In the News

Our Wednesday night television viewing includes “Chicago One.” The three shows focus on a hospital setting (Chicago Med), the local fire station (Chicago Fire), and the second floor offices for Detective Sergeant Hank Voight and his team of elite intelligence officers (Chicago P.D.). The fictitious Gaffney Chicago Medical Center, Fire House 51, and the twenty-first district of the Chicago Police Department provide the locations for Dick Wolf’s dramatic series, filled with medical emergencies, fires, rescues, and shootings. 

 

Series like NCIS are able to spin-off to new locations, such as Hawaii, but by definition, “Chicago One” is limited to the city of Chicago. I wonder if Mr. Wolf has any new ideas in the Windy City to add to his success? Perhaps he could do Chicago Faith, located in a church, or Chicago Press, centered in a bustling newsroom in that great city, home to the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. 

 

What I didn’t realize is that Dick Wolf tried a newsroom-themed show in 2000 with Deadline, featuring star columnist Wallace Benton at the New York Ledger. The show only lasted one season, cancelled after only five episodes aired. So much for that idea.

 

Were Wolf to attempt a newsroom drama in 2021, he’d have a big problem: location. The days when newsrooms were filled with noisy typewriters and a smoky haze are history. While feisty reporters still stalk their stories with passion, they no longer race to the editor’s desk with submission in hand. Instead, deadline is met by pushing the “submit” button on an email attachment. Since writing can be done in pajamas on a home computer or in a corner of the local coffee shop, there’s no need for the cavernous newsrooms of the past. In fact, Ashland’s own Times-Gazette staff writers have been working remotely for over a year now.

 

That’s one of the reasons why the Ashland Times-Gazette building is in contract to be sold this month. At 40 East Second Street, the T-G was our next-street-over neighbor when we served at the old Salvation Army building at 40 East Third, now only a memory, with its empty lot a home to headstones and monuments. Fortunately, the fate of The Salvation Army in Ashland was a more life-giving one than the property faced, with its move to East Liberty St. in the form of the Kroc Center. (More on that next week).

 

As for the T-G property, I don’t know who is purchasing the building (no investigative reporting skills here), but hopefully its bones are strong enough to be preserved for many years to come. Far beyond their facility needs, that hope of preservation is the challenge for newspapers large and small across our country, as the life of daily newspapers as we know them has changed dramatically in the past several years. Like the T-G, formed when the Ashland Times merged with the Ashland Gazette in 1903, journalists, editors, and publishers are working hard to navigate the churning waters created by the internet, the pandemic, globalization, and changing ownership, while still addressing the need of the local community for responsible journalism. 

 

I was glad to hear T-G general manager Aaron Bass confirm that while the building was being sold, the “Ashland Times-Gazette staff remain committed to 24/7 news online and producing a daily newspaper.” That’s good news for Ashland, and good news for me, the T-G’s favorite Saturday columnist, even if I am the only regular Saturday columnist (smiley face emoji).

 

Just as a community needs daily police and fire protection and access to medical care, we also need to know what is happening around us. Effective journalism can raise the alarm and diagnose community ills, as it seeks truth and reports it, a standard not always adhered to in random social media posts.

 

Is the world of newspapers changing? Of course it is. As JFK said sixty years ago, “Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past and present are certain to miss the future.” Here’s to a fond farewell to the brick-and-mortar of the T-G newsroom, looking to a future built on its strong commitment to keeping Ashlanders informed and connected.