Announcements by the publishers of three Emmerich daily newspapers that they will cease publishing a printed edition on Mondays came about the same time I saw the movie, “The Post.”
It may be a stretch to relate cutting expenses at newspapers in Greenville, Greenwood and McComb to the movie’s version of how the Washington Post came to print articles based on the Pentagon Papers back in 1971.
But there are some correlations.
The Pentagon Papers, as most who are familiar with the Vietnam War will recall, is a history of the United States role in Indochina from World War II until May 1968. Commissioned in 1967 by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, parts were turned over — without authorization — to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg who worked on the project.
At a time when U.S. involvement in Vietnam was rapidly eroding, the papers showed that the public had been systematically lied to by the U.S. government about our political and military involvement in Vietnam during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. The papers indicated the war was unwinnable and our leaders knew it.
Richard Nixon was president at the time Ellsberg covertly spilled the beans. Though the study did not cover Nixon's policies, the revelations included within it were embarrassing to the government. Besides, Nixon was no bigger fan of the news media, especially the Washington Post, than our current president.
The government succeeded in getting an injunction to temporarily stop the New York Times from publishing the papers, leading to the Washington Post securing and publishing them. Ultimately other news outlets followed.
The current movie, which is generally getting good reviews, is both entertaining and enlightening as it touches on some of the personal conflicts editors and publishers encounter when reporting embarrassing news involving friends and acquaintances.
It also covers the financial risk newspaper publishers encounter when their journalists take on powerful government officials in reporting what the public should know in a free society.
So, what does that have to do with doing away with printed editions of Monday newspapers in three Mississippi cities?
Maybe not much in the overall scheme of things. I wouldn’t be surprised if sometimes in the not too distant future other printed editions are eliminated by newspapers across the country. Someday all the news may be delivered electronically. If you want to read it on paper, you can download it and print it yourself.
The important thing is that you continue to receive an unbiased account of the news which newspapers are better at than other media.
Counting retirement years, I’ve been writing for newspapers for six decades, so I have witnessed and participated in multiple technological changes in the industry as well as changes in business models.
When I began my career as a journalist in Jackson, there were three daily newspapers in Mississippi’s capital. Most every county seat in the state had its own newspaper, albeit most of them weeklies, with their own production shops. That was in the days of hot metal type and letterpress printing like that shown in “The Post” movie.
Smaller newspapers, like Greenwood, McComb and many other newspapers in Mississippi, had converted to offset printing by 1970 which made it easier and less labor intensive to evolve into the computer age. Large city newspapers, like the New York Times, were way behind the curve on printing technology, because of the labor unions among other things.
In noticing the Monday change at McComb, I couldn’t help but recall that for the first 15 years I worked there we were a five-day a week newspaper, Monday through Friday. I was the editor when we started the Sunday newspaper in 1978, going to six days a week. Had they waited until Labor Day to stop the Monday paper, the six-day experiment would have lasted 40 years.
So, there’s been a lot of change in the news business, and it continues.
But Americans, even those who criticize “the media”, should pray that there always will be an independent platform to support professional journalists and that they won’t someday have to rely on the government and amateur bloggers to supply the news.
