All around, daily print newspapers are in decline. For most of them, there will be no more than several years of life left. By 2020, almost all of them will be gone. (See, along these lines, Clay Shirky’s Last Call: The end of the printed newspaper.)
If a newspaper is at ideological odds with ordinary residents of its community, there’s even more difficulty. That’s the problem that Lee Enterprises has with the State Journal in Madison, and it’s the smaller Gazette‘s problem in Janesville: self-professed conservative papers in blue cities.
One can make a go of it swimming against the community tide only if one writes and reasons very well. A paper’s minority views can even be an advantage, if those views are powerfully argued.
For the Gazette, however, there’s a triple burden: (1) their community – both left and right – mostly rejects their version of insiders’ pro-government conservatism, (2) their version is ideologically flimsy, in any event, and (3) the newspaper expresses that flimsy, minority viewpoint poorly.
Another example comes from the Gazette‘s Monday editorial (subscription req’d), Our Views: SHINE continues hopeful march toward medical isotopes factory.
Janesville has spent over nine million in grants and loan guarantees for a medical isotope project, and the federal gov’t another twenty five million, but here’s how the Gazette‘s editorialist defends that project against charges of corporate welfare:
Critics label these city and federal incentives nothing more than corporate welfare.
Nonsense. Company officials have projected they will have invested $180 million in construction, equipment and regulatory costs by the time the plant opens, and they hope that happens in 2017. SHINE figures it will generate $200 million in revenues in its first year.
Leaving aside that the $180-million figure is a mere projection, and that this projection may not be free of government-provided assistance, one still confronts this question:
Why is it ‘nonsense’ to contend that the thirty-four million from the city and federal government is an example of corporatism (that is, corporate welfare)?
If anything, the one-hundred and eighty million that SHINE contends it will raise (even if all from private funds) only makes stronger the case against local and federal funding: if the idea should be so strong as backers contend, why can’t SHINE raise all of its capital privately?
Either public money is superfluous, because the project is sound, or investors have legitimate doubts, and want taxpayers to allay that skepticism with tens of millions in subsidies for the project.
The additional private investment does not negate the charge against the public expenditures. It makes that public investment more questionable.
SHINE is getting a huge subsidy that ordinary people wouldn’t get even fractionally, all in the promise of producing a sliver of the jobs that GM did, for a more elite group of medical workers than any factory in the auto industry ever employed.
If the Gazette writes about a $180-million possibility, do they think that Janesville’s residents won’t notice an actual $34-million subsidy?
Deriding criticism of that subsidy as ‘nonsense’ is merely another example of weak or lazy reasoning – it’s easier to use the word in criticism than to justify the expense by argument.
And that, really, is why that paper is in so much trouble: at odds with its community, wedded to a selfish defense of powerful insiders, and unable even to explain that defense either powerfully or cleverly.