'If You See It in the Sun, It's So': A Christmas Wish for Newspapers

Until yesterday, Saturday, December 19, 2009 was the last time a newspaper had appeared on my doorstep. After our recent snowstorm, Arlington, Va., where I live, couldn't manage to plow the neighborhood streets for three days. This meant that schools couldn't stay open, trash couldn't be picked up, and The Washington Post went undelivered. The causes of that predicament are the subject of another column, but I found it to be a blessing in disguise because it reminded me of one of the great prerogatives in life: strolling out in the half-light of morning to retrieve the hometown newspaper.

That very phrase, "hometown newspaper" is fraught with significance -- and nostalgia -- and not just for me. Although my local paper these days is The Post, as a kid that appellation applied, at different times, to the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Sacramento Bee. The reason for that is that my father, Lou Cannon, was an itinerant newspaperman who moved us around Northern California as he worked his way up the professional ladder.

My own first newspaper job was delivering the Chronicle on my bicycle as a teenager. As a young man, back when Ronald Reagan was president, it was the Mercury News that sent me to Washington. I drove across the country with George Condon, a friend from my days at the San Diego Union. I had been given a posting as a California regional reporter in the Knight-Ridder Newspapers' Washington bureau. George was heading East to take over the Washington bureau of Copley Newspapers and, although he didn't yet know it, to assume another important title -- godfather to my elder daughter. George excelled at both jobs, but it's fair to say that his godchild has fared better than his former newspaper chain.

Like many other newspaper companies, Copley unraveled with dizzying speed. At the beginning of this decade, it would have cost a cool billion to buy just the San Diego Union, the flagship paper in Copley's empire. When Helen Copley died, her son had to sell the other papers to pay the inheritance taxes. Then the bottom fell out of the newspaper advertising model, and earlier this year, the newspaper sold for an undisclosed figure rumored to be less than $20 million – a fraction of the value of Copley's real estate holdings alone. In other words, with pensions and other legacy costs, the paper was worth next to nothing. Needless to say, even before the sale, Copley had closed its Washington bureau, notwithstanding the fact that the bureau had recently won the chain's first-ever Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

I suppose it's to the eternal regret of one Randall H. "Duke" Cunningham that Copley didn't fold its bureau sooner. Cunningham would almost certainly still be in Congress today instead of serving an eight-year stretch in federal prison for his sordid array of crimes centered on using his office to collect bribes from Pentagon contractors. The investigation into Duke Cunningham's nefarious activities was prompted by a series of stories originating out of the Copley News bureau spearheaded by reporter Marcus Stern and shepherded into print by George Condon and other top editors back in San Diego.

How many other scandals will never be uncovered as a result of this one closing? One can only guess, but Copley is hardly the only news outlet to fold its tent in Washington. The list of formerly proud newspaper chains that once blanketed beats such as Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, the Pentagon -- and which have now either shuttered offices or devolved into skeletal crews -- include Newhouse Newspapers, Cox, Hearst, and Media General.

Nor is Copley the first media outfit to be swallowed up by a private equity firm with little experience in journalism. Knight-Ridder itself is gone, acquired by the smaller McClatchy Newspapers, which itself is in dire trouble. So is Times-Mirror, another company I previously worked for. (I covered the White House for five years for the Baltimore Sun when it was a Times-Mirror property.) Its flagship paper, The Los Angeles Times, was acquired by the Tribune Co. after it had been purchased by a profane Chicago real estate man named Sam Zell, an executive whose idea of morale-building was to travel around to the Tribune newspapers and drop the f-bomb on those lowly reporters and photographers who dared to ask questions at staff meetings. The Tribune Co. is now in bankruptcy, and Zell is facing a lawsuit from employees who charge that he knowingly violated federal pension laws.

But the Trib is still publishing, as is another financially challenged newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. And that's the important thing. In San Francisco, the Chronicle's managing editor, Stephen Proctor, a friend from my Baltimore Sun days, is trying to figure out how to make up the $50 million a year that fellow San Franciscan Craig Newmark has taken out of the Chron's pages in classified advertisements. (And that's just at one newspaper!) I don't fault Craigslist, but I hope Steve Proctor hits on the solution -- and that he shares it with others. Every time The New York Times announces another round of buyouts, faithful readers wince, but the same thing has been happening at nearly every newspaper in the country for the past five years, including The Washington Post, one of the few organizations that could challenge the supremacy of the Times.

Alan D. Mutter, proprietor of a blog called "Reflections of a Newsosaur," calculates that 142 American newspapers folded in 2009 – three times the number as in 2008. Is this the fault of the Great Recession, meaning that those numbers have peaked? Or is this the beginning of the end of an institution that pre-dates (and helped create) our Republic? If the latter case proves to be true, I hope something new can replace the sense of community newspapers fostered once upon a time.

It was in 1897, as newspaper buffs know, that 8-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Sun asking about the existence of Santa Claus.

Today, it's the third line of her missive that seems most poignant: "Papa says, 'If you see it in The Sun, it's so.'" In the unsigned editorial that follows, written by veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church, The Sun insists there is indeed a Santa Claus, and expresses the hope that he will live in the hearts of children for ten thousand years. That sentiment struck me when I read it this year. The paperboy who delivered the San Francisco Chronicle on his bicycle has grown up now, and has raised three children past the age of Santa-belief. So I fear not that Santa will live on. I just hope that newspapers will live on with him -- and with those of us who've cheerfully made the migration to the rich and wonderful world of online journalism.

The last delivery that arrived on my lawn before the grass was cloaked by the great December snowstorm of 2009 included the inserts to the Sunday editions of The Washington Post. These pre-published inserts are typically delivered on Saturday, and so they were last weekend, too. Because it was the only newspaper for four days, I read the inserts, especially the Post's Sunday magazine, more carefully than usual. In a normal week, I might have missed the Christmas story by author Ann Patchett, who writes of the emotional weight that the holiday carried for her as a child of divorce. Her mother, sister, and she relocated to Nashville, leaving behind in Southern California a father who could never quite get the gift-giving right until one year when he came upon a wonderful Christmas story, which he read to Ann Patchett on the telephone. I won't give the story away, except that I will tell you that it involved a Catholic girl like Ann Patchett, this one growing up in an orphanage, who finally got a present she wanted, too.

As poignant as the tale was -- and as moving as the tale-within-the-tale was -- the passage that got my attention in that story was a mere set-up line. "My father called because he wanted to read me a short story that was in the newspaper," Patchett writes. "My father's newspaper has always been the Los Angeles Times."

My simple prayer this Christmas is that future generations of Americans will nod knowingly when they read a line like that. They'll know their hometown newspaper, too, even if it's mainly a Web site. And even if they know they can send a link to a story they love in a second with just a click of their mouse, they'll still want to dial a phone number and read the story aloud to their daughters and sons.