People who subscribed to both the morning and evening papers pretty quickly made the obvious move of canceling one of them – and some of the more stubborn opted to keep the evening paper. But its circulation dropped close enough to the magic number of 100,000 that the company could more readily use that as an excuse to cease publication.
It didn’t create any goodwill, just alienation. In the Baltimore area, many readers staunchly preferred The Evening Sun and resented the moves that first took away its personality and then shut it down. It would have died eventually. But its closing in 1995 was lacking in grace, in respect for the readers. It was a clumsy killing.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Yeah, That's an Iceberg All Right
David Ettlin on the slow dismantling of the Baltimore Sun. (Quote is from the section about the killing of the Evening Sun.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
That's really a shame
(says the woman who still hasn't ordered that subscription to her local daily because she keeps forgetting to do it.)
I mean hypocritical woman. Sorry. Missed the edit.
In Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, we also had a morning and evening paper: Citizen-Journal and Dispatch. The morning Citizen-Journal was the better one, and of course, it was the one to close down. :(
My family got both papers, and one of my earliest lessons in propaganda was comparing the more liberal accounts in the CJ, to the conservative ones in the Dispatch. Particularly about Kent State (which I will be discussing in about 4 days)...
I was amazed at the different emphasis given to events. I was 13, and it was a crash-course in "Politics and Media"...
And it's a crash course that the current generation will probably not get--media consolidation has been going on for years now...
Post a Comment