Interesting decline. So many stories that are in print and on their website are from National wire stories with so little actual local content. Perhaps the next logical progression will be to have one staff in a regional/national location that produces stories for all localities. Wait, already done by the former Statesman owners,USAToday

Please just close the Boise Rag!!! It is now run by a liberal editor from back east.

The Boise Rag is printed in Nampa by the Press Tribune so just kill the Statesman and send us all the Press Tribune – we will certainly get more news and better journalism!

Timesgroup quoted the Don Day blog.

Ah, nostalgia!

My first paying job was as a carrier (newspaperboy) for the Idaho Statesman – AFTERNOON edition! I’d dash from East Jr. High to my pickup point, just a block away, and deliver 40 or 50 thin papers. It was 35 cents a week, or 45 cents if you wanted the Sunday morning paper, too. (A buddy at East had a downtown paperboy job – standing on the street corner, selling papers to passers-by. It seemed glamorous, but he didn’t have a fixed customer base, like me.)

It was a great learning experience… I learned that there were consequences to not doing your job properly, and that a few grownups would “stiff” a kid out of hard-earned pay. (I paid for my papers – I only earned if I collected. A couple times my trust in adult promises to pay me “at the end of the month” was ill-placed.)

It was always a treat to visit the Statesman building – at the corner of 6th and Bannock (the building with the shiny white marble facade). They had a “newsroom” just like in the movies – rows of desks, and guys with their sleeves rolled up and green visors, clattering away on manual typewriters. LOTS of cigarette smoke hanging in the air.

In the back – huge clanking cast-iron presses that looked 100 years old. But what was most fascinating for me was the typesetters – guys who would line up the cast-lead letters (backwards) into sentences and paragraphs. Photos etched onto a lead plate. They even had their own foundry – a big tub of molten lead, and molds for the letters and numbers in multiple sizes. Very “analog”! The transistor (and later the Internet) sure changed everything.

If you’d told me the mighty Statesman would shrivel to a shell of its former self over the next 50 years, I never would’ve believed it!

Erico49 is right! When they built their new headquarters on Curtis Road it seemed the height of foolishness! That was the west edge of town – just boonies, all the way to Meridian!

The Idaho Statesman hasn’t been a purveyor of real news in a very long time, if ever. They are an advertisement delivery device, that bats for the rich folks.
Hopefully they just shut down and die.
My only source of real news for a very long time has been the Boise Guardian.

The Assessed Value for the property is 5.5 million.
Maybe the asking price is just too high? We’ll see….

Brings light to the other ongoing problem of county assessments being too low for many properties.

Development land that is listed as cheap “Grazing Land” is at the top of that list.

While not a new occurrence, I was always concerned that the newspaper that historically was the main source of information and has the charge to inform the community, also felt the need to endorse politicians and ballot measures each voting cycle. There is not a reasonable separation of the newspaper and their editorial board, especially when the candidates then market their support by the paper.

This has moved into TV news, I can not watch any national news service since they are more concerned with telling me how to believe rather than giving me information and letting me come to my own conclusions. They are entertainers, not journalists.

I feel bad for the employees of the newspaper industry, but not for the industry itself which is a victim of its own demise and failure to adapt.

I predict a change of location for the local paper also comes with another downsizing, and reliance on remote third-party content. How long until the paper’s news is just an app for local government and business to upload their press releases as “news”, then have some AI auto-generate a headline and by-line.

In defense of the Statesman to a point. They have a few good reporters (even journalists). Sven Berg and Cynthia Sewell come to mind. I can’t think of anyone in local TV news who is in the same category.

EDITOR NOTE–We agree on the reporters. A close read of the original post will show we were pretty fair in the report and note it is the times we live in–for the most part– that cause the decline of the printed word. Every community NEEDS a good newspaper.

I saw this coming ever since the printing press was removed and the Nampa paper took over printing operations. I used to take walks by this building when I worked nearby – the Statesman parking lot was almost always empty and you could just feel the sense of melancholy radiating from the building, even from the outside.

My mother-in-law worked at the Statesman before the age of computers (and obviously before Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and the feeling back then was that if you worked at the newspaper, your job was safe because “everyone needs the paper.” If only they could see how wrong they were.

I think that the Guardian hit the nail on the head with a prime reason why the Statesman is going the way of the dinosaur. Why should I have to pay up to $2 a day to read regurgitated PR spin from ACHD, City of Boise, State of Idaho, etc. when I could just get that same spin for free from the local TV and radio stations which pretty much do the exact same thing. There is little-to-no effort from any local media outlet to dig beneath the headlines… costs too much money. It’s better to just copy and paste.

Fraudulent “news” outlets like the Idaho Statesman were just given a new chance at life.

Late Friday, buried in the NDAA legislation Obama signed, was the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act”.

The Washington Post has primed the American public to equate “Russian Propaganda” with “fake news” (despite admitting after the fact that their own report was essentially fake”) while the US media has indoctrinated the public to assume that any information which is not in compliance with the official government narrative, or dares to criticize the establishment, is also “fake news” and thus falls under the “Russian propaganda” umbrella, the scene is now set for the US government to legally crack down on every media outlet that the government deems to be “foreign propaganda.”

Just like that, the US Ministry of Truth is officially born.

How long till the Boise Gaurdian gets labeled “fake news” due to its noncompliance with Team Dave news releases?