Worcester journalism comes full circle after 40 years

• Posted by Mark Henderson Thu at 3:02 AM - Filed in News - #Worcester  #journalism  #Telegram & Gazette  #The016.com  #Mark Henderson  #Worcester Telegram  #The Evening Gazette  - 1,371 views

  
  Photo courtesy of Museum of Worcester

  The headline in The Evening Gazette on October 8th, 1986 read simply, “Agreement to sell T&G announced.”

  The paper reported that the local owners of the Worcester Telegram and The Evening Gazette, separate papers at the time, were selling the business to the owners of the San Francisco Chronicle.

  It was a watershed moment in Worcester media, but just part of a larger trend of prominent locally owned companies sold to outside interests.

  (Before I continue, know that this story has a happy ending, I promise. Onward … )

  Not a rehash

  I’m not going to rehash the 40 years since the sale, the last 30+ years of which coincided with the digital revolution. That’s a much longer story for another time.

  In hindsight, though, I say the sale of the T&G in 1986 was not the critical decision that contributed to its long-term decline. I contend it was a strategic decision made 3 years later that set that stage.

  In 1989, the Worcester Telegram, a morning newspaper, and The Evening Gazette, an afternoon paper, merged into the Telegram & Gazette you see today.

  To understand why that decision was more consequential than the sale itself you first need to know the culture of the 2 papers. Despite having the same owner, using the same building and even the same newsroom and computers, the staff of both papers fought fiercely for stories. How fiercely? Quick stories:

  1) As a stringer for the Gazette in the mid-’80s, I worked on a story all day. After a final edit from my assignment editor, he told me to print it then delete every version in the system and come back the next morning and retype it. When I asked why, he said that the Telegram staff looked in the Gazette directories for stories, wrote their own version and scooped us. Notice the word “us,” which logically made the Telegram staff “them.”

  2) The Telegram Sports Department posted its schedule on a bulletin board. For a while, reporters’ assignments were listed on the schedule. That didn’t last. Assignments were given verbally because Gazette reporters were scooping the Telegram. From that day forward, local stories were listed on the schedule as “Assign.”

  Culture mattered more than ownership.

  A culture is destroyed

  The Telegram & Gazette has produced and still produces the most impactful journalism in Worcester. Those in the know remember that Telegram reporters Kathy Shaw and George Griffin were the first to do in-depth reporting of the clergy sex abuse scandal, years before the Boston Globe. In addition, the Telegram was in the running for 2 Pulitzer Prizes since 2000, both times getting robbed, in my opinion.

  That said, merging the papers in 1989 created a de facto daily newspaper monopoly and destroyed the culture of fierce competition for stories.

  The decline of newspapers in the past 30+ years was not the result of a single thing. In fact, you could ask 30 people why newspapers declined, get 30 different answers and all would likely contain some kernel of truth. Add a lack of competition to whatever your answer is and you quickly see how things went from bad to worse.

  You’d be right to say that retaining the culture would not have forestalled the utter devastation that digital had on newspapers. However, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which the papers remained competitors until the digital revolution hit in the mid-’90s and that culture could be transformed from competition between 2 newspapers into competition between print and digital newsrooms.

  I made a thing

  In 2023, I coined the term Third Digital Age. I did it to explain why the future of journalism and news is brighter than at any time since the creation of the internet.

  The fundamental question posed in the Third Digital Age is: What happens when every business and every person is effectively a media company? It turns out a number of interesting things occur. First, the ease of creating a news media company is such that there will be far more of them. Second, diversity increases because the barriers to creating a digital media company are lower than ever. Third, the increase in the number of journalistic entities means that the community once again reaps the benefit of fierce competition for stories as media companies try to find original, engaging stories to serve and grow their audiences.

  All of those things were fairly evident as far back as 2012, when I first envisioned creating the016.com as a way to ensure all of this journalism and news could find an audience on a single platform.

  So where does this leave us in Worcester on the 40th anniversary of the sale of the T&G?

  Is the daily newspaper what it was? In size, no. In impact, I’d still say yes. More importantly, though, news in Worcester is clearly not an inefficient monopoly. By my count, there are now 20 – yes, 20 – media companies producing news in Worcester and 13 of those – not 1, not 2, not 3 – are locally owned. And there once again exists a healthy competition for original, impactful stories, which serves the city well.

  If that’s not good news, I don’t know what is.

  Mark Henderson is the founder of the016.com and has been a journalist in Worcester since 1983. His career includes 25 years on the staff of the Telegram & Gazette, where he was the digital director and deputy managing editor.