We’ve eight days until this gubernatorial election, and it’s been quite the battle.
However happy or sad you’ve been with ’14, here’s one thing you likely won’t notice in ’18: newspapers’ political endorsements.
That’s because print newspapers either won’t be around by ’18, they won’t be making endorsements by ’18, or their few remaining readers won’t be looking at those papers for more than inserts and sports coverage.
Of the two big papers in the state, the Journal Sentinel no longer endorses, but the State Journal still does.
After the ’12 recall election, the JS abandoned endorsements, disingenuously contending that they thought endorsements were less helpful than simply writing about particularly policies. They may be less helpful, but that’s not why the paper abandoned them, as just about anyone connected with the paper will admit in conversation: reader ire at unpopular endorsements is too hard for a financially fragile enterprise to bear.
(Now that Journal Communications will be a newspaper-only group, and their broadcast television and radio stations will go with Scripps, they’ll be even more vulnerable. The papers proudly announced that on the day they are split off they will be leaving debt-free. Their first day of independence will be the only day that newspaper group is ever again debt-free. )
The State Journal still makes endorsements, but one can guess that each and every endorsement weights on Lee’s finance team.
Only a few years ago, either paper would have made endorsements freely, whether popular or unpopular with readers, and still have been confident of ongoing readership. If there’s any paper in America that sanguine today (except perhaps the Wall Street Journal), then I’m not familiar with it.
Closer to home, local dailies face the same problem, but they probably have even less chance of survival as dailies than does the JS. (What they do about endorsements won’t change their fate: a man falling from a thousand-foot cliff wouldn’t appreciably worsen his prospects by smoking a cigarette on the way down.)
Have 2014 newspaper endorsements been irritating for you? Cheer up: you’ll have one less thing about which to worry the next time around.
It used to be so predictable, as to who would endorse whom. Now; not. Print papers don’t want to antagonize their dwindling print subscribers. Especially, the State’s two largest papers…So sad…no longer advocates. In the case of the Journal Sentinel, a Major Fail. Journal radio broadcast is a sham. Does The GOP (Grand Old Putrid) pay WTMJ for air time..?