Over the course of the 21 years I owned and wrote for The Journal Newspapers, an opinion column appeared each week under my name (Jeanne Rubba Witzig and then Jeanne Rubba Smith). Mostly, I wrote about local issues, events in my family, people I knew and respected (or not). When the paper moved on to new owners and my column was no longer welcome, I left with a manila envelope filled with favorites of my dear friend, Marie Martin, who carefully cut out the column each week and kept it for... whatever. Not all of them survived and many are yellowed and crumbling. But at the behest of another dear friend, Mary Lou Capella, I'm slowly retyping them and will publish them as blog entries here. This is the first of many.
February 3, 1982
Another Voice is Silent
Requiescat in pace.
Long ago, I was taught that one could not pray for the repose of the soul of an inanimate object, because inanimate objects could not have souls. So, although we mourned for our pets, the deceased birds the cats brought home and even precious dolls that had to be discarded after years of wear, we could not invoke the beautiful, “Rest in Peace” over them. After all, God did not consider a prayer for something that had no soul.
Maybe a requiescat in pace is allowed, though, for an old friend that, although inanimate, had a soul. Maybe we should all be thinking of whispering a quiet prayer for the soul of the Philadelphia Bulletin, for the venerable institution truly had a soul and the spirit of service that kept people informed for nearly 135 years.
To the people who worked for The Bulletin, the end of the publication’s long life meant a drastic change in theirs. Imagine being a 40-year employee at the paper and finding oneself out looking for a job. I don’t particularly mourn for those in top management… somehow they have enough connections in the business to land on their feet every time. The press operator, delivery route man, copywriter, reporter and just plain staffer might have a much harder time finding work.
Those of us in the newspaper world, even on a small scale such as we, looked at The Bulletin as a colorful, well-designed product. In recent years, as the paper scrambled to regain its lost circulation and revamp its image, it took on a bold new look and went sniffing into stories that made it exciting to read. Even then, though, the death rattle was slowly beginning in its throat, as no amount of flashy headlines or in-depth copy could bring back lost advertisers.
The biggest losers will be the readers of the metropolitan Philadelphia area. Right now, it might just seem that the death of The Bulletin simply means one less newspaper on the stands. Wrong. Whether people realize it or not, there is one less voice in the city. Two newspapers with the same owner serve the whole town! It will be impossible for them to compete against each other and it will be impossible for readers to get a true forum on any issue. Now, more than ever, the losers will be the people.
The winners, so-called, are already zeroing in on the carcass. Listen to the ads for the suburban dailies, the ones who slowly strangled The Bulletin, and watch them battle each other for The Bulletin’s readers. By Sunday, two days after the closing was a reality, features that for years were associated with The Bulletin appeared in other papers. Syndicated columnists were picked up and favorite comic strips turned up elsewhere. Radio pitches and TV spots urged readers to continue reading a “big” newspaper by subscribing to the suburban dailies. The corpse wasn’t even cold before the scavengers closed in, driven by the pressures of business and profit to take the pennies off the eyes of the dead.
People say the newspaper industry is stronger than ever. People say the print medium is weakening because of the electronic medium. People didn’t think for a minute The Bulletin would go under. People knew all along it really would. Everyone had a theory about why and a reason why it shouldn’t be. But those of us who understand the struggle in which The Bulletin was engaged knew it would fold. Without advertising, a paper dies. It’s that simple and inevitable. Graphics, good writing, great pictures… all of it means nothing if the advertising revenue isn’t there. With each successful suburban daily, the advertising pie got sliced thinner and thinner, until there simply wasn’t enough to go around. Deprived its prime source of revenue, the giant newspaper slowly toppled and fell.
So requiescat in pace seems appropriate. We can put to rest an American tradition. We can wish godspeed to the people for whom the paper was a way of life. And we can nervously watch the rest of the giants across the country as they grapple with the same problems that overtook and killed The Bulletin, the Washington Star and others. If some solution isn’t found to the economic problems that caused their deaths, we’ll be seeing many more great newspapers fade from the scene. And we, the readers, will continue to be the losers.
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