Another newspaper that once boasted of winning journalism’s top prize is heading for the crapper.
How do I know that? Because the Amarillo Globe-News has informed its subscribers they no longer will have what is left of the newspaper tossed on their yards the day it is published — in Lubbock! Ohhh, no! It’s going to be mailed to subscribers via the Postal Service. The paper is terminating its carrier service.
Stick with me for a moment as I explain why this sounds like the death knell peeling across the Texas Panhandle.
A few years ago, the Globe-News shut down its presses and farmed the job of printing the paper to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, about 120 miles south of Amarillo on Interstate 27. That meant the deadlines for getting “late-breaking news” into the G-N would be pushed back. The paper needed time to get the pages assembled and then shipped to Lubbock, where it would end up on printing plates.
Bottom line? There would be no late-breaking news in the Globe-News.
Now they have added the mailing element to a newspaper that has been stripped of its viability because it cannot report news that happens at midnight.
I once worked for a newspaper in Oregon City, Ore., that around 1983 decided to start mailing its copies to subscribers. I left the paper in early 1984 headed for the Golden Triangle region of Texas. The experiment failed miserably. The paper folded in 1988 and vanished into the void.
A similar experiment is about to commence in Amarillo around the third week of July, as I understand it.
All I can do these days is sigh and bemoan what has happened to a news organization that once displayed a Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service it won in 1961 for exposing government corruption in the region. That, folks, is the highest honor a newspaper can earn. The Pulitzer Board is still making that award, but in Amarillo and in the Panhandle, it is a distant memory now.
The days of great daily community journalism are long gone.
What does mailing the paper mean to those who still read the Amarillo Globe-News? It means they now will get a sheet of newsprint that is worth even less than it was before.
I detest bringing bad news to my friends in the Panhandle, but the end is approaching … rapidly.