An Empty Field

 

A friend of mine posted a video on facebook recently which  meant a lot to me. So, thanks a lot.

I’ll share it with you -  not the video, which most people would find a little boring, even though it only lasts a couple of minutes  - but what it means.

What you see is a camera panning across an empty field. A big empty field in a commercial/industrial area, one that has obviously been leveled by bulldozers to prepare for some new construction.

There’s no sign of what was there before. No sign of the big white 414,000 square foot building with the big NEWSDAY sign proudly announcing the home of suburban journalism in America.

No presses. No classified advertising department. No cafeteria. No circulation trucks. No newsroom. Just a big open field.

Of course, it won’t be empty for long. A new $190 million dollar construction project is going up. It won’t be as grand as the old Newsday building, just two warehouses totaling 945,000 square feet.

Hartz Mountain paid $54 million to buy the old Newsday property, but the Suffolk Industrial Development Authority gave the company $16.8 million in tax breaks, to help meet what it called a “very healthy demand for warehousing and distribution space…”

What went unsaid is that there was no longer a very healthy demand for a very good local newspaper, a daily that had the resources to cover towns and villages, counties and state and federal governments. Over the years, there were investigations  of businesses and utilities, scandals to expose, corruption to unearth.

In the china cabinet in my dining room, there is a small plexiglass plaque showing that my old paper won a Pulitzer Prize for covering a really big plane crash. It was really an editor’s story, although me and a lot of other reporters worked on and off for months trying to find out everything about the crash and its impact. A couple of reporters spent a year or more on it.

Eventually, the crash changed the way airlines handle fuel vapors in near-empty tanks. Probably saved hundreds of lives around the world - maybe more.

But, that was old-school journalism, a time when people actually had to wait a whole day to find out what was news. Now we have on-line web feeds, news from Facebook, competing with all those cute pictures. And floods of opinions from no one knows where.

I live in an aging part of New York State, where most people think they are computer literate and also say they won’t take a Covid vaccine until they do more research. I will never get to ask them which genetic sequences they are looking into, or how to explain just what efficacy means. Or even how control groups are monitored. Not even how to get that data on their tablet or their facebook account.

No, there is no room for that stuff any more. No room for a newspaper that offered much of it to hundreds of thousands of readers every day.

Just a big empty field. Makes me glad I retired.