The Union Leader announced changes in today’s Saturday edition. If you are familiar with the paper you get that day, it is about as thin as a small-town bi-weekly gossip rag. So, their announcement that the print version is going buh-bye in 2020 is not surprising.
Beginning January 4th, subscribers will only be able to access a digital version of that day’s paper.
If you subscribe to the print edition, you already have access to the digital version, so there’s no real change unless you are not savvy enough to take advantage of the digital access or reader (or a Luddite who doesn’t want too).
While that may be a minor inconvenience or a major one, depending on your ability, on “paper,” the move makes sense. As noted above, the Saturday edition is a whisper clinging to a tradition that is dying. The only loss being a few fewer pages or bird-cage-liner, or fire-starter for generations that are transitioning almost entirely to online access.
The Saturday edition isn’t thick enough to use to train a puppy. I can’t imagine the print edition will be missed.
Ditching it also cuts all the other costs associated with printing, distribution, and delivery; freeing up money they could use to pay someone in a newsroom, a place that has been shedding resources the way the Saturday UL dropped pages in recent years.
I’m no fan of the direction the Union Leaders “news” has been headed, but there is still plenty of it out there. Professional media bias (not just how they cover it but what they cover) has been taking over what was once the nation’s most conservative daily for years. It was inevitable. The J-Schools were taken over long before the UL. And that’s why sites like GraniteGrok have risen to attract more online traffic in our state.
Finding Separation
You can grab almost any paper in the state and get the same institutional spin. They all tend to avoid the same stories or topics. Part of that is reflects dwindling resources, but that problem heightens the preponderance or perception of bias. If you can only cover so many stories, what you cover says everything about what you want people to know and what you don’t.
For our part, we’ve never pretended to be anything but committed to defending the US and New Hampshire constitutions through a conservatarian lens. And we’re all part-time hobbyists not paid scribblers. But we’re clear on where we’re coming from and why and if you are expecting something else, that’s on you.
In contrast, the traditional media has (for years) pretended to be a neutral watchdog standing between the potential abuse of those in power and the people of whom they might take advantage. That ship sailed a long time ago (generally speaking). But there are still “‘journalists” pretending they are stranded on the dock or editors and published on board flying false colors.
I have some advice as a guy with a few years in online print media.
If you embrace who you are and then fight for the audience in that niche by defending what you stand for, you can be a lot more successful than if you pretend to be something you are not.
The print edition of the Saturday Union leader is going away. Soon, it will be all digital. That is inevitable. Newsprint may one day be a trendy fad like vinyl records. Until then, the publisher is selling this as a deliberate forward-looking evolution. A course plotted to intelligently embrace what awaits us on an advancing horizon.
I think we are past that horizon. This is a red-pill moment. A Bail-bucket to slow the demise of a ship that has for a long time been taking on water.
It’s not just the Union leader. They are all heading this way. The question is, will enough people go there with them? And who or what will rise to compete for that audience in a digital “marketplace” where they have no monopoly on access, news, or ideas.
