Way back in 2011, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article about Modesto’s dire need for news. This was when the Modesto Bee still had hundreds of employees, slightly down from its peak of almost seven-hundred, but still a respectable number for a local newspaper.
Today, Bee employees number in the low dozens. The paper still includes national news, and the local range of coverage still extends throughout the northern San Joaquin Valley, though it’s mostly confined to Stanislaus County and nearby cities—but as might be expected, local coverage has gotten thinner and thinner.
Given the extreme loss of people, the Bee does a remarkable job. Nonetheless, Modesto and the northern San Joaquin Valley still need news, now more than ever.
Unfortunately, the Bee’s ongoing loss of coverage makes it harder for readers to justify subscriptions, especially when delivery and service seem to be getting worse all the time. Below, Babette Wagner expresses the frustration and loss we experience when our local paper can’t even find its way to our front lawn. Ed.
Founded in 1884 as The Daily Evening News, our hometown Modesto-originated newspaper went through several incarnations to reach what would later become today’s Modesto Bee. After several name changes, it was eventually purchased in 1924 by McClatchy Newspapers, after which it was merged that same year with the Modesto News-Herald, adopting that name as part of a consolidation.
By 1933, it had officially expanded the name to The Modesto Bee and News-Herald, still remaining a part of the McClatchy family of newspapers, a corporation which started on the heels of the California Gold Rush in Sacramento with The Daily Bee, first published on February 3, 1857, where the Sacramento edition eventually became the McClatchy Corporation’s flagship newspaper under the Editorship of James McClatchy.
By September of 1943, the cartoon “Bee” which is still seen on Bee mastheads could be seen on all of the Bee newspapers, was named Scoopy, and had been created for the McClatchy Corporation by Walt Disney, who, though not known for taking on commercial work, agreed to draw Scoopy if the McClatchy Company would donate $1500 to the Army Relief Fund of WWII. By 1975, the Modesto paper had abbreviated the name on its masthead to The Modesto Bee and had become a vital part of the Stanislaus and neighboring county regions.
But the Bee is not the same as it was when many first subscribed, even just a couple decades ago, much less when many of us were growing up in Stanislaus County. Since those halcyon days, The Modesto Bee has downsized, and become more impersonal; many now find it a sparse paper with a sporadic to outright absent delivery system and a non-existent circulation department. Today’s Modesto Bee is hemorrhaging both readers, staff, and advertisers, not to mention its long-gone local publishing facility and other key parts that many of us once took for granted.
Despite complaints, the problems continue to fester; subscribers are not happy. After living in one area over 33 years (where, even there, delivery became more and more sporadic as time passed) we moved over two years ago and again, live in a readily accessible area (Village One) in a well-designed development of one and two story homes in which it is apparently even more difficult for The Modesto Bee to manage household deliveries.
Almost since our arrival, it has seemed to us that we are living in a virtual news desert as Village One does not appear to be on The Modesto Bee’s delivery map. Those few of us who have continued to subscribe would often be missing not just one or two papers a week, but often the entire week! When we called the subscription line, we’d reach a robo-answering machine and a promise for a soon-to-be home delivery. Out of well over 100 calls, it was rare that we, or our dwindling number of subscriber neighbors, received the promised paper.
The online Bee is, frankly, annoying: It’s not organized like the actual newspaper, advertisements are far more obnoxious, and many articles are entirely different from the newsstand copy.
In addition, the online editions are constantly changing subjects and it certainly doesn’t work when you want to sit outside with a morning cup of coffee and read the newspaper you’ve been reading since childhood, the one you’ve been paying for well over 50 years as an adult! Call me picky… and maybe I am, but there’s a part of most people that want to get what they’ve paid for. It’s just that simple!
So after several weeks of multiple consecutive failed deliveries, we cancelled. In two to three days we received a call from a woman at the “circulation department” (wherever that is) and they offered us a re-subscription. I explained that, “we’ve been down that road before,” and we were promised that this time it would work; this time we would get a paper every day just where we wanted it.
