PEORIA -- Take a close look at the April 2 Peoria Journal Star. Anything missing?
Yes.
Members of the Peoria Newspaper Guild are striking the paper by removing their bylines from their stories.
It's a protest against the layoffs or forced resignations of a half-dozen more Journal Star newsroom staffers, all of whom contribute to the news. Some were laid off. Others resigned or retired when their jobs were downsized into something other than what they were trained and qualified to do.
April 2 is their last day at work.
The incredible, shrinking Journal Star is still fat with ads -- but the money reportedly is being shipped out of town to the GateHouse corporation so it can pay inflated salaries to its executives and pay its inflated debt to Wall Street. In other words, it's a form of looting this profitable local newspaper.
Businesses and readers should be -- and are -- furious at what is happening to the Journal Star, which even in its shrunken state still sets the news agenda in Peoria and central Illinois.
Newspapers are not just another business. They are vital to our democratic society, which cannot function without news reporting. (That's why totalitarian societies closely control the news.)
As newspapers shrink, the victims of corporate greed (and reader indifference!) the nation will know less and less about what is really happening, because newspaper research is the foundation for all news, including news on TV and the Internet.
And as for GateHouse, at the end of April it is shutting down the Peoria Times-Observer, which it bought a few years ago. Nothing like a corporation buying the competition and closing it. Then it has a monopoly.
Whatever happened to anti-trust laws in the USA?
It's a sad, even dangerous situation for our democracy.
-- Elaine Hopkins
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