Another 40 on the road to oblivion

I couldn’t even begin to imagine closing down a newspaper with a circulation of twenty-two thousand subscribers in the immediate greater Portland area, but that is what occurred on February 1, 1991 when the Evening Express left the local media machine for good under the headline “Goodbye.”

Circulation was on the decrease, it was argued. Why publish a hyper-local paper when the Express’ sister publication, the Press Herald, was publishing a state-wide paper with a reach from Kittery straight on up to Bangor? Better, they could merge the Express newsroom into one and put out a product that was all things to all subscribers, and save a little money in the meantime.

The Express was a relic of turn-of-the-twentieth century newspapering that occurred in cities across the country. Then, cities of all sizes were host to multiple daily newspapers representing a whole spectrum of views. The Press Herald itself is the result of a merger between the Portland Press and the Herald Advertiser.

Hyper-local papers: Our past, our future.

I believe the newspaper industry, as well as the economy in general is returning to the local ideology of those earlier times. In decline since 2007, the large regional newspaper model has told its own story in a slew of dismal headlines. Yesterday’s announcement that the Press Herald was eliminating 40 jobs was no exception. It’s truly a shame and didn’t need to happen.

Just like the current downturn we’re experiencing as a nation, the downturn in the newspaper industry started as far back as thirty years ago. Decisions that took what were local, sustainable papers and turned them into the infinite growth machines they became by expanding their reach both geographically and editorially have plateaued. First came the geographic expansions of the 1970s. Papers would go further and further away from their home bases, adding motor routes to service new subscribers until they were as far as they could go and be deliverable by seven in the morning. Soon, regional distribution centers were opened across the paper’s new regions to centralize the management of all the new routes.

A few years after the routes were established, the editorial expansions began. Former local, but now regional newspapers opened bureau after bureau and staffed them with reporters and support personnel. Indeed, some of the best local reporting came out of regional newspapers in the 80’s and 90’s. Sure, the papers had lost focus on their original urban cores, but the honey pot was where the mall was, proof of which is on display here locally on Spring Street in SoPo, where in 1989 the Press Herald built its cavernous printing facility with the intention of moving their entire operation there. The city of Portland somehow convinced them not to abandon their downtown offices, however. The paper remained there until just last year. The South Portland facility sits largely unused to this day.

All of these decisions served the infinite growth beast that until 2008 was our economy. The expansions served to increase ad sales and subscriber growth right up until the best year regional newspapers will ever experience with regard to revenue came and went, 2006.

Then the e-brake was applied to the idea of infinite growth, and with it a whole slew of other industries. Papers that had grown ten-fold in a relatively short amount of time were forced to cut back dramatically. They did so in the exact opposite direction they grew. First the bureaus were closed and editorial staff members were laid off.

Then came the catch-22. I was sitting in my car in a parking lot in Bangor at 1:30 in the morning on a Sunday four years ago waiting for the truck carrying the Sunday Telegram to arrive after having lost a coin toss to cover for the vacationing Bangor area circulation manager. The truck arrived, carrying 700 papers that were to be handed out to twenty-five different carriers for delivery. The routes that originated from that parking lot stretched from Bar Harbor all the way to Houlton.

I sat there and just shook my head thinking about the average revenue of $1.25 per paper versus what we were forced to compensate the carriers, which at the time was an average of nearly two dollars. I would return to the Press Herald building armed with Power Points explaining why these routes needed to end, if for anything else to stop the bleeding of red ink. But we couldn’t stop them. The paper had grown too big. We needed every bit of circulation we could scrape together, to continue to charge the ad rates that supported the operation. Even as subscribers disappeared from routes, we would still have to deliver them, I was told.

Now, carriers on rural routes at regional papers across the country are being compensated to deliver newspapers at rates that exceed revenue even closer to their cores as their own coverage cutbacks and internet competition for regional and state news eats away at subscriber bases. Add to that the ever increasing cost of fuel to transport long distances, and you have a recipe for disaster. The mistakes, decisions and big dreams of the baby-boomer newspapermen have come crashing down around them, and they still haven’t come to terms with the new reality that is on the horizon for newspapers, industry and the economy in general best stated by author James Howard Kunstler in this paper Tuesday: “to contract, de-globalize, downscale, and go local.”

