Star-Ledger Death Watch: Part 1 (meaning this one's for as long as its death rattle takes)
There is a paper in Jersey which is the state's largest in terms of circulation and traditionally also the most financially successful. And while it's never been a great newspaper, at times it's been, oh, pretty good. It's certainly always been fairish. Enough so to erase fond memories (in all but the most sentimentally inclined, I'd suggest) of the long-gone Newark Evening News. And still usually better than its closest rival, The Record, no matter that the Record clearly does several things better.
Sometimes, admittedly, the Star-Ledger has been able to successfully rear itself up on its little hind legs and actually display some evidence of both editorial passion and influence,
But those days are almost surely long gone and the Star-Ledger is clearly a dying newspaper. A vapid daily read, too, staffed and produced by hacks. It is never a good sign when it takes longer to read Friday's edition than Sunday's, than to read Monday's, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturday's editions all put together.
Owned as it is by the Newhouse family via its Advance subsidiary, what will finally kill the Star-Ledger is the decision by the Newhouses to, as is happening with both its "signature" paper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and with its Post-Standard in Syracuse, NY, drastically cut to a three times weekly publication schedule. This process is well underway in Louisiana, has been announced for Syracuse. Most likely it's also been discussed for the Star-Ledger, though you'd never know it from those grinning nitwits who staff the Star-Ledger's subscription tents at assorted local crafts fairs and food events. Asking them about the Star-Ledger's future always proves useless, and it's only in their partial defense that these mere subscription sellers (who never quite know what to say when I ask if my subscription would somehow be "extended" or the charges for it altered if the paper went to a thrice-weekly frequency) turn out not to actually work for the Star-Ledger itself. They really should be better informed. And their programmed chirpiness about what they insist on terming "New Jersey's greatest newspaper" just makes me want to kick them.
What's actually wrong with the Star-Ledger?
A cynic might instead ask (especially given how little real coverage is given local school sports there these days, which used to be the paper's bread and butter, yet is done so much better by the Record, nowadays), hey, what's right? There simply is no longer any area in which the Star-Ledger can be said to offer superb, anyway wide-ranging and authoritative, coverage.
For me personally, the conviction that the Star-Ledger was in its death throes began, oddly enough, with sports columnist Jerry Izenberg's retirement from the paper some years ago. Now, Izenberg is a very bad, very over-emotional writer, someone whose baldly inappropriate metaphors cannot be so much described as "mixed" (to be kind in the extreme) as they can the verbal equivalent of some execrable 30-ingredient version of soggy coleslaw. But his retirement, after several decades of yeoman service, was prominently treated by his newspaper bosses as if it were the twilight of a truly great era of sports journalism, as the passing of a true giant from off the cheapo bleacher seats.
All well and good, you might say. Surely the paper was entitled to hail and send off in grand fashion one of its obviously most loyal "old sweats." But then, Izenberg never actually "retired" in a complete sense. Instead, the giant wanted to keep hanging around and mangling the English language, and so the Star-Ledger slapped him with the terribly awkward sobriquet of "columnist emeritus"(the Star-Ledger is so lazily shameless that it kept attaching this title to Izenberg for way too many years, only in the last year or so finally dropped this embarassingly awful usage) and he thus continued to appear on a semi-regular basis. (No, he couldn't just shut up and try writing a memoir.) While this has allowed Izenberg to continue to get paid trips to, among other events, the Super Bowls, it has not represented the sort of sports journalism one looks forward to reading. Which Izenberg has never really been capable of anyway. So his continued writing for the paper may be nice for him, otherwise merely establishes that the Star-Ledger would prefer to drag out one of its most reliable and long-term (albeit supposedly retired) hacks from time to time rather than, say (here's a bright idea!), actually develop some new writing talent for its sports department.
I go on so about Izenberg only because his career at the Star-Ledger seems a reasonable example of the editorial "sloth virus" which has infected the paper for so long. Another proof of this is that the Star-Ledger pays so little apparent attention to copy editing, thus conveys a certain contemptuousness on a daily basis to the grammatical niceties of our mother tongue. There has literally, for example, never been a day during the last 5 years when I haven't noticed multiple misuses of "it's" and "its." (True newspaper vets, wherever they worked, will recall instead days in their own careers when they were made to tremble at the mere approach of a veteran copy editor.) Well, at the dear old Ledger (let's be casual from here on) nobody trembles.
And this has always been demonstrated most clearly to me by the writings and beloved-at-the-Ledger status of Izenberg (in public, that is, I've always wondered how less showy scribes there took to working with the guy), who got away with so much for so long. A lot of the Ledger's unfamiliarity with the proper use of three letter words beginning with "i" and continuing with "t" and "s" seems of course to be centered on its sports section. But hardly all of it. And I will gladly send the munificent sum of $5 to anyone out there who can show me three consecutive issues of the Ledger from anytime over the last ten years where the use of those three letters in a three-letter word was consistently and entirely accurate.
