LA Times on the Ghost of a California Newspaper

James Rainey, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, reports that the Salinas Californian, the daily newspaper serving the capital of Monterey County, has completely emptied its newsroom.

The only original content from Salinas comes in the form of paid obituaries, making death virtually the only sign of life.

Rainey points out that the paper did not write one article about the disastrous flooding that occurred when the Salinas River jumped its banks in January. He goes on to report that the 152-year-old newspaper did not cover last November's mayoral race, nor a crippling police staffing shortage.

“The Salinas Californian missed those stories, understandably, because it employed only one journalist until December,” Rainey writes. “That’s when the paper’s last reporter quit to take a job in TV.” 

The Californian is owned by Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, which now fills its pages with copy from the chain-owned USA Today and its other California papers. 

“The only original content from Salinas comes in the form of paid obituaries,” Rainey writes, “making death virtually the only sign of life at an institution once considered a must-read by many Salinans.”

Rainey offers some crucial context in the form of these two related facts. 

1. Newspaper revenue coast-to-coast has been cut in half in the past two decades.  

2. Most of those ad dollars now wind up in the bloated coffers of internet giants including Google and Facebook.

Read ‘The California newspaper that has no reporters left’ on latimes.com.