L.A. Examiner Staff reunionFor years now, the debate about whether or not newspapers would survive has been raging, but it has gradually gone from theory to leaning toward fact that they indeed may tank. As tough as it was for me to leave my career in the newsroom, being away has allowed me the detachment to look at it differently. For the past several years, more and more of my friends and ex-colleagues from American newspapers have been shown the door.
That nagging long-running story predicting the death of photojournalism seems to have quieted a bit now that thousands of former newspaper employees are hunting for jobs. Within my time working at newspapers, I had a unique opportunity be part of the good old days. I didn't realize it at the time, but when I began working in a real newsroom those days were the good times. It's more than just reminiscing about assignment adventures and good friends, the companies that I worked for had money to invest and hire despite being notoriously cheap.
I did photo internships at the Pasadena Star-News and then at it's sister paper, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. A good portion of the staffs at the papers were former Los Angeles Examiner photographers, the extinct Hearst-owned competition to the L.A. Times. I loved working with these guys. They were from the golden era of newspapers when there was still a lot of world travel, national and international bureaus, and big budgets. For me a fan of All the President's Men, Fear and Loathing in LasVegas, and that genre, it was all a bit exotic and larger than life. Besides the invaluable practical photography and newspaper photojournalism that they taught me (remember, I was a writer that wanted to be a photographer and switched near the end of college), the had great stories about covering Charles Manson, the night shift at the Examiner, a historic plane crash in Los Angeles and travels.
They were all sort of larger than life to me when I was starting out, and still are to some degree. A number of newspapers have disappeared, merged or transformed into skeletons for their former selves over my career: The Houston Post, San Antonio Light, the San Francisco Examiner, The Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer–and it looks like its only snowballing. Knight-Ridder has gone and its former stars like the Miami Herald are in deep trouble. In Florida we were always a bit hopeful because of the older population there who tended to read newspapers. It seems as they die off, the newspapers are going along with them.
When I was on a news staff, I had the hopeful opinion that newspaper would never die off despite the buzz raising the opposing position. Now, I'm not so sure. Like the rest of the news media, people just are not interested anymore. I was always annoyed that many of the young staff didn't read newspapers, a reflection of the populations. I find it interesting now that some of those people are now my friend on Facebook and have been joining a group called something like Save Newspapers. In symbolic terms, it's a sign that despite hugging that tree, the developer is ultimately going to cut it down and build his development. I'm not sure a movement by newspaper employees probably more interested in saving their jobs is enough to stop newspapers from tanking.
Keeping on the Facebook theme, I've gotten notes and pictures from old colleagues and friends both in and out of newspapers who remind me of a time when we were sort of high on the hog. One of the driving factors motivating me was repeated often by one of my best friends who I started off with in L.A. and has since left newspapers. He would say, 'more and more photographers are graduating every year from better schools than we went to, they're better and younger than us willing to work for less money.' I think that's still true, but with less newspaper jobs and newspapers themselves, I wonder where they'll turn. I've already been in the position several times telling younger aspiring newspaper photographers what it was like in the old days, and I don't even think I'm that old. With more an more newspapers dying and the never-ending tightening of the company belts, I'm sure those stories will be more fascinating to future photographers.
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