Then she asked me for my credit card number and I had to explain that when someone calls us, we do not give our credit card numbers out over the phone, and I asked her to please give me a number to call back. Apparently being unable to receive calls, she said that we’d be receiving three weeks of free newspapers to make up for the many losses we’d suffered and we would get a statement in the mail in about a week and a paper the next morning.
Well, neither has happened and that’s been over four weeks ago! After two tries calling The Modesto Bee to request the promised paper, we gave up on the robo-answering machine which told us they “had a record” of our address and phone number, but that we no longer had a subscription. So we waited a few more days, hoping things would clear up: Nothing! No newspapers, no statement, just continued Robo talk along with three weeks of no statement and no subscription.
So we are, indeed, in a news desert!
The only paper in town is no longer worth the trouble or the money, the service is a nightmare, the staff remaining is obviously overworked, especially given my husband’s two separate emails, two separate times, to two key individuals, Tim Ritchey, General Manager and Garth Stapley, Opinion Page Editor, without any response whatsoever.
Modesto deserves better. The Fourth Estate is an integral part of what helps keep our communities informed, insures that our government is not just reported upon, but held accountable. Many times over past years, the end result has been not only much clearer information for the city’s citizens but an overall better local government. Without these daily publications, people remain either ill-informed or uninformed, particularly when there is often only one local paper per community.
Sadly, The Modesto Bee is an endangered species, a fact over which we can only grieve, and after seven generations of my family living in Stanislaus County and subscribing to The Bee, there seems to be no one willing to find a solution to salvaging this sadly underfunded, mismanaged and lost treasure that’s been with us well over a Century.
Rest in Peace, Scoopy. You will be missed!
The best days of print journalism appear to be over. Electronic journalism is gradually replacing paper. As the Bee declined, one would have expected the emergence of a new competing paper. The fact that one has not popped up is an indicator that we won’t being seeing newspaper delivery much longer.
Internet based outlets like the Valley Citizen are picking up the void left by the shrinking Bee. We now have more sources of news available, including Facebook and Twitter.
In the heyday of the Bee, the accuracy of its content was periodically questioned, just like internet news and TV News of today. Will the public ever have an infallible news source? Probably not. Not as long as writers continue to weave opinion with facts or alter facts for the purpose of influencing opinion.
Pretty much says it all : “But the Bee is not the same as it was when many first subscribed, even just a couple decades ago, much less when many of us were growing up in Stanislaus County. Since those halcyon days, The Modesto Bee has downsized, and become more impersonal; many now find it a sparse paper with a sporadic to outright absent delivery system and a non-existent circulation department.” And a ludicrous price tag for what we receive in return.
Coincidentally when the Bee moved print functions to Sacramento and imposed a 9PM deadline people stopped reading and started complaining. Always looked forward to the Saturday Bee and the high school football scores up on the top line. Sunday’s not cutting it folks!
I had made a prediction a year or so ago that the Modesto Bee print version would not see 2020. I still think it’s a possibility but I may be off by a year. I can’t even start a fire in the fireplace in the winter with what we’ve been seeing lately and now to cut out Saturday and make Friday and Sunday bigger? Yeah, right!
Lots of good people at The Bee have sunk their life’s work into that paper and I thank them for that. The sad part is that life has moved on and a local print newspaper is one of the casualties.
Hi Babette,
When you get a chance, please give me a call. I certainly can’t argue with anything you have written regarding delivery, which has become a major issue since March. In Village One, where I live, we had major problems a month ago that have subsided somewhat, but not to the degree that satisfies me. You can reach me at 209-578-2362,
Brian Clark
Editor
The Modesto Bee
Thank you, Brian…. I’ll give you a call when I’m finished with today’s clients, or perhaps sometime tomorrow, schedule permitting, if that’s your business line.
