Examining The Health Of “Another Member Of Your Family”

Word comes of the declining health of a member of the extended family.

First, some background.

Those of us who grew up in the area and attended the elementary schools of the Greater Johnstown School District in the 1960s got periodic news reel films courtesy of the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat that would be played in class to keep us up on world events. The recurring tag line repeated by the narrator was “The Tribune-Democrat, another member of your family.”

Back in those days, it sort of rang true. Everyone I knew subscribed to the newspaper. Many of my friends made a few bucks delivering the paper, and would try to recruit me or my brother to fill in for them when they went on vacation.

There were both morning editions and afternoon editions, but none on Sunday. That all changed in 1977.

My dad always got the afternoon edition and I was astounded to read the morning edition that my maternal grandmother subscribed to and find no scores on west coast Pirates games or other sporting events– too late for the press run. But if you got the afternoon edition, you got the complete results, albeit with a delay of maybe eight hours.

Remember, this was an era well before the internet, 24-hour sports cable networks, or cable news networks, or anything other than traditional broadcast networks. The evening news was half an hour of local stuff and half an hour of network feed.

The newspaper was a vital source of national as well as local news and sports.

These days, not so much. The aforementioned explosion of cable television outlets, the growth of the internet, including outlets such as Twitter that are fountains of breaking news, and changes in demography have rendered newspapers to a tiny, declining shell of what they once were.

For example, I’ve been told that on a night not too long ago, the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat ran off just 10,000 print editions. That floored me. When I left the Tribune-Democrat sports department in 1994, circulation was in the low 50,000s.

When I first started working at the TD in 1974, I recall circulation numbers being talked about in the low 60,000s.

Memories of those days stand in stark contrast to current conditions. The newsroom back then was staffed day and night with reporters, editors and sports personnel. That was true of the composing and press rooms, too, as well as the circulation people.

There were times I reported for work while on the news staff and had a hard time finding a desk or typewriter (yes, we wrote on manual typewriters) to use.

The last time I visited the newsroom, even before the great COVID work-from-home craze, it was virtually abandoned. Same with other departments.

There used to be a photo gallery in the main floor lunch room with mug shots of all the employees. I wonder if they just bagged that now that the multi-panel display could be reduced substantially.

Expanding on newspaper circulation, those figures are a bit hard to find. I did some internet search and found a wikipedia entry for the Tribune-Democrat citing a daily circulation figure of 20,000 from way back in February 2007.

I understand that newspapers now have digital subscriptions and print on fewer days, so the print number would understate the total circulation. I can’t find any separate estimate for digital only subscriptions, but I’m fairly confident that would be a relatively small number compared to the print total, at least for The Tribune-Democrat.

Any way you slice it, The Tribune-Democrat, as another member of your family, is about as vibrant as Joe Biden.

Many current workers fear the place, now owned by yet another out-of-town chain, won’t be around in present form long enough for them to reach normal retirement.

Media retrenchment in general is only gaining steam. From ESPN axing copious amounts of staff, to CNN lightening its load, to the hallowed New York Times bagging its entire sports department, news is not good for media outlets.

It’s even worse for print media. There was a time when the smaller newspapers were thought to be relatively immune to the trend because they did not serve areas with enough population/potential circulation to attract national competition.

But rising costs and the willingness of the populace to get their “news” from questionable sources as long as it is free, have combined to hammer circulation.

Hold on to a few hard copies of The Tribune-Democrat. They are likely to be collector’s items in the not-too-distant future.