Is Cedar Rapids Fading into a News Desert?

Front page of Jan. 31 edition.

On Jan. 14, the Gazette, the daily newspaper of Cedar Rapids, announced that it’s following the trend of many other newspapers in the U.S.: Daily will soon not mean every day.

Starting Feb. 17, the Gazette will print only three editions per week, on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Otherwise, news of the community will be available via the Gazette’s web site.

Meanwhile, the cost of a print subscription remains the same. The Gazette is making an iffy gamble that people are willing to pay, in effect, much more per printed paper. Their argument, made in a follow-up column by editor Zack Kucharski, is that their cost of reporting the news justifies the continued price.

We’ll see. My wife and I are still discussing what we might do—I am sure we’ll still want the Sunday paper, but if the others papers are available online, is paying for the very occasional print product worth it? Reading the Gazette is a daily habit, it gets passed around the breakfast table, and I don’t think my relationship with the digital product will be the same. But it cannot be a daily habit if the paper no longer is delivered daily.

Well, the Gazette isn’t the only paper that I have an online relationship with. I subscribe to The New York Times, and enjoy skimming its list of stories and picking what I want to read, so the idea of treating a “paper” as an online source is not alien to me.

I hope The Gazette can make its digital presence a bit easier. With the NYT, for example, it was “one and done.” I subscribed, signed on, and their app just keeps me signed on. On both my PC and my phone, the Times seems to know who I am, instantly.

As a print subscriber to The Gazette, I’m supposed to have full digital access to their site, too—but it’s not as smooth. It seems very frequently the Gazette demands that I sign in. In my digital life, I have multiple usernames and passwords, and remembering which applies to The Gazette is not easy for me, and there have been days that I just give up and prefer not to read a Gazette story on their web site rather than find and dig through my password file.

So please, Gazette, if I’m going to depend on your app, keep at it making the app more user friendly. Aim for NYT-level ease.

Gazette web site.

Another issue is that the print Gazette gets passed between my wife and I, and our grandson when he is staying with us. When we’re accessing digital content, only one username or password works, I assume. Is there a way that 2 or 3 “readers” can be associated with a digital subscription so my wife could just as easily install the app and access content as a “household” subscriber who lives with me?

Those are technical issue, adjustments I’m sure The Gazette will consider. The larger issue, to me, is what this change means to The Gazette and to my local news environment.

I know the situation is different, but the same forces that the Gazette contends with have changed the nature of the university newspaper, the Mount Mercy Times, that I advise. We made the decision to cease print operations altogether, as it was be coming too expensive and our readers were out of the print habit anyway.

Unfortunately, at the moment, the status of the Times is not great. Our staff has slowly shrunk, our frequency of updating our news has declined and our online readership has not grown as it should. I hope to encourage students to try some new strategies to boost the Times, but first I must recruit more students, and somehow that was easier when there was a print artifact that reminded everyone that student journalism exists at Mount Mercy University.

I hope that The Gazette can maintain a sense of status and strength when it become more ephemeral, when it’s just dancing digits rather than ink on a page. I’ll miss the morning tug of war over who gets section A first, and the experience of skimming the headlines in my hands rather than on the tiny screen of my phone.

Too many communities in the U.S. have become news deserts. That’s not happening here yet, but it does sort of feel like we’re going from a lush news jungle to a drier, dicey news savanna, where the desert no longer seems so far away.

As a customer, paying the same for less product doesn’t make me happy. But as an old news person, a former newspaper editor, I hope the Gazette finds a way where so many papers have stumbled. Society as a whole is no longer as willing to pay for news, and that has left too many of our citizens subsisting on the junk food of social media disinformation, rather than the richer, healthier diet that a quality daily newspaper provides.

The daily Gazette isn’t perfect. But it will leave a hole, for me, when it is no longer there.

So, from a disgruntled customer, to the Gazette: Good luck. I hope you find a way to make it work but I’m worried.