~babette
Younger generations under 60 yrs old rarely read newspapers since they tend to be internet wizards. All the news they want can be found on Twitter and electronic MSM. When reading the Bee, I find that news articles are at least a day old compared to internet reports. Adding insult to injury, the Bee swerved to hard left leaving their old base of Modesto conservatives fuming with anger.
I remember having a bicycle paper route when I was in junior high in Oregon. It was 120-some papers, so I had to make two trips with a very heavy, two sided, bag loaded full (one bag on my chest, one on my back). This was a four-season activity that started at 4am. I recall seeing and delivering the first USA Today papers, and my family telling me when I got home how many calls I got when the papers weren’t delivered by 7am..
Those days are over, as others have plainly said. Print newspapers are now a unique point of nostalgia, much like horses and buggies and families gathered around the radio on a Saturday night. It seems like every generation gets an event — a war, a depression, an industrial revolution, and so on. It’s a little disheartening to know that my major generational event has been the Internet. In the grand sweep of history, that seems so tacky.
So as papers fade, and along with it, the quality of discourse and the availability of nimble minds, I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it.
Sorry to ramble. Nice work,
JT
How sad, how dispiriting that another also bemoans the loss of the Fourth Estate:
“Modesto deserves better. The Fourth Estate is an integral part of what helps keep our communities informed, insures that our government is not just reported upon, but held accountable. Many times over past years, the end result has been not only much clearer information for the city’s citizens but an overall better local government.”
In the absence of that function, the Bee, from the standpoint of content and view, has become a tabloid; it may as well change the format also.
In the absence of a Fourth Estate, the government staffs, and their unindicted co-conspirators,
the electeds, are free to indulge in mischief without restraint.
All sad; all true. Even the ESubscribe leaves a lot to be desired. There is no corporate commitment to providing the level of service we pay for a subscription. The sole reason for staying and paying is no alternative.
I read the Modesto Bee online daily with no problem. Hard copy newspapers are becoming obsolete, the Modesto Bee should end print papers and go completely online. Babette Wagner needs to stop complaining about “delivery” and learn to navigate the online website or read the internet copy sent to her email that comes in the hard-copy format. This isn’t the 1950’s, the times are a changing and the so-called Fourth Estate is online for the world to see, debate & produce (via websites, Facebook, YouTube etc.) Babette Wagner would you like some cheese with that whine… 😉
All these complaints are accurate, yet I still subscribe to the Modesto Bee out of loyalty and to do my part to stand up for print journalism, which unfortunately is an endangered species. I have no inclination to bury my face in my phone and scroll through pages to find a good news source. I’m also concerned about the potential loss of investigative journalism, an essential role of a local newspaper.
I don’t blame at all the staff at the Bee. It is just an unfortunate situation that is a by-product of our society’s infatuation with technology.
Among other things, I fear for democracy when there is no more Bee. We have always had problems getting enough .local news to be informed to vote. Now what can you rely on except the sad flyers the candidates send you in the mail? So despite its problems I support the Bee as much as and for long as possible.
We continue our Bee subscription and subscribe to at least half a dozen other papers. But at some point someone is going to come in and provide better local news in service to democracy than the Bee does. On the environment and local politics, the Bee hasn’t been useful enough since the 80s. But we must admit our own roles in the decline of news; too many people gravitate to clickbait and sensational stories. When enough people are willing to pay for a truly informative news source, we’ll have one. Until then, the void will be increasingly filled by corporate- and wealth-favorable propaganda along lines pioneered by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.
Sean Hansen:: Thanks for the advice, but I already read a wide variety of on and offline newspapers, magazines, websites and blogs as well as publish online, so it’s not like I’m still wearing a bustle and carrying a parasol for my weekly Sunday in the park with George. You might wish to take your snarky sour grapes remark and make some real wine as you’ve rather missed the point about the fading “watch dog” acumen of the Fourth Estate across the country and Modesto’s longstanding shortage of news coverage: paper, online or otherwise and the negative impact that that important missing information can lay the groundwork for. But thanks for taking the time to read….you’re headed in the right direction!
~babette