Advoless

A frigid woodland way.

View from the fire escape of the Haymarket Cafe.

View from the front window of the Northampton Starbucks.

UMass students walking past the Fine Arts Center enroute to class this afternoon.

Today marks a negative milestone in the decline of print journalism in the Pioneer Valley. After 45 years of coming out every week (officially on Thursday, although it is often widely available on Wednesday) the Valley Advocate has for the first time in over four decades not published an issue. That is because as of this week, the Advocate has become a bi-weekly paper, slashing its publishing schedule in half, from 52 to 26 issues per year.

The reasons why are all the obvious ones. Since the late 90's the print newspaper industry has been in a relentless decline, resulting in cutbacks, firings and even permanent closings of publications throughout the Valley. Indeed, along with the reduction in the Advocate's printing schedule, Preview, their sister, glossily paged monthly magazine, is going permanently out of business effective immediately. The decision to fold appears to have been sudden, as a few stories that were apparently completed for the next, now never to appear issue of Preview are included in the latest Advocate, presented as a farewell gesture.

People much under 35 would probably have a hard time imagining the role newspapers once played in people's lives. They were the internet of their time, the only place to read the news of the day. Everyone read the paper, I remember as a delivery boy for the Springfield papers in my youth that hardly a single neighbor was without a subscription. It was a world in which everyone made time to read the paper every single day.

The Valley Advocate was a key player in that print news eco-system for a long time. I recall how in the entrance way to the UMass library there would be six or eight piles of strapped bundles of the Advocate that would be all gone in just a matter of days. Once I was entering Springfield City Hall with Mitch Ogulewicz just a few minutes after the Advocate delivery truck had left. The Advocates were always left on the stairs just inside the door, across from the grand staircase leading to the departmental offices, and down those stairs were running City Hall employees, racing to get the new issue in order to read the paper's latest take on local politics.

Alas, today it is hard to find a copy of the Advocate on campus or in any public buildings. Now that they are printing half as often, print copies of the Advocate will only become rarer. The Advocate website will continue to update regularly, but the whiff of doom is in the air. When the Advocate was acquired by it's current owner, The Hampshire Gazette, someone told me they feared it would ultimately devolve down to just a monthly art and culture insert slipped into the weekend edition of the Gazette. I scoffed at that notion at the time, but now I'm not so sure.

Meanwhile, Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole.

Not like you.