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COVID-19 & The Housing Market: Jim Maceo, talks with Silentia Slaboch of Beacon Media News
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FACE TIME People are finally wearing facemasks in public Terry MILLER tmiller@beaconmedianews.com
A
pple indeed has proved to be a little ahead of the curve, especially with their application known as FaceTime. Little did Tim Cook realize, however, just how important its name would become. From the beginning, the pandemic we know as COVID-19 has worried the world. The debate, however, has been ongoing as to the importance of face coverings for the average man on the street. Now into the later part of the virus — hopefully — it has become mandatory for almost everyone to wear a mask at all times but especially when going out in public, in the workplace or simply to the market. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is not the first time health experts have suggested masks as a preventative measure. “In 1911, a deadly epidemic spread, The Manchurian Plague, ripped through China and threatened to become a pandemic. The origins appeared to be related to the trade in wild animals, but at the time no one was sure. “Lockdowns, quarantine measures, the wearing of masks, travel restrictions, the mass cremation of victims, and border controls were deployed to try to lower the infection rate. Yet more than 60,000 people died in modern-day northeast China, making it one of the world's largest epidemics at the time. “When the disease was eventually brought SEE FACE TIME PAGE 4 Huntington Hospital RN, Kelly Smallman, helps conduct drive through COVID-19 tests the Rose Bowl recently. – Photo by Terry Miller/Beacon Media News
Since 1996
VOL. 9, NO. 17
Despite Skyrocketing Consumption, Local News Struggles to Survive Terry MILLER tmiller@beaconmedianews.com
Newspapers, up and down the state of California say they have become collateral damage from the state’s effort to rein in the gig economy. Combine that with drastic drops in advertising revenue, especially in smaller community newspapers; ever-increasing cost of printing and circulation costs, and the massive impact social media, and the internet in general, has had on the business for a not so perfect storm. The digital beast is ever-tightening the rope around conventional newspapers’ necks. Newspapers are going out of business, cutting staff, while some are hoping there’s a sustainable future in online publishing. Newspaper owners and publishers are scratching their collective heads and trying to come up with ways in which to stay afloat and keep the communities they serve abreast of local happenings — that which the big daily papers simply do not or can’t cover. Some newspapers are cutting staff to bare bones and subsequently cutting circulation in a Herculean effort to stay afloat. Locally, last week three Los Angeles Times owned community newspapers were shuttered: The Glendale News Press, Burbank Leader and LaCañada Valley Sun. This is a trend that has been plummeting for years. In fact, according to the New York Times, one in five papers has been lost in recent years bringing the total closed to over 2,000 in the past decade. Between 2004 and 2018 California lost the most daily papers of any state; it saw 15% of its papers shuttered. In 2018 circulation was down 38 percent across dailies and weeklies, with two counties in California lacking a paper altogether. “City Council and school board meetings. Small-town sports and politics. Local government corruption. These are just a handful of the news and issues that go unreported when small newspapers close or are gutted by layoffs. Over the past 15 years, more than one in five papers in the United States has shuttered, and the number of journalists working for newspapers has been cut in half, according to research by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism,” wrote Lara Takenaga SEE STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE PAGE 4