On March 21st the Tucson Citizen will fade into history and Tucson will be a one-newspaper town. Sadly, its passage will be mourned by few. The cranks who regularly add to the paper’s comments section understand the cause: The Citizen has become too liberal, too biased, too socialistic.
Huh? I suspect the real reason is that Gannett wants to profit from a phantom JOA, reaping the rewards of a joint operating agreement without actually jointly operating anything.
Tucson will lose more than it realizes when the Citizen closes down; it will lose a large part of its corporate memory, for that’s what a newsroom staff is. They are the folks who remember and pass on to the new arrivals in the newsroom, and to their readers, our community’s history.
Historical context is important. It’s good for a city to remember where the bodies are buried and who buried them. We are less likely to be taken advantage of if we do.
More about the "phantom JOA" phenomenon later. (Added at 6:21 pm Monday)
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