So the layoffs at large regional newspapers, including the one in our own backyard, will continue. The times that allowed for anything in our economy that was large in scale are drawing to an abrupt close. I wonder now after the inevitable closure of some of the larger papers, if executives will be able to look back and see how things might have been different if they maintained their original turn of the twentieth century local sustainable model? Things would certainly be different.

You might even be reading the Express right now.

The great gentrification

A few weeks back, an acquaintance on Facebook posted that she was, yet again, being woken up by the early morning sound of construction on Munjoy Hill. The comment didn’t surprise me; Munjoy Hill has gone through a huge transformation over the last twenty years. The gentrification is well under way, working to displace the very people that have made Munjoy Hill into the “East End” it is today in favor of the well-off people that, after raising their kids in the suburbs, have decided to reclaim their youth and “move back to the city.”

It’s a story that has happened in every East Coast city to the south of us, and is starting to reach the point of no return here. Places like SoHo in New York, or Kenmore Square in Boston — places that used to be the center of specific cultures that transformed cities from the wastelands they had become due to suburban sprawl into the places, after having screwed them over in the 1950s, wealthy people wished to return to. I quickly responded that the sound of construction she was hearing would soon be followed by the sound of a moving truck hauling her butt to Riverton. She responded in agreement, saying “I give it a year.”

Back in the day, the Hill was the place where the older twenty-something guys who liked to party, with Miller High Life and a bowl, holed up in sketchy apartments that attracted the high school girls we would all pine after but couldn’t get and because high school dudes didn’t have access to the aforementioned bait. Parties, crime and good times were the way of the day. Over time, young people, drawn to the hill for the low rents, started to move into the area, replace the high life with a bottle of red, paint their front doors some off-the-wall color to stand out, plant a sunflower and voila — the culturally diverse and desirable Hill was born. Now, like all affordable housing in the city for working people, we find ourselves in danger of losing it.

In addition to the rents being artificially inflated by the city subsidizing housing for people who don’t work, the upgrades to buildings by the people who have rediscovered the city have started to push rents from the seven hundred dollar range to upwards of twelve-to-thirteen hundred dollars. The only help available for a middle class worker? An extra shift or a second job.

The city doesn’t care. The political class focuses on the one hundred percent subsidized poor and how they are the ones that need the assistance. The building upgrades are netting more property tax revenue, and “you middle class people can just tough it out.” Adding insult to injury, they even come out with a two percent tax increase this year, which doesn’t hurt the wealthy and isn’t paid by the poor.

It seems to me this city would just as soon trade us in for the “new people” coming to town, and all this supposed “business” the mayoral candidates speak of. It seems that those of us who remain in the ashes of the great gentrification are being told: “You’ll be taxed until you too need subsidization and oh — we have the perfect apartment for you just off the beaten path and out of sight.”

At that point, the perfect utopia city planners have really been after will be realized. Of course, Portland won’t be the vibrant, diverse city it is today, but it certainly will look pretty. How do we stop it? Seek out the candidates that stress the terms “homeowner” and “taxpayer.” Reward the people seeking city office that don’t just talk about jobs that pay 10 bucks an hour answering phones, but jobs that put Portland to work making actual products that people need to live.

Most importantly, stay away from the candidates bringing in large amounts of “campaign money.”

It’s not coming from us.

Portland while you were sleeping

Portland is a very different city after you’ve gone to bed. The utopia that “just needs a little vision” the more polished mayoral candidates speak of and the “total governmental tax burdening disaster but otherwise okay town” the riff-raff decry is riddled with a drug abusing and/or mentally disturbed underclass that roam the streets causing trouble on the entire peninsula and the busier thoroughfares on the other side of 295. Usually an “innocent” travelling the streets will only run into it here and there and give it only a fleeting thought. On Thursday morning, while out delivering this paper, it was blatant, it was everywhere and the scene presented provided me a glimpse into our future.

