R.I.P., Cortland Standard

An instantly recognized building if you grew up where Curmie did.

Curmie doesn’t know if everyone who has lived in multiple places thinks this way, but when asked where he’s “from,” he generally responds with the city where he went to high school: in his case, Cortland, New York.  There are five (yes, five!) other towns or cities where he’s spent more time than he did in Cortland, and the number of days he’s spent there in the last thirty years or so is in single digits, but it still remains, in his mind, at least, his hometown.

At the risk of sounding like a MAGA, Curmie confesses that the fact that an average of two local newspapers shut down every week in this country hadn’t really made an impression on him until… you know… it directly affected him.  Today is the last day of publication for the Cortland Standard, which has filed for bankruptcy after over 157 years of operation.

We had the paper delivered to our doorstep every day for the time I lived in Cortland.  Virtually everyone referred to it as the “Substandard,” but actually it was quite a good paper, or at least it was a half-century ago.  There was national and international news from agencies like the AP and UPI, as well as coverage of what was happening in Albany.  But mostly, there was local news.

Yes, a lot of the stories were rather quaint.  Curmie’s name (and often, photo) appeared in the Standard’s pages on several occasions for such relatively inconsequential accomplishments as going on a field trip or appearing in the high school play.  But the paper did serve to bring the community together.  Getting your name in the paper was kind of a big deal for adolescents.  (Perhaps it still is?)  It sounds kind of squishy to say that it made us feel like we mattered, but it was true. 

Moreover, in the pre-internet days, the local newspaper was our primary local news source.  The television stations in Syracuse to the north or Binghamton to the south didn’t cover our area unless something really important had happened, and if they did, it would likely be a 90-second segment, offering about as much information as a six column-inch article.

We’d check the Standard to see how the high school basketball team did in that road game.  We’d be looking for something else altogether but come across a story about someone we knew—or the parent, sibling, or child of someone we knew.  It was a big enough city, with a population of about 20,000, that the “everybody knows everybody” line wasn’t literally true, but seldom did a day go by without my knowing personally someone whose name appeared in those pages.

And that doesn’t even count the coverage of local sports.  (Obviously, Curmie knew a lot of the athletes at his high school.)  Predictably, there was a lot more of that than anything else, but actually that makes sense.  There are generally two or three sports going on at the same time of year, and between the high schools and the college, there were local results to report virtually every day.  It wasn’t that the high school choir concert wasn’t covered; but there were fewer such concerts in a year than there were basketball games in a fortnight.

There are, of course, manifold reasons why small-town newspapers are folding.  In their farewell statement (linked above), the paper’s staff identifies the obvious: declining readership and increasing cost.  The former is certainly understandable: the internet and social media certainly lead to a sense of isolation, even as they pretend to do the opposite.  There are more and more texts and IMs and fewer phone calls… and even fewer “let’s go get coffee” moments.

We also come to concentrate on our Facebook friends or those who follow us X or whatever, at the expense of keeping up with those who don’t have as much of an internet presence.  Curmie is as guilty of this anyone else, by the way.  He’s pretty much lost touch with many of his closest high school friends.  Of course, this is not at all intended to suggest that he doesn’t value those who may indeed come to read these words.

The access to free news content on the internet also contributes to the demise of smaller outlets, even if they also operate a website, especially if it’s behind a paywall.  Why pay for national and international news if you can get the same story at no cost?  And now the question becomes: is the local news, about people I’m less and less likely to know or care about, sufficient to warrant the price of a subscription?  (Curmie hasn’t subscribed to the local paper here in Texas for twenty years or thereabouts.)  And, if I’m a businessperson, why should I pay to advertise in a medium with declining reach, particularly, as is likely, if the remaining readers aren’t in my target demographic?

But Curmie also calls your attention, Gentle Reader, to the one specific factor highlighted in the paper’s closing editorial: “increasing costs, including an expected 25% tariff on newsprint.”  Translation: they get their newsprint from Canada, and the Tangerine Toddler is threatening escalating tariffs.  The reasonable rationale for the US to impose tariffs is to protect American businesses from unfair competition.  In the hands of a reckless buffoon, however, the result is pushing at least one business over the edge into bankruptcy.  Such is life in Trumpistan.

This essay isn’t about pointing the finger, however.  It’s just an old man’s reminiscence of a time when communities mattered, when Big Tech didn’t dominate the information landscape, and when the local newspaper was a cherished part of small-town life.

R.I.P., Cortland Standard.  You had a great run, and you will be missed by many, even by those of us who haven’t read you in hard-copy in decades.