AND THE DIRGE CONTINUES

Repository owners buying Columbus Dispatch

The Columbus Dispatch, owned by the Wolfe family for 110 years, is being bought by New York City-based New Media Investment Group.

ThisWeek Newspapers, a collection of 24 suburban weeklies; seven magazines, including Columbus Monthly, Columbus CEO and Capital Style; and the Dispatch printing plant, a five-story office building on Broad Street and ThisWeek’s offices in Lewis Center are included in the deal.

The Wolfe family will continue to own and operate WBNS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Columbus; WTHR-TV, the NBC affiliate in Indianapolis; RadiOhio Inc., which operates WBNS AM & FM radio stations; and the Ohio News Network, which supplies news, weather and sports to 70 radio stations across Ohio.

The Wolfe family also will continue to own Capitol Square, a commercial real-estate enterprise, and Agricultural Lands, a portfolio of farming operations.

John F. Wolfe, chairman and publisher of The Dispatch, lamented: “The past two decades of accelerating and challenging change in the newspaper industry made it clear to us that maintaining a single-city, family-owned paper in this environment was untenable long-term.”

New Media also owns the Canton Repository, whose presses print the Beacon Journal. It is a holding company that emerged from the bankruptcy of GateHouse Media in 2013. The company controls 126 dailies among its 550 publications in 32 states.

The Columbus Citizen and the Columbus Citizen Journal both folded years ago.

Since 2007, so have the Tucson Citizen, Rocky Mountain News, Baltimore Examiner, Kentucky Post, Cincinnati Post, King County Journal, Union City Register-Tribune, Halifax Daily News, Albuquerque Tribune, South Idaho Press and the Honolulu Advertiser.

Newspapers that reduced the days they print, adopted online/print or print-only models include the Ann Arbor News, Capital Times, Catskill Daily Mail, Hudson Register-Star, Christian Science Monitor (one of the quality newspapers used as an example during my West Virginia University School of Journalism days), Cleveland Plain Dealer, Detroit News-Free Press, East Valley Tribune, Flint Journal, Bay City Times, Saginaw News, Harrisburg Patriot-News, Syracuse Post-Standard, New Orleans Times-Picayune (another once-great newspaper), Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, Mobile Press-Register, Portland Oregonian and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

These lists were provided by the appropriately named Newspaper Death Watch.

So today the Internet, which along with a lack of foresight by newspaper owners who could have gotten in on the ground floor of this snotty brat before he got too big to swat, caused the demise of newspapers, is the vehicle for everyone to put their opinions out there as though they are as much of an expert as Woodward and Bernstein, Scotty Reston, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Seymour Hersh (prior to his latest kerfuffle) and Maureen Dowd.

Internet readers have no way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Democracy is the poorer for it. And politicians are having a field day because the cats are dying off and there’s no one to watch the rats.

Mark Dawidziak never spoke truer words when he told me: “You got the last great retirement.”

Timely, too.

I doubt that I could have tolerated the insanity that passes for “journalism” today. Hell, a 12-year-old in his grandmother’s basement is considered as much of an expert on the news as an investigative reporter who spends six months before getting a corrupt politician or businessman tossed out on his ear or into the pokey.