The Charlotte-based Southern Textile News will close down on Monday after covering the textile industry for the past 64 years. Publisher Chip Smith had this to say about the publication’s demise:
“How do you know an industry is shutting down or ceases to exist?” Smith says. “When you quit writing about it. … We’ve held on to support the industry, but it’s just no longer economically feasible to continue to publish.”
There’s another trade publication whose industry is dying around it: Editor & Publisher. Since the 1880s, E&P has covered the newspaper industry in North America. For many decades it provided authoritative, objective and accurate accounts of the industry’s ups and downs.
But in 2002 it got a modern redesign and a new editor, the ethically challenged Greg Mitchell. Since then it’s been a left-oriented tract that has done little to help an industry in crisis. Mitchell’s intemperate and ideological editorials and agenda-pushing stories have destroyed its credibility as a responsible trade publication.
At what point will E&P, like the Southern Textile News, find it “no longer economically feasible” to continue to publish because it no longer has a newspaper industry to write about? I hate to see any publication of long-standing have to close down, but I’ll shed no tears when E&P croaks and Greg Mitchell is in journalism’s lengthening unemployment line.
