The Blade & The Good Old Days

Something struck while reading the reading today's Toledo Blade (and no, it wasn't the rest of the Blade being thrown). It was the idea that perhaps The Blade, recognizing the beginning of the end of its days of power, is beginning to focus instead on the Good Old Days. Two things on the front page of the newspaper did this for me: 
 

• The statement at the corner of the front page banner that The Blade was the 2004 Pulitzer Prize (depicted in the upper left) winner for investigative reporting.
• The page 1 headline, above the fold "Kaczala details decision not to take Noe money".

For any paper who believes that they are a mover and a shaker in the industry (even given what it is today), going five years without winning another Pulitzer prize is a significant blow to the ego. Every newspaper in the country measures its success based on these awards. Revenue, quality of reproduction (printing) and even profit all take a back seat to the concept of winning this most coveted recognition from its peers. 

Talking about Tom Noe is likewise a subject often on the lips of Blade writers.
Despite the fact that the Republicans are mostly irrelevant in Toledo and Lucas County politics these days (when not proving themselves to be a comedy of errors), the Blade returns to the subject like a carrier pigeon to the roost. 

Regardless of the fact that the scandal is years old, that the perpetrator of the crime is currently serving time in prison, and that there are no new real facts to report, the Blade cannot seem to stay away from this story and must in fact recount in endless (and nauseating) detail its entire history. 

While I used to think that all of this was simply about the Blade's well-illustrated media bias where the Republicans were concerned, I now begin to believe that it is more the senile ramblings of its owner John Robinson Block. Having reached a point of diminishing authority, his bully pulpit growing smaller each day, and with his newspaper empire crumbling around him; he can only look back at the days of power and glory that used to be. 

At a time when nothing could be more important than the present and the future, he and The Blade can only see the past. There is some consolation in all of this however. As time continues to move forward, as the ramblings and rantings of The Blade become even more shrill (and perhaps less coherent), the diminishing readership of the newspaper in general and The Blade in particular will insure that fewer people will listen to its recollections of The Good Old Days.