A very dark Friday.

By David Hudson on 01/10/2009

Just yesterday, I labeled Marc Cooper's entry "LA Weekly: The Autopsy Report" a "must-read," and now, with sadness and fury, I must note that he's posted a followup: "LA Weekly Kill-Off Continues." The sentence that hurts: "Film writer Ella Taylor's unique and erudite voice on film is being expunged."

As Kevin Roderick notes at LA Observed, the film department at LA Weekly now has a staff of one: Scott Foundas.

What's more, Movie City News is currently tracing a cold wind blowing coast to coast. "Hearst Corp said Friday it will sell the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the oldest morning newspaper in the state of Washington, due to 'unacceptable' level of losses," reports Sue Chang for MarketWatch. Sean Axmaker comments:

Updated through 1/11.

Obviously, this has a direct impact on me - I've been the paper's primary freelance film critic for the past eight years. The paper's longtime staff film critic William Arnold (who has been in the post for over 30 years) will obviously be out of a job, another name for Sean Means's list of "The Departed" (film critics losing their positions) at the Salt Lake Tribune.

But self-pity aside, a lot of career reporters, editors, copyeditors and other folks will be losing their jobs, even if the paper goes web-only, and there are not that many options for them in this climate. For my fellow freelancers, it's one less venue in a very competitive market.

More importantly, Seattle will be losing a major source of news. Papers have been losing readers (mostly younger readers) to the Internet, but there is still no viable web model to replace the kind of aggressive investigative and in-depth reporting that newspapers have provided for centuries. And competition between papers one of the factors that drove such reporting and kept everyone honest. So yes, one way or another, Seattle will go the way of Los Angeles and San Francisco and so many other major metropolitan America cities and become a one-newspaper town.

More via MCN: "Sun-Times Media Group Inc plans to close 12 weekly newspapers in suburban Chicago and has asked its union employees to take a cut in compensation as part of cost-cutting measures brought on by declining advertising revenue," reports the AP. The Chicago Reader's Michael Miner notes that the Sun-Times itself is considering the elimination of "25 to 30 jobs - about a fifth of the editorial jobs remaining at that paper - by outsourcing the copy editing and layout functions, possibly to India.... [T]his company is in terrible shape. It cut itself to the bone to slash 2008 expenses by $50 million and now it's trying to find $50 million more to cut. Its third-quarter losses were $168 million."

Sending jobs overseas is an option that appeals not just to newspapers, of course. Warner Bros "will join a train of other entertainment companies including NBC/Universal and Viacom Inc to cut costs across their operations in the face of tough industry economics and the deepening recession," reports the Los Angeles Times' Claudia Eller. "Although the number and timing of layoffs at Warner is still being determined, it will definitely impact scores of 'back office' workers in management information systems, finance and accounting. Many of those jobs will be outsourced to India and Poland, according to people familiar with the situation."

A couple of observations. While the economic downturn that flew into full-blown crisis mode when the bubble in the financial sector finally burst in September has compounded the challenges facing newspapers and magazines, the forces that may well lead to the demise of print media were set in motion a long, long time ago. The key word in Sean's observation that "there is still no viable web model to replace the kind of aggressive investigative and in-depth reporting that newspapers have provided for centuries" is, of course, "viable." Because there is such a thing as investigative reporting online. As just one example, some have noted that they learn more about where hundreds of billions (and quite possibly, a trillion or more) US taxpayers are going and why from BailoutSleuth than from, say, the New York Times.

We may eventually see a new media landscape roughly divided into two tiers, in which passionate and resourceful investigators make use of practically unlimited space (formerly known as "column inches") and relatively very low operating costs to dig, discover and publish - 21st century Woodsteins, in other words - while aggregators (I prefer to think of us as filterers or even tastemakers; I've heard "curators," but that's a bit too flattering) such as The Daily Beast (or, of course, The Daily) mine and contextualize the need-to-know nuggets. When we find ourselves reading the news on electronic paper or other portable screens, will we also be reading headlines and stories from papers we've known, read, depended on and even identified with in previous years and decades? I'm fairly confident we will. The shakeout is underway; I'm sure we all have at least a handful of papers we hope to see prevail.

In the shorter term, the important argument that Cooper makes in his first entry is that "the slashing and trashing of LA Weekly... was initiated before the current crisis." With bull-headed obstinacy, New Times/Village Voice Media has stuck to a gut-and-run strategy that has depleted, diminished or outright killed off nearly every title it's acquired. What we'll need to keep in mind in the coming weeks and months (let's hope this mess won't last for years) is that some managers will be able to blame the carnage on the current economic meltdown with a certain degree of legitimacy. Others, though, won't. At all.

Updates, 1/11: "Some New York media commentators are beginning to contemplate the previously unthinkable: could the New York Times go under?" Paul Harris in the Observer. Michael Hirschorn's widely discussed piece for the current issue of the Atlantic comes up, too.

"Why Would Anyone Launch a Print Magazine Today?" ask Vanessa Voltolina and Matt Kinsman in Folio.

[Photos: Newspapers; "Citizen Kane," RKO Radio Pictures, 1941]

Tags: Film Criticism, New Media