Before…
The painfully long slide of Lawrence Journal World took a giant leap last weekend…
From appearances, the 108 year -old newspaper of record for Lawrence – proud home of the University of Kansas and its Jayhawk sports teams – is hanging by a thread.
Over the past weekend its remaining die hard survivors suffered the indignity of an embarrassing move from the Journal World‘s proud, high profile home in downtown Lawrence to a cheesy, nondescript strip center just off Interstate 70.
No longer will its reporters and interns freely roam the heart of the city by foot as it has for decades. Instead they’ll have to drive for miles from an industrial area near the city’s outskirts and play parking meter poker with shoppers and KU students.
It’s been a downhill trajectory for the Journal World since hiring me briefly to write a weekly column in 2012 until it was unloaded three years ago by publisher Dolph Simons, Jr.
Most halfway high profile writers and editors have quietly gone for dirt naps or fled to faraway cities like Boston.
After…
Take longtime sports editor/columnist Tom Keegan, who hasn’t even been gone long enough to update his Wikipedia page for his columnist gig at the Boston Herald.
Having lived in Lawrence the past handful of years, I can tell you that local news and information outside of the Journal World is pretty much a word-of-mouth proposition.
And it’s getting worse by the week.
Should the newspaper curl up and die, there’ll be little local news outside of downtown shootings and KU sports stories covered by Kansas City television stations and what’s left of the Star.
On top of all that, the newspaper will now have to split a small office space with a local home security retailer.
Yes, it’s come to that,..
Back in the early 2000s, the Simons bought up a bunch of local weekly newspapers in Bonner Springs, Basehor, Tonganoxie, Eudora, DeSoto, Baldwin and maybe one or two more. All of them, with the exception of Tonganoxie, no longer exist due to the Simons’ ineptness.
They basically turned them all into “regional” news sources, instead of covering the cities they were based in. The worst was when the Bonner and Basehor paper offices were moved to Shawnee, and they stopped publishing those papers. They started up the Shawnee paper and force-fed it to those communities, but it had zero to little news about them. The Shawnee paper finally closed shop in the last year or two.
It is sad that those small town papers bit the dust, but the way print pubs have been going, it’s hard to say that if the Journal World (or the Star, for example, in the case of the Olathe newspaper) hadn’t purchased them, they’d still be around.
That said, if local owners were running the show, they might have had a greater incentive to find ways to keep them running.
I can tell you this, if the Journal World bites the dust, actual news is gonna be pretty hard to come by unless some halfway legit news phoenix rises from the ashes – and not just some kind of rumor machine a la Tony’s KC.
Could happen, but things are not looking good at present.
Meanwhile, little old Columbia MO manages to keep two newspapers in business…weird
Definitely, Guy…
Then again, if a locally owned pub can do the kind of job that the Platte County Landmark does and deliver a truly well balanced, well written menu of often cutting edge local news…difficult as it is, who’s to say it can’t be done!