LOGAN AIRPORT, Boston – I’m on my way home from the
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Journalists Forum , an annual event, co-sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Neiman Foundation, in which journalists from around the country convene to discuss, jointly, the fate of our industry and the fate of American cities. What greeted me at the threshold of my hotel room this morning? USA Today. To anyone who loves cities, it’s a dispiriting doormat. Ever since American cities decided to turn into clones of each other following World War II, plenty of ink has been spilled about the physical homogenization of American cities – the familiar highway strips, tract home developments, big box stores. But for one of the biggest sources of intellectual homogenization, look no further than USA Today, the literary equivalent of the Big Mac. Local newspapers of course have fraught histories. They have often intervened in civic affairs in reprehensible ways. They’ve promoted developments, cheered for sports teams, and started the occasional war. But, at heart, they are dedicated to the prospect that all urban regions have unique stories to tell and that their readers are, in some way, part of those stories. With the demise of many local newspapers and the shrinking of almost all the others, untold stories have been lost and, along with it, civic identity. Reading a local paper makes you a member of a community, or at least a welcome guest. Reading USA Today, you’re nobody nowhere. Some of these lost stories are probably expendable, like sagas of pets that have returned after inexplicable hiatuses. But what of those about local politics, business, and, of course, development? Where in USA Today do those crucial discussions take place? Certainly not in the infographics, or in the teensy paragraphs that it dedicates to each one of the 50 states. In some ways, it makes sense that even the Cambridge Sheraton would serve up USA Today each morning. Travelers who come from all over might not care about the Red Sox and other parochial interests of the Boston Globe. But that’s only if they lack all curiosity and have no desire to engage with the place that they have chosen to visit (not to mention that major papers like the Globe offer plenty of original non-local coverage, or they used to).
[Read More...]