about newspapers much anymore, and would not miss them. The San Diegans I have encountered today contradict the statistics. My dentist’s first question to me was, “What will happen to the Union?” Ditto his dental hygienist, who went on for five minutes in support of newspapers as I waited there with my mouth open.

This, I believe, is because when push comes to shove, people back their newspapers, because the newspaper is the repository of a community’s civic, social and institutional memory. People can reconnect to that San Diego memory, going back 81 years, only by going into the newspaper’s files. Only in one place is it all in one place. To lose that would be unthinkable.

If people feel that way, how do you think newspaper people feel? Many of our files are now accessible online. I was one tiny player in the history of the Copley Press in San Diego, but a search for my files from 1983 to 1992 yields 1,384 documents. Multiply that by thousands, and there starts to appear above the building in Mission Valley a spectral congregation of journalists shaking hands and patting backs for a community memory well, if sometimes imperfectly, preserved. No one else could have done it.

Paper was our medium, on which we moved history from the city through the presses and into the streets. That will change, and it will not be easy. I am totally addicted to picking up a newspaper and sitting down with it. But paper is only a medium. Journalism is the message. It will flow on a new river. I just got a Kindle for my birthday, and it feels clumsy and awkward and restrictive, but it also looks like the journalism medium of the near future. It’s journalism, not newspapers, that communities must keep alive.