And Then There Were Two

When I moved to the Cape and began working for The Chronicle in 1982, there were nearly a dozen independent community newspapers covering the peninsula from Falmouth to Provincetown. With last Friday's annoucement that the Provincetown Banner has been acquired by Gatehouse Media, there are now exactly two independent papers left on the Cape, The Cape Cod Chronicle and The Falmouth Enterprise.

Just a few years ago, Gatehouse acquired Community Newspapers, publishers of The Cape Codder, Register, Harwich Oracle, Sandwich Broadsider, Bourne Courier and other Cape weeklies, as well as more than 100 papers throughout the state. Speculation is that Chicago-based Gatehouse may be eying the Cape Cod Times, Barnstable Patriot and Nantucket Inquirer, now that Rupert Murdoch has made it clear he plans to cut those and other properties loose from Dow Jones now that he has his paws on the Wall Street Journal.

Last week's Banner announcement came as something of a surprise, especially since Gatehouse last month said it will cut 60 jobs and not fill vacant positions at its papers, including the Cape properties.

This increasing corporatization of community news creates a blandness that is evident to anyone who picks up a Gatehouse paper. Sure, they look good; the printing's crisp and the layout is clean, though often uninspired. Content may come from any of the region's papers and is often not specific to the town paper it appears in. I can see the advantage of this. Short on local copy this week? Just pull something from the vast miasma of articles produced each week by the chain's other papers.

What these papers lack, however, is perspective. Staff turnover is high. I need both hands to count the reporters who have cycled through Chatham for The Cape Codder during the past few years. The focus therefore tends to be on bigger picture stories, since nobody running the papers has any insight into the community nor the connections to understand what is meaningful to the people who reside there.

While The Chronicle does not compete directly with The Banner, we shared a bond as small, feisty papers that more often than not scoop the local daily, thanks to the fact that our staffs live here, have many years of experience reporting on the local scene, and are part of the fabric of the community. I'm sorry to see The Banner go the way of the Cape's other weeklies, though if Gatehouse is smart its corporate editors will leave the paper alone and let it continue to cover Ptown the way it always has. And what about those often-racy ads? Will those pass corporate muster? Hey, as long as the client is paying, there's likely to be no big fuss.

What's happened and continues to happen on the Cape mirrors the fate of small weeklies across most of the country. Those that haven't carved out well-established niches for themselves --- which The Chronicle and The Enterprise have done, both papers having held back the corporate barbarians at the gate for many years --- are ripe for plunder or unfair practices by chain competitors who can afford to almost give away ads until the local independent dies of economic anemia. With fewer editorial voices and sources of news, the readers lose.

It could be argued that this is a fight among dinosaurs, that news is migrating online and print newspapers will be gone in the very near future. Sure, an online presence is necessary, and we're working to overhaul and upgrade The Chronicle's website to be more responsive to the needs of the community, but until readers become accustomed to looking up school lunch menus, real estate ads and other features of local papers online, there will be a place for the local weekly.