Globe Gobbled by Greed

Right here in West Michigan is a weekly newspaper that serves as yet another example of a local business that lost its soul and its mission because it was captured by a corporation.

The Penasee Globe, which began in 1884 as the Wayland Globe, has become just one of the many suburban Grand Rapids area weeklies now owned by the Advance Newspapers group, which has strong business ties to the Booth chain and the Grand Rapids Press. What used to be a quaint weekly chronicle of the doings of ordinary people in Wayland, Hopkins, Martin, Dorr, Moline and Gun Lake has undergone a makeover into small cog in the corporate media.

The old Wayland Globe had been a classic old-style community weekly under the reign of Irvin and Helen J. Helmey until they sold it to Ron Carlson and Nyla Aamoth in 1986. The new owners updated the paper, had 100% turnover of staff members within two years, changed its name to Penasee, made it look more like a magazine and proceeded to eliminate a lot of the old features, such as the little old ladies’ chatter, the spaghetti dinners and church activities. Carlson and Aamoth admitted they were only in it for the money and they finally sold the Globe a few years ago to the Advance, which was happy to expand its empire. Since capturing the weekly, it has reworked the whole operation into a publication with a sprinkling of local news, lots of general chit-chat columns used by all papers in the chain and lots of shared regional news and ads.

In short, in just 20 years, the Wayland Globe has been transformed from a community newspaper to a corporate newspaper. It’s a lot like the old-style local greasy spoon restaurant with home-cooked soups and specials of the day transformed into a McDonald’s or an Applebee’s. What’s lost here is a sense of community. Go to any town the size of Hastings or even smaller and you’re likely to see franchises of McDonald’s, Ace Hardware, Wal Mart, etc. And now you’re likely to find the friendly local weekly paper is owned by some far away corporate media, too.

The last straw for the Penasee Globe came last week when they found a way to get rid of editor Scott Sullivan, an incorrigible community journalist who didn’t fit in with the corporate philosophy of toeing the bottom line. Wayland folks say they’re going to miss Scott, but the Globe will keep chugging along as a corporate weekly newspaper with little if any genuine interest in the community. The people on the Globe’s mailing list have been just like that rabbit in the fable who got into the pot with warm water and just didn’t notice when the cooks slowly but surely turned up the heat until it was too late for him to understand he was on the menu. The Globe’s death as a community publication was very slow and painful, and too many just didn’t understand until it was too late.