I’m from a place called Cortland, a small college town nestled in New York’s Finger Lakes region about a half an hour south of Syracuse. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s OK. It’s not known for much.
The actor Kevin James went to school there. 1904 presidential candidate Alton B. Parker (one of the biggest losers in the history of presidential elections) hailed from there, as did heavy metal singer Ronnie James Dio. We have a pretty good Division III college football team, and we are the former home of the Smith Corona typewriter, which was invented and manufactured in nearby Groton. Once upon a time, we were even home to one of the nation’s most well-trafficked brands of hotel soaps.
And, since 1867, we’d also had a daily newspaper called the Cortland Standard, which occupied a beautiful and imposing brick building in the center of downtown.
As a budding journalist starting his career in the early 2010s, the place seemed like a miracle. Hundreds of newspapers in cities just like mine were closing their doors. Corporate chains were punting experienced reporters into soulless public relations jobs. Printing presses were being sold for scrap. But the Cortland Standard — replete with its 1970s interior design — seemed frozen in time.
I was in college at the time, and still figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. After failing out of the business program at SUNY Brockport and a bad knee that ended my athletic dreams, I joined the school paper to fill my idle hours. And as it turned out, I was good at it. I quickly became the paper’s news editor and, when I came home for winter break, went to the paper on the advice of a family friend to try and get some clips. I did well and, the following summer, returned full-time, making minimum wage attending town council meetings and writing features about funeral homes and potato farmers.
I was actually being paid to write. And for the first time in a while, I felt like I knew where my life was headed. I had a calling.
Every day on the way to work, I’d walk past the sales and reception desk and the publisher’s office into an honest-to-god newsroom. There, I’d punch an actual timecard and proceed past a desk of bitter sportswriters — some of whom covered my high school basketball team during our improbable run to the Section 3 championship game against nationally ranked Jamesville Dewitt, and who asked my college coach when I’d see some action while I was riding the bench in college. In the corner was the opinion editor, gray with a long beard, hidden behind giant stacks of paper on his desk.
It was a magical place to start your career. It was family-owned — in fact, one of the oldest operating family-owned papers in the United States. Craziest of all, it was an afternoon paper. I would have my editorial meeting in the morning, make some calls, and pick up a freshly printed copy of the paper on the way to lunch.
I left the Cortland Standard in 2015 for the nearby Ithaca Journal, a Gannett-owned newspaper that shed its entire staff within two years of my arrival and was used as a poster child of the so-called “ghost papers” in a Poynter article. I left for Wyoming’s Casper Star-Tribune, where I watched owner Lee Enterprises dismantle the in-house printing press within a few weeks on the job.
Meanwhile, the Standard kept trucking on. It survived the recession, it survived the first Trump administration, and it survived COVID, which presented an extinction-level event for many places like this one.
But things weren’t going well. Wages stayed stagnant as costs kept rising. The price of the paper kept rising, while the pages got leaner. Old-timers began to head for the exits. The miracle paper couldn’t keep up with the times.
Last summer, the printing presses — visible from Main Street through floor-to-ceiling windows — stopped running. Earlier this winter, the newspaper sold off all its relics: an old Associated Press wire from the 1960s, ink-stained stools. (My mother, who knew the publisher, managed to secure the printing press block used for the paper’s first masthead, way back in the late 19th century).
It tried to adjust. Video, Instagram, digital-only subscriptions. The new editor, Todd McAdam, published a regular column explaining what a newspaper does, and how decisions are made and stories vetted. But the paper was on its deathbed.
Then, on the night of March 12, I got a text from a friend back home with a screenshot saying that the paper was shutting down. The screenshot had apparently been gleaned from some community page on Facebook.
It seemed suspicious. It had the date of the paper’s founding wrong, for one, saying it had been in operation since 1791, even though that was actually the year the area was first settled. It cited anonymous sources. And the news came from a woman who, from my cursory review, had become something of a de facto news source in the area by reposting other people’s Facebook statuses and pushing out any information she heard on the scanner.
I sought to verify it myself and found that I couldn’t. It wasn’t on the Standard’s Facebook page, nor was it on its website. I asked this woman for proof. She provided me with a picture of a computer screen with a headline I couldn’t find myself. (Someone later pointed out it was only visible on Bing’s search.)
Frankly, I showed my whole ass: I argued with people about how journalism works. I fought with family friends. I criticized former staffers commenting on the posts who seemed to have bought the news wholesale, no questions asked.
The following day, the paper confirmed it. A proposed 25% tariff on printing paper from Canada — a byproduct of President Donald Trump’s trade war — had finally done the Standard in.
In the comments, I saw people like myself who were mourning. But I saw plenty, celebrating: “Go woke, go broke,” some said. Others considered the paper obsolete. “You can just Google information now,” they wrote, seemingly never asking themselves the question of where that information actually comes from.
The irony that I had learned of my newspaper’s death from some random woman on Facebook, rather than the paper itself, was not lost on me.
I wondered to myself whether the vocation I’d dedicated my life to still had meaning.
I raged against my community for not cherishing something I myself so strongly believed in.
I felt betrayed, cast aside. I was angry. I was heartbroken. They had no idea what they had done.
I know this because I have seen the rebirth of the industry. There is plenty of good.
When I left the Casper Star-Tribune, I ended up at WyoFile, a donor-supported nonprofit in Wyoming that has been steadily growing and producing invaluable journalism.
I am currently a reporter at the Charleston, South Carolina, Post and Courier, a newspaper that is not only one of the oldest in the nation, but is also in the process of rapid expansion and regularly lauded as on the cutting edge of the industry.
In Ithaca, the Journal was replaced by The Ithaca Voice, a news blog founded by Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein that has since become a pillar of the community it serves.
But I’ve also seen the bad. In pursuit of a lot of money, I ended up at Newsweek for a while, an outlet where writers were regularly expected to write three or more stories per day of varying quality and depth, with pageviews and quotas the primary measure of success.
This is the struggle: It seems the places that do it right are few and far between. There’s only so much ad money and subscriber dollars to go around. And ultimately, we get what we pay for: free outlets, in the competition for eyeballs, churn as much as they can, and more than anyone can conceivably produce on their own. They are derivative and need other people’s work to remain successful.
This is what I fear for towns like mine: When the institutions fall, is Facebook — with its AI slop and abandonment of fact-checking — all that’s left? Will we depend on the commitment of a couple of people listening to the scanner, or to trust them to verify whatever information someone sends them over Messenger?
Mostly, I fear the lack of incentive for people like me to get into the industry. It’s not hard to find an opening for a journalism job. But one with wages you can live on is a different story, and dominated by budding journalists from schools you have heard of — not people like me, from little old SUNY Brockport. I remember one juncture in my career where the staff of a rival newspaper was comprised almost entirely of Mizzou grads. We may one day face an era where all the nation’s credentialed journalists learned their craft from the same few professors.
When we lose papers like the Cortland Standard, we’re not just losing another small business on our Main Streets, or a relic of a forgotten time that has fallen victim to the evolution of technology. We’re losing a generation who understands what this work actually entails.
Correction (March 20, 11:20 a.m.): The Cortland Standard launched in 1867, not, as a previous version of this article said, in 1862.
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