Fort Worth Star-Telegram Continues To Shrink

This morning I read an interesting series of comments at the West & Clear Blog regarding reader's regard, well actually, lack of regard regarding the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's current state of failure.

After having spent a month reading another McClatchy newspaper, that being the Tacoma News Tribune, it is surprising how different the 2 papers are. One would think the Tacoma paper was the one serving the bigger market, but Tacoma's population is just a tad over 200,000. While Fort Worth has over 700,000 people currently residing within its borders. I believe the Star-Telegram circulates more newspapers than the News Tribune.

But the Star-Telegram is a much smaller paper, with a lot more ads and way fewer columnists. Somehow the News Tribune can afford to have more than one columnist on its editorial page.

The comments in West & Clear about the current state of the Star-Telegram's diminishing relevancy were interesting, matching much of what I've observed, including the weird role the paper assigns itself as being a city booster, rather than accurately reporting on the city's many shortcomings.

A guy named Greg wrote an interesting comment about the Star-Telegram's shortcoming's and its resultant disservice to the community. I'll copy what Greg wrote below....

"A paper whose purpose in life has its historic roots in boosterism for the home town is doomed in the long run. It won’t get into controversies that could make Fort Worth look anything less than perfect. And that’s just not interesting. By not digging and finding things that need improvement I guess it’s assumed Fort Worth can look great. The problem is if we don’t expose what’s wrong, how do we ever get better? I mean, I love Fort Worth but I still think we have some areas that fall short of perfection.

Worse, by not digging into city failures and bad ideas the paper leaves the casual observer thinking there’s no reason to take an interest in civic affairs. And so people don’t show up and they don’t pay attention.

A free press is critical to preserving our other freedoms, but only to the extent that it does its job to inform the citizens about their government, including criticizing it. Fortunately we have the Weekly and occasionally the Business Press taking a few shots, but that’s not enough.

I don’t want to imply, though, that the S-T doesn’t have some dedicated and talented people. What it lacks is vision."