by David Safier
Yet another Arizona paper which has performed a valuable journalistic service is shutting down. The East Valley Tribune will be ending both its newspaper and online presences at the end of the year.
One less news source means some stories will slip by unreported, and other papers, pushed to better journalism by the sting of competition, may grow more complacent.
We're in the midst of a sea change of some kind. The outcome is far from certain.
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The East Valley Tribune was part of Freedom Newspapers and thus a less-famous sibling of the Sacramento Bee and the Orange County Register.
If you’ve seen the Register lately you’d probably have noticed three things: it’s very thin, layout is a kludge (the mix or serif and sans serif typefaces for headlines is like a poke in eye), and to call coverage and reporting mediocre would be generous.
I wonder if, without tremendously crappy papers like the Register, Freedom could have kept the Trib afloat until it was again profitable what dragged the Trib down. Also interesting is whether or not Freedom Newspapers’ blatantly ideological stance–they make the Chicago Tribune’s leftish position and support for Daley and by extension Obama look enlightened by comparison–contributed to the decline.
This is the chain that would send professional Ayn Rand fan and maybe-philosopher Tibor Machan around to “educate” staff when they got editorial stances “wrong.” That sort of micromanagement is bad enough, but if someone sent someone from far outside the analytic tradition and its associated honesty and humility–and who aside from elderly libertarian ideologues gives a rat’s ass about Tibor Machan?–to “educate” me I’d feel my intelligence being insulted with each word. As an occasional reader I felt that, too; the opinions page was dominated by the trashiest and most reactionary sort of libertarianism.
East Valley Tribune was better than their California papers in this regard, but it certainly had its bad days.
Wow, that bites. With all their critical acclaim lately over the “Rigged Privilege” series, one would have thought they were on an upswing.