The Writing is on the Wall: Oh, Wait. Maybe it Isn’t
The Keys Citizen will print one edition per week starting Aug. 1. Its publisher wants you to know this is actually good news.
KEY WEST — In the long, sad history of newspapers pretending they are not dying, The Keys Citizen just delivered a performance worthy of dinner theater.
Publisher Kevin Smith announced this week that the paper — which stopped being a daily some time ago, the way an iguana stops being alive after it falls frozen out of a tree — will now print exactly one edition per week. One. Every Thursday.
The headline on this obituary dressed as a press release?
More Local News, More Often.
That might become Above the Fold’s new tagline.
But one print edition per week? More often? You could stare at that sentence for an hour and it would not get any less deranged. It is the kind of logic that only makes sense if you are trying to sell a collapsing house by advertising “more ventilation.”
The handwriting is on the wall.
Oh, well, maybe it is not.
Maybe it was on the wall, but somebody cut the wall to one day a week and now you have to check back Thursday to read it. If the wall is even there at all.
You might think this makes me happy, but it does not. My name appeared in The Shitizen across three decades. I have friends (well, two) that still work there; they are some of the most talented I have ever worked with at any level of media.
And here is the truly magnificent part: Smith ran the announcement on the front page. As news. The Keys Citizen used its own front page — the one piece of real estate a newspaper is supposed to reserve for things that actually happened to other people — to announce that it is barely a newspaper anymore in between repurposed press releases, “Staff Reports” and original content on some guy named Ernest Hemingway. Apparently this is his week.
That is not journalism. That is a going-out-of-business sale with a masthead. You half expected a coupon at the bottom: clip this ad and get 20 percent off your last subscription payment.
The announcement, addressed “Dear Reader” — singular, which at this rate may be literally accurate — explains that the Saturday print edition will become digital-only beginning Aug. 1. This leaves Thursday as the lone surviving print day, now rechristened the “flagship” edition.
Flagship. As if The Keys Citizen is a fleet. As if somewhere out there a convoy of newspapers is steaming toward port and Thursday is leading the charge. In reality, the fleet is one leaky dinghy tied to a dock behind a strip mall, and the captain is bailing with a bucci cup.
Refugees from nearby communist countries would refuse to embark.
The flagship Thursday paper will feature, and this is not satire, “Puzzles and comics.”
Also: “SCORE sports coverage,” “Dedicated military news and content,” an “Open House Map,” and something called “Good Deeds.” It reads less like a newspaper and more like the contents of a dentist’s waiting room circa 2004.
Smith assures readers they can still access digital editions Tuesday through Saturday — delivered to their inbox, available on an app (that doesn’t work,) or found at KeysNews.com by navigating to “the upper-left corner of the website.” If that sounds like something your grandson would have to help you with, do not worry. Just call 305-292-7777 and select Option 3. A human may or may not answer. The announcement does not guarantee one.
Let us be clear about what is happening here.
The Keys Citizen is a dinosaur. Not the magnificent kind — not the tyrannosaur that shook the Cretaceous and made other species rethink their life choices.
This is the last one. The runt. The one standing alone in a field of cooling ash, blinking at the sky, too confused to lie down.
The asteroid hit years ago. The dust has blotted out the sun. And the publisher Kevin — may we call you Kevin? — is propping up the carcass with a broomstick articulating its short little arms waving a press release saying the dinosaur has never been healthier.
More alive, in fact. More alive, more often.
The paper once landed on porches from Old Town to Stock Island with a satisfying thwack every morning, ink still wet, carrying the messy, vital, occasionally misspelled news of the Southernmost City in the continental United States. Hemingway read it. Tennessee Williams probably lined a birdcage with it. Empirical studies show that noine out of 10 parrots do not complain if you use it as cage liner. The 10th disrespectfully asks for the puzzles and comics.
But now? At once a week? Polly is going to have be put on strict rations.
I was there long enough to remember when they still had presses over on Northside Drive. As Assistant Sports Editor, Saturday nights (we still had a Sunday edition) were my purview. I would put the paper to bed, pour a cup of coffee and wait for it to ripple like the puddles in Jurasic Park as the presses lurched to life. I would go back in the press room, pull one of the first copies and hold it to my nose so I could inhale and savor the ink. That may be a contributing factor as to why I turned out this way.
Now it prints on Thursdays somewhere in South Florida. And the even better news? At two days a week, delivery by USPS was unreliable at best. Now only printing once a week, your chances have exponentially improved for not even seeing one issue, at all.
Now that’s what publishers call added value at no additional charge!
There is a word for a newspaper that publishes once a week.
That word is “weekly.”
And there are already good ones in the Keys — ones that never pretended to be anything else. Let Mandy Miles — I almost said Bolen, which shows how old I am — and The Keys Weekly fight to the death with the newly minted Keys News Sometimes. It was hard enough to get one printed paper out a week when the Citizen was printing two. Now their chances are exponentially worse.
It is my guess that when the City of Key West and the Monroe County Sherriff’s Department figure out they no longer have to pay the newspaper of record to publicly advertise items, the last gasp will be expelled.
With The Citizen’s retreat to a single print day, Above the Fold — an independent Substack newsletter — is now the only near-daily local news source in Monroe County. No corporate owner. No board of directors. No strip mall headquarters. Just a journalist tyring to cover the Keys the way they deserve to be covered: when the news happens, not when the printing press feels like warming up.
That is not a boast. It is an indictment.
Smith closed his letter by thanking readers for “supporting local journalism in Key West and the surrounding Keys.” It was a gracious sentiment, the kind of thing you say at a funeral right before they close the lid.
Someone should send flowers — assuming they have not already sublet the rest of their strip mall office to the mattress store next door, packed up and left the building.
But if they have, the mattress store will do fine. In Key West, there is always someone looking for a place to lie down.