Stop the presses? Latest news just might

For a generation that grew up with two, three newspapers in a house every day, the news grows steadily worse.

This week, longtime employees of the Courier Gazette and Camden Herald got the now-familiar news to newspaper families. The company has been sold. See you later. Another 26 jobs lost.

Such familiar faces as Steve Betts (who I thought was the Courier) and David Grima, who put the Herald together each week, have been kicked to the curb after decades of service. I shudder to think of the hours the three of us have spent at school boards, selectmen’s meetings, fishermen’s forums and town meetings.

Many of us have taken newspapers for granted and expected them to be part of the landscape, forever. No longer.

My very first salary came from pedaling my sporty J.C. Higgins fat-wheel around LaGrange Street in West Roxbury, Mass., delivering the Post, the Globe and the Christian Science Monitor. The Boston Record, if memory serves, was delivered by rival gangs.

On Sundays we would shuffle to the 6 a.m. Mass, sleep through the service, then pick up the impossibly heavy Sunday Globe in a heavy pushcart for our customers, who would leave the money between the doors, if you can believe that. We could make $7, maybe $8 on a Sunday morning.

Big money.

When I went to Northeastern, my “co-op job” was at the Globe, which had just moved to the “country” on Morrissey Boulevard. The entire building shook when the presses rolled. That was the sign for us to collect each new edition and deliver it to the hot-shot ad salesmen, so they could check their copy. It was a great job and paid $40 a week. We had to save $30 a week for tuition.

Bigger money.

When I was living on unemployment (up to $45 a week), I decided to become a reporter. How hard could it be? I placed an ad in Editor & Publisher for a starting position. You could do things like that in those days. The Attleboro Sun replied and sent me to cover my first Rotary meeting as a test. Luckily Tommy “Satch” Sanders of the champion Boston Celtics was the speaker and I knew everything about the Celtics that there was to know.

I got the job, partly because my predecessor had been committed to a mental hospital. True story.

We never doubted the future of newspapers in those days. They would be around forever, of course.

Maybe not.

According to The New York Times, which has experienced several rounds of layoffs and buyouts, this year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, “raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.”

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated. Executives at the Hearst Corp. say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.

Obviously, that cannot continue. Peter S. Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, told the Times, “I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it’s inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies.”

“It’s going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy,” said Edward Atorino, an analyst at the Benchmark Co. Even with less severe losses, “You’re going to see structural changes; papers could drop a day or two per week, they could outsource printing.”

The industry will not bottom out for another three or four years, analysts predict. The question, Appert of Goldman Sachs said, “is how far things will fall before then.”

Sad times indeed, and not just for Betts and Grima. The loss of an aggressive, independent press is a blow to all of us.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.