We begin at the Jetport at 2am, where all was quiet. Approaching Libbytown inbound on Congress Street I started to notice a lot of people walking and biking. A lot for this time of day is more than two. There were five. I thought nothing of it and descended into the St. John valley.

Stopping at the Greyhound station for a delivery, I’m usually tripping or glancing over a “regular” from the homeless community. The people without homes that have lived in the city for an extended time seem to have claimed the St. John valley for themselves. The newer homeless population that moved here based on the true rumors that Portland was the cat’s meow for the almighty hand out seems to stick around the Bayside area where those dreams are realized. Instead of the usual one or two people at the station, there were seven people hanging around – and not the regular faces. The faces there looked even less savory than I had grown accustomed and immune to, so I proceeded to Union Station plaza right quick.

On my way there I passed the building at the corner of St. John and A streets that is always lit up like a Christmas tree, has no signage and always has one or two suspicious-looking people coming and going from it. This morning, business was brisk, whatever it might be they purvey.

Heading to Dunkin Donuts, I saw a man wobbling behind the Dog Fish café yelling toward the sky at the top of his lungs. I continued up Congress. I am not over-embellishing when I say that every single stoop on the portion of Congress between Valley St and Bramhall Square was occupied by two or three people I wouldn’t be having tea with, and at two buildings, entry was being granted to knockers by the way of a guy cracking the door, peering out, and sizing up the visiting company. On a typical morning, you might see two or three people in this neck of the woods total. Thursday, there were 30 peeps, minimum.

I banged a right on Bramhall St, passing three late-teen/early twenties dudes using an orange construction cone as a megaphone. They had made their way up to Maine Medical Center by the time I had exited the hospital. I saw them approach a doctor outside to smoke a cigarette and as I passed in my rearview saw them dropkick the cone in her direction.

Driving further into the West End I saw people everywhere. There are always a few bar stragglers or wayward addicts out and about, but Thursday they were on every street and around every bend. Arriving at Cumberland Farms, I was greeting by a gaggle of early-twentysomethings in the parking lot. The manager of the store, having recently lost the part-time overnight guy, was manning the store. I walked in and said “The city is nuts tonight!” He agreed, and reminded me of a fact a working guy is wont to forget. It was the first of the month, he said, “checks went out.”

“That’s right!” I remembered right then that a percentage my early morning toil went to subsidize a few nights on the town for the very people I was seeing out. I usually don’t notice that our subsidizing of the criminally inclined underclass in our city has occurred until about the eighth of the month when I try to find a snack cake in the city and can’t; It seems the Hostess guy hasn’t figured out how to capitalize on the welfare state through efficient merchandising.

Having been reminded of why the city was so busy, I had a better understanding of the grand weirdness I was witnessing. Continuing forth on Danforth Street, there were four dudes standing next to a fire hydrant that had been opened and was spewing water.

I crossed the interstate from there and headed out on Forest Ave. I nearly squished a guy laying smack dab in the middle of the parking lot at the 449 Forest Ave Plaza, saw two kids armed with felt-tip writing devices at Woodfords Corner and in my rearview, after having passed a wobbly bike rider saw him then cross in front of a cargo van which came to a complete stop to wait for him to move out of the way. Heading further down Forest, I saw four police cruisers pass me, quickly heading in to town.

The quietest part of the city Thursday morning? Riverton. Not a peep out there, which was weird in of itself.

So that is what was happening while you were sleeping and your tax money was subsidizing “less fortunate” people Thursday morning. I thought you might like to know. It’s time to start thinking about when, not wondering if, what the climate in the city will be like after the collapse of the welfare state. Will a given Thursday at around noon start to more closely resemble this past Thursday at three in the morning? Will these people be better behaved when they’re not getting their Ramen noodles and starving? And most importantly, what steps are you taking now to protect yourselves for the eventuality they will come knocking on the door of a North Deering cape near you?

Seeing Portland slowly deteriorate over the last two years in the early morning has given me time to think about these things. Let’s hope our city leaders give it the same kind of thought.