Farewell, Connecticut Valley Spectator -- Hello Reader Ownership . . .?

How ironic it is to read in the Local Daily Newspaper of the sudden demise of its only competition, the friendly neighborhood weekly known as the Connecticut Valley Spectator. Along with its parent company, and its affiliated daily newspaper in Claremont, the Eagle Times, the Spectator is now in bankruptcy. Today's is the last issue.

Among other things, this explains why the editor hasn't been returning my messages and queries. Since early this year, I had been writing a biweekly opinion column in the Spectator. (The whole oevre is here at http://www.n1303k.com/, in the unlikely event anyone is interested.) Then, a few weeks ago, editor Mike Peterson, the fellow who had recruited me, abruptly disappeared. His successor and I exchanged emails a few times but we never managed to connect; now it is apparent that she was only there as a form of hospice care.

Naturally I am really grateful to the Spectator for giving me a career as a columnist, however brief it was. It was pleasant to discover that I could indeed find a coherent opinion to express publicly every two weeks. It was exciting to feel as if I was playing a part, however small, in an effort to prevent the Local Daily Newspaper from gaining an absolute monopoly on news reporting in the Upper Valley. That struggle has, of course, now been lost.

A couple of interesting and ironic milestones in my brief tenure as a columnist are worthy of mention here.

The first was the time I submitted a column about the newspaper industry's death spiral -- and my modest proposal, about which more below, for addressing it. Mike spiked the column, confessing that the whole subject was a "third rail" with publisher and owner Harvey Hill. I have never had any contact with Mr. Hill, but I sympathized long before he sought protection from creditors in bankruptcy court for his failing newspaper conglomerate.

The second milestone was what turned out to be my last column, published about six weeks ago. It was about the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth (CHaD), and it cost me my membership on the CHaD Family Advisory Board. The CHaD FAB did not like my factual observation that the Board is comprised almost entirely of hospital insiders -- employees or close relatives thereof -- and is thus serving the purpose of telling the hospital only what it wants to hear. Speaking that truth to those powers sure frosted a bunch of folks who proclaim they are committed to giving a meaningful voice to patients and their parents.

So now I get to leave to others the task of trying to cause a monolothic institution, so central to the life of the community and the health of my family, to others with more tact and equanimity. My quest, newly reinvigorated by today's news about the Spectator, is to figure out a way to make sure we all get the information about the public life of our community that we need. While I am concerned about the monopoly of the Local Daily Newpaper, ultimately the LDN is in the same toilet swirl as the Spectator. The investor-owned, for-profit newspaper, which subsidizes its news reporting efforts with advertising revenue, will soon be as extinct as the dodo bird.

An important fact about all of this is often overlooked. It was the loss of classified advertising, as distinct from display advertising, that really took the bottom out of the newspaper business. In other words, it is not the loss of support from retailers that is killing newspapers; it's regular folks like you and me. Once, we used the classifieds to connect with each other regarding the prosaic commercial transactions of daily life -- finding jobs, renting apartments, selling our cars, that sort of stuff. Then the internet arrived, and the newspaper became superfluous as that kind of community bulletin board. Fundamentally, what has broken down is the relationship between the newspapers and their readers, not the newspapers and the big corporate buyers of advertising.

So it is time to take the newspaper companies out of the mix and let the people themselves figure out what information they need as well as how they will pay for it. As I tried to explain in the Spectator, the answer is reader-owned, internet-based news portals that are organized as consumer cooperative societies. This model is vastly superior to the taxpayer-supported models commonly under discussion, usually in the context of turning newspapers into nonprofit organizations that are dominated by big and powerful foundations. That's just another form of outside control; the idea of government support is particularly pernicious because newspapers are supposed to hold government accountable rather than live off government.

Reader-ownership is also an antidote to the ethical lapses that have always bedeviled the newspaper industry, most recently the venerable Washington Post. The Post's own ombudsman has just issued a scathing public report on his employer, which apparently had set up a program of "salons" -- private social gatherings at which newsmakers were to pay big bucks for access to news writers. Shame! If the readers owned the Post, they could and would fire every last editor because none of them, apparently, raised a single dissenting voice.

As a board member at both the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society and the Cooperative Fund of New England, I spend a lot of time thinking about co-ops and talking with people associated with them. What I've found is a bubbling of interest, at least among board members, in figuring out whether co-ops can play a role in meeting the information needs of their members. It was, after all, a lack of available citrus fruit that led to the founding of the Hanover Co-op in 1936. Insightful news reporting is starting to look a lot like those oranges used to -- tantalizing but distant. I'm not saying that co-ops should launch news portals from scratch. But all of these co-ops have newsletters. What if they came out a bit more often -- and what if the big co-ops each hired just one staffer whose job it is to look outside the co-op itself for something to write about?

One of the ways in which co-ops can be especially useful in our economy is as an exit strategy for local, family-owned businesses when the inevitable life changes of the owners require cashing out. It's too late for the family business that ran the Spectator. But it's not too late for the family that owns the daily newspapers in Concord and the Upper Valley. Each place boasts an excellent consumer cooperative society with oranges for sale!