This is a somber weekend for journalism in New Jersey, as the print edition of The Star-Ledger comes off the press for its final run today after 193 years under one banner or another. It occurs one day after the final edition of the Jersey Journal, which will shutter its entire operation after being a leading voice in the ethical burn pit known as Hudson County for 157 years.
More than 3,200 print papers – most of them weeklies — have vanished since 2005, according to Northwestern University. Once upon a time, in what historians call the pre-TikTok Era, such events were alarming, but now newspapers disappear at a rate of more than two per week, victims of a seismic shift in a media landscape dominated by internet behemoths that produce little content but vacuum up most of the revenue…
Marc Pfeiffer, the associate director of the Bloustein School at Rutgers, put it this way in a new report about the future of journalism in New Jersey: “Despite some contemporary criticisms of (editorial opinion),” he wrote, “it has, over many decades, helped generate public discourse and solve complex and controversial issues facing our society.”
Such commentary, he added, “provides citizens a pathway through the confusion of current trends of both-sidesism and false equivalencies.”
It remains to be seen what fills that void. It’s true that if we have learned anything since 2016 – when the current president won exactly two endorsements from the nation’s top 100 newspapers – it is that the modern editorial carries little weight in the arena of national politics.