Your host here at PHXated has an interest in the media, and recently wrote a long article on the state of the daily press. The essay, “Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Dying, and Why They Don’t Get Talked About Much,” was printed over two days in Splice Today.

After a day of radio silence, during which I thought no one cared about the subject (and even if they did I’d bloviated too long) a few folks noticed the article and started tweeting about it.

I was happy about the interest that resulted, because it demonstrated to me that serious subjects could still be treated substantively these days, and that people would take the time to read the result. For a few days, life was fun. I was interviewed by the Times and got some nice words from some people who are spending a lot of time figuring out the future of the industry.

Anyway, I just saw that I even got noticed by the Seeing Red AZ blog.

But neither they nor anyone else wondered about the identity of one major character in the piece, an unnamed paper in “one of the very largest cities in the U.S., … in classic flyover territory, a sociological light year away from a major media center.”’

Here’s part of it:

You can see the evidence of it [i.e., what I argue is the press’s thoroughgoing timidity and blandness] in the pages of virtually every daily in the U.S. I live now in one of the very largest cities in the U.S., but it’s in classic flyover territory, a sociological light year away from a major media center. Here’s a list of the headlines that appeared on a recent day on the front cover of the paper’s feature section, including both stories and news squibs:

“Wooden Memories”
“Test your hearing”
“Free burrito for teachers”
“Post office food drive”
“Fight Crohn’s and colitis”
“Mom and Estában”
“Healthful salsa non-guilty pleasure”
“Great gifts for teachers”

The first of those—“Wooden Memories”—was the compelling headline of a big feature about folks who keep old wood-shop projects around the house because … they just can’t bring themselves to get rid of them.

“Wooden Memories”! “Healthful salsa”! It’s obvious from reading down that list of headlines that there was nothing there of remote interest of just about any sentient being. But that’s not what the paper’s editors were aiming for. The point is that there was nothing there that could possibly offend anyone.

Any editor who presided over such a sorry collection of non stories and journalistic Malt-o-Meal at a time when papers should have been fighting to make themselves relevant to readers should of course have been fired.

But, inside newspapers, that’s what is, paradoxically, regarded.

Indeed, the top editor of that paper just got a new job: He was stolen away by another well-known American newspaper, one of the ones currently facing bankruptcy and closure. You’d think a paper in that position would be fighting back. Instead, they turned to a guy who’d overseen the publication of sections like that.