Yeah, we really need a North American La Jornada. A friend of mine is an editor at a Bay Area weekly, and an idea we were turning over recently was that one of the few good things about the left being so concentrated into the Bay Area political ghetto was that presumably a tabloid left daily could get a foothold there, and actually be widely read--- providing a launching pad to going statewide, and then to a limited national or regional basis. I also really wish some folks (not crazy) would resurrect the old left Guardian, which I never got to read, having been born after its demise.
But I don't think these circulation numbers affect things. It's just another step in our country's progression to a niche culture, with fewer and fewer universal mass media. Most people weren't reading liberal dailies ten years ago, and they still aren't today. Me myself I steal a copy of the NYT from a starbucks every morning to read, so I guess I'm contributing in my own way to the downward pressure on newspaper revenues. In the Harry Magdoff commemorative issues of MR recently, someone (Paul something?) said "I'm not worried about dying, I'm just sad I won't be able to read the NYT every morning". It's strange but I feel the same way. It's an odd affection for routine and nemesis maybe that draws so many of us leftists to our repsective preferred dailies?
Things are getting really tough for journalists as workers in most markets, tho. When I was working in Youngstown OH last year the newspaper workers were on strike and camped out 24-7 in front of the paper's offices. Fun evening activities were few there so the spirited vandalism of the paper's boxes around town helped me pass many a boring rust belt night. They lost, and a bunch more newspaper strikes are underway or impending in the state.
The excellent HBO show the Wire owes its existence to a newspaper strike, incidentally; the writer David Simon was on the bargaining committee the year the Baltimore Sun tried to take away a bunch of health benefits despite sustained revenue growth, leading to a series of strikes, and after they were settled Simon was so disgusted with the business side of reporting he took a sabatical and started doing the freelance writing that eventually led to his TV career. And now, the Wire is 100% union labor. Maybe the future of working class critical analysis is in TV as much as print media.
I'd love one of those. Not in the constrained, proper, euphemizing PC
> sense, but a good left-wing tabloid, that was full of news, gossip,
> and went after the ruling class in an energized, polemical, witty
> way. The NY Post is brilliant at what it does; I wish we had one.
>
> Doug
>
>
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