@indystar, once great metropolitan daily with two Pulitzers, announced with a whimper today it will no longer publish Op-Ed pages five days a week. Devastating news for those who love(d) newspapers. #deathbyathousandcuts pic.twitter.com/nyTpQw33QI
— AndreaNeal1 (@HoosierHoundDog) October 7, 2018
Gary Welsh, Paul Ogden and IR have for several years now been talking about the Star’s fall from it’s heyday under “Young Gene” Pulliam to it’s decline since being bought by the Gannet Corporation in 1999. Click here and here to read some of our previous columns on the Star’s sad state. One reader once commented on this blog that the Star even failed as trash can liner. Many people whom IR respects and admires have mentioned that the decline at the Star is due to the decrease in resources given to local newspapers in recent years and to the ever increasing use of the Internet as a news source. But the biggest factor for many of us who have canceled our subscriptions to the Star over the past two decades, is the decline in quality reporting being printed by the Star since 1999. There are still several high quality journalists at the Star such as Tony Cook and Fatima Hussein. But when most of the papers space is spent simply regurgitating the talking points of the Indiana political establishment. Why should people pay money to read the Star when they could just listen to politicians speak for free? And when you have useless shills like Tim Swarens as an opinion writer, or guest columnist like Carpetbagging Abdul Hakim-Shabazz writing for your Op-Ed page. It’s only natural that the Star’s readership would plummet.
Tim Swarens on his Facebook page was whining about how the news business has gotten more complex over the years:
Maybe if Swarens had actually tried to be something other than a hack writer the Star would be in better shape today. We sympathize with Andrea Neal and Ruth Holladay’s sadness at what the Star has become. But unlike them we cannot bring ourselves to mourn the Star’s impending destruction. The Indianapolis Star died long ago. We, Paul Ogden and the late, great Gary Welsh long ago made our piece with that. Our best advice to what talent remains at the Star is: Keep your resumes updated, write high quality work like you never have before, and start applying for other jobs if you have not already. It is no longer possible to dig the Star out of the cosmos sized hole it has dug itself into. The only thing that you can do is keep the Star’s demise from damaging your own careers and let Tim Swarens and his ilk go down with the funeral pyre that is known as The Indianapolis Star.
