ETN presses stop Sunday night
Example of Goss press
Barring some last minute second thoughts or major technology glitch, the big Goss presses at West 12th and Sassafras will go silent late Sunday night as the Times Publishing Co. outsources the printing and packaging of the daily newspaper to the Butler Eagle, effective Monday.
If Friday morning’s (8/19) edition is any indication, get ready for stale news on your doorstep or vending machine. The printing arrangement with presses two hours away forces an early deadline in the news room. This really hurts when it comes to sports. Forget about missing west coast scores, the ETN will have a hard time covering any game past 10:30 or 11:00 PM.
Case in point is Thursday night’s Eagles vs. Steelers preseason contest; the battle for Pennsylvania bragging rights. The game was over and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a full story up on their website by 11:14 PM, ten minutes before the late night TV sportscasts. Hours later, when you picked up the Friday morning Erie paper, a scan of the sports section resulted in only this:
Thursday’s Eagles-Steelers game did not finish before press time. For a game report, go to GoErie.com/sports.
Really? Quarter after 11 is past deadline?
Ugh. I know newspapers across the country are in pain, and the Erie paper has been doing better than most through innovative and creative ideas, but this outsourcing of the presses and the consequential diminishing of the ink-on-paper product is a significant step backwards.
Of course the real tragedy lies in the loss of 40 family sustaining skilled-labor jobs. The irony remains that the Erie Times was created by pressmen involved in a labor dispute with their former employer. Now, at the end of a five-year labor contract with today’s pressmen no renewal was offered. They’ll hit the big red button on the Goss for the final time this weekend then hit the streets.
Yes, indeed, the future is in the digital online streams. We talk about it everyday. But for now, don’t the 52,000 daily paying purchasers of the NEWSPAPER and all those advertisers deserve better than this sad state of affairs?
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Our genial host Joel asked “…don’t the 52,000 daily paying purchasers of the NEWSPAPER and all those advertisers deserve better than this sad state of affairs?”
Fair question. I think this gets to the crux of the matter of much of what we’ve discussed here lately.
In this context of business (as obviously opposed to say, interpersonal relations like marriage), what exactly does “deserve” mean ?
Do I deserve a live newscast instead of one which has been prerecorded on a local TV station ? Do I deserve local news to be produced and transmitted in HD instead of SD ?
I find the dictionaries are not much help here. Basically, the ones I checked seem to equate ‘deserve’ with ‘to be worthy of’.
But I’m not sure it is correct to over-personalize that.
(Although some folks like Mitt Romney do feel that ‘corporations are people’….)
Perhaps ‘deserve’ in a free market economy really means ‘willing to pay for it’ ?
Once again, I am not sure that is such a bad thing. To the contrary, look at what has happened to command-and-control central non-freemarket economies like the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, etc. We are going through some tough times now ourselves, a great deal of which I attribute to government intervention and entitlement like LBJ’s “Great Society” in the USA which imbued terms like ‘deserve’ in the popular vernacular. One needs only to turn on the nightly news and look at what is happening in England to see the result.
So in answer to your inquiry, I’m just not sure. It is an interesting question though.
Here’s the ETN’s own reporting on the shutdown. As we report above, the Monday Aug. 22nd paper was the last to be printed in Erie:
Erie Times-News press goes quiet
We “deserve” a free market where we can “vote” with our remote controls and with our wallets. If we don’t like the pre-recorded newscasts, we can just push a button and try something different. If we don’t like the “new” Times we can quit buying it. Personally, I am encouraged that TPC has taken the necessary steps to ensure that the printed pages continue to publish daily and provide the community news we have come to expect. I have many avenues to take for the late sports scores but have few sources for great community news.
By my calculations, about nine column inches per page have been lost from the ETN with the new size from the new printer. I don’t believe any pages were added, so the paper now has a smaller news hole.
That is a pretty significant reduction in size and service to the community.
The Growth of Newspapers Across the U.S.: 1690-2011 (an interactive visulization)
http://www.stanford.edu/group/ruralwest/cgi-bin/drupal/visualizations/us_newspapers