Yesterday’s was the final edition of the Hernando Today, an off-shoot of the Tampa Tribune that has served the Brooksville area for three decades.
Ken Koehn, managing editor for the Tribune, announced in November that the newspaper would be shuttered due to a tough advertising climate.
“We cherish our role of serving the Hernando community, which made this an extremely difficult decision,’’ Koehn said. “But like many newspapers across the country, we are streamlining operations to make our core products financially successful.’’
In a final note to readers, Michael Bates writes:
“When the paper started, we were on a two-lane highway called State Road 50. Our editorial offices were on one side of the road and production-advertising was across the street. That meant crossing the road with the proof pages on a daily basis. Needless to say, not many of our staff volunteered to carry the pages during one of those infamous summer thunderstorms.
“Today, Hernando County is a thriving community of 175,000.”
So, just to be clear, the Hernando Today is folding, despite serving an audience that grew from a quiet bedroom community to a market of 175,000 residents.
For a business to fail in the face of that kind of market growth, it’s not enough to say the Internet is killing the newspaper business, as I’m sure many veterans of legacy media would have you believe. It has to have something to do with the quality of the product as well. That’s what so few of the traditional journalists, save the New York Times‘ David Carr, will acknowledge — that not only has the technology revolutionized how we get the news, but that some newspapering just isn’t very good.
This is not to say this is what happened to the Hernando Today, but any autopsy of what killed that newspaper has to include this as possible cause of death.
