All the news that sits

I watched "The Post" again last night, just to remember how it used to be in America. There was a time when people still gave a damn, it tells me. There was a time when they had ink in their veins and a reverence for the mission in their hearts, and not just a cold eye for the bottom line.

There was a time when the caretakers of the free press were actually the caretakers of the free press, and they put that responsibility above all else. They were people like Katherine Graham, who risked everything -- risked her newspaper, her company, even her freedom -- because it was the right and essential thing to do for the country.

There are still people out there like that, doing what reporters and editors have always done. And God bless every last one of them.

But the Katherine Grahams?

Few and far between anymore.

By now everyone in Fort Wayne knows its days as a two-newspaper town, even virtually, are over. Ogden Newspapers, which owns the News-Sentinel and is run by people as far from Katherine Graham as Our Only Available President is from the truth most days, killed it off yesterday. Nine months into the News-Sentinel's run as a digital-only model, Ogden pulled the plug, laying off the entire staff of the afternoon paper except for one person.

Among those it laid off were people who had for decades put in the newsperson's customary insane hours to do the newsperson's noble work: Keeping us informed and  holding our public officials' accountable.

For the latter especially, Our Only Available President now labels the free press the "enemy of the people." Coming from a wanna-be despot, it's a label the free press should wear especially proudly.

But I'm getting off track here.

What I want to say is that among those laid off yesterday were friends of mine, and people whose work I respect. Because I was a sportswriter myself for 38 years, it was the jettisoning of my brothers-in-arms in sports that cut deepest. Two of those dumped on the street were Reggie Hayes and Blake Sebring, both Hall of Fame journalists who had been with the News-Sentinel for decades , and who in that time had sold God knows how many papers for it with exemplary work. That they are also good people who represented their newspaper and their community in the best possible fashion -- and whose heroic output for their paper's digital product was so faithlessly betrayed yesterday -- only makes this lunacy more apparent.

Only it isn't lunacy, of course. It's bidness. And it's happening everywhere.

The painful reality is, at some point the free press in America passed from the hands of the Katherine Grahams. At some point, it became the property of mere moneychangers, empty-eyed bean counters who no more understand the sacred trust they keep than a gnat understands quantum physics.

The widespread assumption about Ogden's curious move, for instance, is that keeping one reporter on maintains the fiction of a news product, and that's essential to maintaining a JOA (Joint Operating Agreement) that outrageously favors Ogden. Simply bailing on the entire enterprise would violate that agreement. And that would cost Ogden what we can assume would be a hefty sum.

 If this bit of spitballing (and that's all it is) is true, it would be very much in line with Ogden's reputation as a company that traditionally wrings every last drop of blood from every last stone before folding the tent and fleeing the premises. Fair or not, spitballing or not, that process certainly seems to be in motion in Fort Wayne.

Point is, as it does everywhere, it's the best people who get hurt by it. People who did the work while Ogden raked in the cabbage. People who did the work even as their company made it increasingly difficult for them to do so.

I watched "The Post" again last night, just to remember how it used to be in America. And now?

Now I wish Ogden would back all its pretty nonsense about how it was committed to still giving the citizens of Fort Wayne comprehensive news coverage. I wish it would put its money where its mouth is, so to speak, when that mouth is telling us the News-Sentinel can still be counted on as a vibrant and viable news entity.

That's great, boys. Know how you can make that happen?

Sell. Sell to someone who still gives a damn.