There is so much to note about why and how the Ledger is in rapid, fatal decline that this item can only scratch the surface. So this just-launched series will continue for as long as necessary. This is a newspaper, after all, which apparently retains full-time TV and movie and music columnists, even has begun a weekly "New Jersey authors" column, all the while clearly slashing to the bone its actual news coverage. There is always room, however, for yet another drearily over-analytic Springsteen concert review or a Boss-related item. (I swear, the Ledger's critics could find deep meaning in Springsteen blowing his nose, they all write like English majors on meth because they face a thesis deadline.) But never any real look at the dire indeed problems of, to cite just one urban horror in this state, of Camden. Perhaps the Ledger, with its obvious large-scale commitment to its NJ.com web operation, just aspires to constant triviality? I often find so many of those "Jersey voices" on NJ.com to, rather, simply sound like pitifully predictable squeaking.
Anyone who wishes to send me their own complaints or observations about the Ledger, too, feel free. Especially Ledger vets or current employees, whose anonymity is guaranteed. Surely, as well, some out there have good Ledger-related gossip to share.
All well and good, you might say. Surely the paper was entitled to hail and send off in grand fashion one of its obviously most loyal "old sweats." But then, Izenberg never actually "retired" in a complete sense. Instead, the giant wanted to keep hanging around and mangling the English language, and so the Star-Ledger slapped him with the terribly awkward sobriquet of "columnist emeritus"(the Star-Ledger is so lazily shameless that it kept attaching this title to Izenberg for way too many years, only in the last year or so finally dropped this embarassingly awful usage) and he thus continued to appear on a semi-regular basis. (No, he couldn't just shut up and try writing a memoir.) While this has allowed Izenberg to continue to get paid trips to, among other events, the Super Bowls, it has not represented the sort of sports journalism one looks forward to reading. Which Izenberg has never really been capable of anyway. So his continued writing for the paper may be nice for him, otherwise merely establishes that the Star-Ledger would prefer to drag out one of its most reliable and long-term (albeit supposedly retired) hacks from time to time rather than, say (here's a bright idea!), actually develop some new writing talent for its sports department.
I go on so about Izenberg only because his career at the Star-Ledger seems a reasonable example of the editorial "sloth virus" which has infected the paper for so long. Another proof of this is that the Star-Ledger pays so little apparent attention to copy editing, thus conveys a certain contemptuousness on a daily basis to the grammatical niceties of our mother tongue. There has literally, for example, never been a day during the last 5 years when I haven't noticed multiple misuses of "it's" and "its." (True newspaper vets, wherever they worked, will recall instead days in their own careers when they were made to tremble at the mere approach of a veteran copy editor.) Well, at the dear old Ledger (let's be casual from here on) nobody trembles.
And this has always been demonstrated most clearly to me by the writings and beloved-at-the-Ledger status of Izenberg (in public, that is, I've always wondered how less showy scribes there took to working with the guy), who got away with so much for so long. A lot of the Ledger's unfamiliarity with the proper use of three letter words beginning with "i" and continuing with "t" and "s" seems of course to be centered on its sports section. But hardly all of it. And I will gladly send the munificent sum of $5 to anyone out there who can show me three consecutive issues of the Ledger from anytime over the last ten years where the use of those three letters in a three-letter word was consistently and entirely accurate.
There is so much to note about why and how the Ledger is in rapid, fatal decline that this item can only scratch the surface. So this just-launched series will continue for as long as necessary. This is a newspaper, after all, which apparently retains full-time TV and movie and music columnists, even has begun a weekly "New Jersey authors" column, all the while clearly slashing to the bone its actual news coverage. There is always room, however, for yet another drearily over-analytic Springsteen concert review or a Boss-related item. (I swear, the Ledger's critics could find deep meaning in Springsteen blowing his nose, they all write like English majors on meth because they face a thesis deadline.) But never any real look at the dire indeed problems of, to cite just one urban horror in this state, of Camden. Perhaps the Ledger, with its obvious large-scale commitment to its NJ.com web operation, just aspires to constant triviality? I often find so many of those "Jersey voices" on NJ.com to, rather, simply sound like pitifully predictable squeaking.
Anyone who wishes to send me their own complaints or observations about the Ledger, too, feel free. Especially Ledger vets or current employees, whose anonymity is guaranteed. Surely, as well, some out there have good Ledger-related gossip to share.
A final observation for today
It does seem that the Ledger could not survive without either the revenues from Macy's advertising or from legal notices, which have to be "published" by law and on Mondays and Tuesdays seem to constitute the major printed matter in the paper. But I wonder, couldn't such notices just as easily run on the Web? It is not, after all, as if anyone reads the damn things in the first place for the most part. (They may now, for all the admitted attention I pay.) Is there an assemblyman or state senator out there, one with maybe a grudge against the Ledger, who'd care to investigate this matter more fully?
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