It will take some time, maybe a few years; but I think we are witnessing the incremental death of the Allentown Morning Call. For those of us who lived through, and who more or less personally endured, the death of an earlier newspaper--the Globe-Times of Bethlehem--this is not an especially happy time. The death of a community's newspaper pinches and shrivels the community itself, and the life in it.
Not that the Morning Call ever was Bethlehem's newspaper. Some of--not all of--the reporters it sent over to the Bethlehem bureau during the past few years have been so arrogant, and so determined to push their favorite city politicians--think Mayors Cunningham and Callahan--that they could not bother with straight news coverage. You could read the Morning Call; but to know what had gone on at a meeting you had either to have been there or to have had a friend there. And this is a serious criticism of a newspaper. It got at least one reporter fired; but things should never have been allowed to come to that.
Some of the mistakes that are now eating at the fabric of the Morning Call are similar to the mistakes that consumed the Globe-Times; some, I think, are different.
I intend to continue this discussion in the next blog entry.