When I was a Cub Scout, in the early ’60s, we toured the Statesman facility (6th and Bannock at the time). Lots of noise! The newsroom was stereotypical – ugly gray metal desks lined up edge to edge, guys with green sun-visors, clattering away on Underwood typewriters… the air heavy with cigarette smoke. Teletype machines going “chunk-chunk-chunk…”
The production facility was more interesting, for an 8 year old kid. Typesetters composing a page using lead-cast letters from a dingy wooden matrix of boxes. A cauldron of melted lead, for making more letters… the mammoth presses with huge newsprint rolls. Amazing stuff!

My first job was delivering the AFTERNOON edition of the Statesman; I snagged my papers a block away from my school – East Jr. High. Later I graduated to morning edition… and it was a rare household, that didn’t take the morning paper. (35 cents a week, or 45 cents if you wanted Sunday.)

Times have sure changed! I bet it’s been 10 years since we had a newspaper subscription. Probably haven’t watched news on TV for 2 years.

Unfortunately, the LOCAL news seems to mostly be composed by PR staffers from government agencies nowadays. And, our “news outlets,” by and large, all have an agenda of some sort. It may be harder than ever before, to filter the real news and the fake news.

Tom. Try Shortyz app if you have a tablet. Bikeboy…with tv news you are missing endless weather reports and constant hyping of their apps. But hey, they CARE.

I have some bad news for you Mr Guardian….The once great Idaho newspaper passed on many years ago….

My last renewal subscription offer from the Statesman came close to $500 a year. That’s been one of the problems — the offers to renew varied so widely from individual customer to customer that it took on the aura of negotiating a purchase from a rug merchant in a Middle Eastern bazaar … only the voice you were talking to on the telephone originated in the Philippines. The prices got lower the longer you stayed on the line and haggled. I won’t do that. Embarrassing. Newspapers that formerly earned most of their revenue from advertising and treated circulation as a “loss leader” (keeping subscription costs low, in order to deliver a high volume of subscribers to potential advertisers, have had to inverse the ratio — now, circulation prices have gone sky-high in order to compensate for the fall-off in ad revenue. The pandemic has only made things worse. It will be a sad day if we lose a newspaper, regardless of political point-of-view on the editorial page. We’re already paying the price of the fall-off in investigative reporting and day-to-day “go to meetings” gumshoe reporting in places like City Hall and county government. When the disinfecting glare of the public spotlight is removed from government and how the public’s business is being conducted,, bad things happen. Typically it’s been daily newspapers that have served that function in American society for more than 200 years. We can’t rely on shady bloggers and social media “tweets” to perform this vital function.

I used to believe we were in an over-information age. Then I believed we were in a dis-information age. Now I believe we are entering a non-information age. Boise is potentially losing our principal daily newspapers that perform a vital, watchdog function on government. Our “alternative weekly” does little more than review movies and the latest fish taco food carts. Local TV news has mostly become “happy talk”, covering the latest “walk-a-thon” or charity drive, and helping us “feel good about ourselves”. And “bloggers” (such as they are) don’t typically show up at meetings of the planning commission or school board for the hard, unbiased, factual reporting. Investigative reporting has become a lost art. Now (as witnessed at January’s “housing bonus ordinance” hearing of the Boise City Council) future zoning actions governed by this sweeping new change mostly won’t require public hearings; they’ll just be approved in-house, by staff, outside of the glare of public scrutiny and monitoring. Increasingly, in this new, non-information age we are entering, the public’s business will be done in private. That’s when the problems, the deal-making, and the malfeasance will accelerate … and we, as ordinary citizens, won’t even know about it. “The truth will set you free” will be just a vestige of that pre-Internet era when we actually knew more about what was happening in our community than today, when we know far less.

Private equity and/or the demand for profits strikes again, right? Not everything needs to be excessively profitable, and not everything needs to be parted out and bled out for dollars. A “modern” newspaper represents, ideally, an impartial source for facts that I cannot personally gather. I don’t have the time and energy to attend school board meetings, ACHD meetings, Ada County meetings, Boise City meetings, the Legislature, and so on and so forth.
Obviously there are two problems here: making sure the information provided is factual, and making sure the information provided is useful. I gave up on the Statesman because its corporate owners have reduced the value to me–there just isn’t enough latitude or column inches (or bodies!) provided to make it worth the money. And this makes me very, very sad. Certainly there is a need for wire service stories for things that the public needs to be informed of, but I can get those anywhere. Fill me up with the local stuff!
I hope the Idaho Press (I’m old enough I still want to call it the Nampa Free Press and Caldwell Tribune) keeps making a go of it. When I look at the talent they’ve brought in, and their apparent commitment to journalism over increased profits, I’m excited.
Also, a serious shoutout to forums like this one, BoiseDev.com, and similar that are helping fill the gaps. Good work guys!

It is sad to see the slow death of a venerable paper. I imagine that the failure comes from owners, recent past and present. Then the Idaho Press hired several top reporters and drove a nail in the Statesman. Now the reporting is weak and a day old. I still take it in digital format but read it less and less. This Times News and Idaho Press report the news timely and far more comprehensibly.

The Statesman’s local stories are 2 days old, minimum, and many are week-old reprints from WaPo, NYT, Spokesman-Review.

Is anyone noticing the major changes in appearance at our local newspaper: different fonts, shaded comic strips, LARGER advertisements, wildly different size of TV sports schedule?

Trying to fill the space? Getting positioned for ‘PDF paper’? It’s coming, very soon.