Our J-School friend Snow recently changed jobs and was cleaning out his office. As part of the process, he wanted to recycle a literal page of Columbus history — a framed copy of the last front page of the Columbus Citizen-Journal. Rather than putting it into a box in the basement that never would be seen again, he asked if I wanted it, and I said sure.
Columbus used to be a two-newspaper town. There was the Columbus Dispatch, of course, and the Columbus Citizen-Journal. The Dispatch was the established afternoon newspaper, in the days when many newspapers were delivered around 4 p.m. so people coming home from work could catch up on the news before dinner, and the C-J was the morning option. The Dispatch, owned by a prominent local family, was a dominant force, and its articles could shake the political foundations in downtown Columbus. The C-J, a part of the Scripps-Howard chain, tried to be the lighter, spunky competitor.
But reading tastes changed, and when it became clear that afternoon newspapers were going the way of the dodo, the Dispatch decided it needed to become a morning paper to survive. An agreement under which the Dispatch printed the C-J was due to expire, and after much hand-wringing the agreement was allowed to lapse. In those pre-internet days, becoming an on-line newspaper was not an option, and with no way to print itself the C-J was inevitably doomed. The Columbus Citizen-Journal therefore printed its last edition, shown above, on December 31, 1985, and Columbus officially became a one-newspaper town the next day.
At the time, that seemed like a very bad thing. I marched in the “Save the C-J Brigade” during the 1985 Doo-Dah Parade, and thought that if Columbus wanted to be a big city it needed to have a second newspaper that could provide an alternative perspective. And, of course, having two newspapers promotes competition and better reporting. But it turned out that Columbus was just on the leading edge of a trend that has seen many newspapers turn off their presses and many big cities become one-newspaper towns. In the digital age, newspapers struggle to compete with online news sources that deliver the news instantaneously and around the clock, and the online sources have rushed in to fill the content void that was created by the closure of so many daily newspapers. Even the Dispatch, once so dominant, has seen its pages and circulation shrink.
Thirty-four years later, how many people in Columbus remember the C-J, or even know that at one time there was a second newspaper in town? It’s important, of course, to hear alternative viewpoints — particularly in these politically divided days — but maybe daily print newspapers are not the best way, technologically and culturally, to supply those viewpoints. In reality, for all of the dire predictions, Columbus has done pretty well as a one-newspaper town.
Ingredients: 1 cup butter; 1 cup sugar; 2 eggs; 1 teaspoon baking soda; 4 cups flour; 1 cup oil (I use extra light olive oil); 1 cup powdered sugar; 1 teaspoon vanilla; 1 teaspoon cream of tartar; at least 2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
What’s weird is that the Dispatch considered this to be news at all. Literally, it’s a “dog bites man” story, and therefore is the classic definition of non-news. Dog bites happen regularly in our humdrum, everyday lives. Postal workers get bitten by dogs so often they train postal workers to deal with it, and they even keep statistics on it. And when Columbus isn’t even at the top of the dog-bite list, but comes in at number 8 — which is a pretty undistinguished number, too, when you think about it — and trails Cleveland in this dubious category, its clear there is absolutely nothing noteworthy about it.
At the time there was a pair of really cheap, almost plastic-looking black loafers lurking around the house. I don’t know where they came from — they weren’t Dad’s, and they certainly weren’t UJ’s or mine — but for some reason they became an object of ridicule and silly humor in our household. We called them the shiners, and they would mysteriously appear on your chair at dinner, or on your pillow when you went to your bedroom at night. It was one of those inside jokes that sometimes develop in families.
The underlying problem is the recent time change, which means that Columbus is plunged into darkness in the middle of the evening rush hour. The statistics show that deaths from car-pedestrian collisions increase during the fall, so there is a real problem to be addressed. And, according to the Dispatch report, the enforcement effort is both even-handed — police are looking for jaywalkers and for drivers who make illegal turns or fail to yield to pedestrians who have the right of way — and is designed to focus on reminding people of their legal obligations, by having yellow-jacketed motorcycle cops stationed at key downtown intersections to talk to pedestrians and look for drivers who don’t yield, and representatives of city organizations handing out leaflets about the traffic laws near bus stops.
Wolfe’s stated reasons are familiar to anyone who follows the newspaper business: he believes that independent, locally owned newspapers cannot realistically compete in an era where media conglomerates have the advantage of economies of scale. Such economies are crucial in a business where the costs of acquiring, printing, and distributing a hard copy newspaper — to say nothing of providing it with content — put the daily newspaper delivered to your doorstep at a clear disadvantage compared to digital outlets that don’t have to buy paper and ink, maintain printing presses, and pay printers and delivery people. When you combine the cost disadvantage with overall national trends of falling subscription numbers and declining advertising revenue, you produce a witches’ brew that ultimately has been fatal to many independent dailies. The Dispatch has tried to cut costs, by shrinking the physical size of the newspaper among other steps, but ultimately it, too, succumbed to the inexorable forces of the marketplace and the reading habits of the American public.
Gee’s retirement comes on the heels of some ill-advised comments about Catholics that were intended as humor but struck many people as disparaging. Gee 
We’ll be seeing a lot more of them all in the days ahead.
It feels like a close race here, too. In 2008, there was a remarkable outpouring of support in Ohio for President Obama. You saw it in unlikely places like Upper Arlington, a Columbus suburb that traditionally has been a Republican stronghold. The President won Ohio by nearly 5 percentage points.
Of course, the Dispatch has every right to control its content and to decide whether, and if so where, to carry Doonesbury. As the Dispatch‘s editor points out, some newspapers carry Doonesbury on the op-ed page precisely because it frequently includes political content; the Dispatch has chosen not to do so. But Doonesbury is not the only comic strip that is addressing more adult themes. Bloom County did so, Funky Winkerbean has done so, and so has For Better or For Worse — among many others. The daily comics, like so many other aspects of our American culture, have become a lot more diverse, and a lot less predictable, over the past few decades. That change has occurred because many comics artists chafed at the artificial constraints that tradition imposed on comics strips, and wanted to write and draw about topics that were more relevant to their lives.
Webner House 