Union Travails

Dear J-

In a carefully worded statement, the Copley Press announced that it was exploring selling one of its last newspapers (and self-proclaimed flagship), our local Union-Tribune. I’ve ridiculed them in the past, and with good reason: the ousting of their movie reviewer, David Elliot, in favor of the “movie maniac” Lee Grant, better suited to write cereal box copy; the retirement and then un-retirement (at the local weekly free paper, where he’s got a much less restrictive soapbox than the developer-favoring U-T) of the senior business writer, Don Bauder; questionable advertising decisions (hey, let’s make Martin Luther King Day into a mattress ad — “I have a dream” and all, eh?); the late elevation of ridiculously untalented staff writers (Michael Stetz, I’m calling you out here: you slag the zoo for depressing you [OMG it made me think!], your husband-and-wife movie reviews confirm that your mental age is stuck at six, and you choose to make a feature article about riding in a Hummer H2? I don’t advise following the links, unless you enjoy severe nausea, by the way) merely underscores the obvious.

This is a newspaper in trouble. Gimmickry and lack of anything remotely resembling writing skill (Brizzolara, from a wheelchair and no doubt with one arm tied behind his back, can still outwrite any of you fools [here, I swear to someday somehow find the "Friday Night at Dad's" article that made me a fan for life]) make for an uncompelling experience. I read the paper out of dutiful devotion to headlines and comics (this despite the unfortunate continuing inclusion of Garfield and Six Chix), but there’s no particular sense of relief when I look at the paper lately. Yesterday brought front page news — below the fold, but still, front page — that the head of a cancer research institute had advised his staff to discontinue hand-held cell phone use due to preliminary, unpublished research. I’ve never read a worse article in a newspaper that wasn’t called Weekly World News; there’s a reason for scientific magazines and article publishing: knowing your peers will be critiquing methodology and statistical interpretation inevitably leads to careful research and conclusions. Instead, the U-T chooses to inflict essentially rumor and conjecture as fact without citing the volume of inconclusive research already undertaken — it’s as if articles were chosen from e-mails forwarded by one of David Copley’s half-blind, Internet-illiterate uncles who’d never heard of snopes.

Good luck selling this sinking ship. Even Roger Hedgecock, one of the U-T’s frequent targets, couldn’t resist taking a few potshots at the sale, noting that the Copley family have often treated San Diego as their fiefdom, wielding the paper as a bully pulpit from which to legislate by sheer volume and shrillness (not that Hedgecock, with his popular radio show, isn’t the pot calling the kettle black here). Any change can only be positive, honestly.

Mike

P.S. The good folks at the Reader e-mailed me this link to my favorite Brizzolara piece. At long last! Salvation!

Tags: copley, decay, decline, fall, out, paper, roger hedgecock, san diego, selling, terrible newspaper, union tribune