A tree falls; only a few hear it

Last night's debate among candidates for the Bethlehem Town Board and supervisor post was the most highly anticipated event of the local campaign season, which features some Democratic incumbents trying to hold off an insurgent slate.

The insurgents pounded away last night at the present administration for proposing a tax hike in hard times and for what they called playing too much politics in town hall. The incumbents countered that they have done a good job maintaining services in the difficult economic climate and kept proposed tax hikes to a minimum.

Both sides appear to have prepped thoroughly, and those maybe couple of hundred people who stuck it out for the full 100 minutes of the came away from the debate with a lot more information on which to base their votes.

The problem is, as Supervisor Jack Cunningham pointed out, there are about 33,000 people in town, so only a tiny proportion got the benefit of what happened last night.

Once upon a time, back in the last century and into the early part of this century, a business called newspapers would help fill the gap by sending a trained professional to such events to boil them down to a story that could be read in a few minutes that would reach thousands of people the next day.

But last night only a single TV camera, from all-news cable station Channel 9, and the weekly paper The Spotlight (which doesn't issue another print edition until after election day) were there representing the media.

The daily paper serving the town and the greater Capital District, The Times Union, didn't cover it. The other local daily paper, the Gazette of Schenectady, long ago stopped covering Bethlehem. Another, the Knickerbocker News, went out of business more than 20 years ago.

This is but a small microcosm, of course, of what is happening in cities, towns and state capitals around the country as well as in Washington. The news business is teetering, and it's unclear who or what is going to pick up the slack to tell people what's going on.

The NY Times reported recently that the number of people working for newspapers has shrunk from 60,000 to 40,000 in the last decade, with a further precipitous decline predicted. The number of reporters covering Washington has been cut in half in the same period.

Anyone walking into the press room of the state Capitol here, once a noisy, crowded place, can now sense an eerily quieter atmosphere.

The outcomes of the races in Bethlehem are still undecided, of course. But it's a sure bet that fewer voters will make informed decisions because of the cutback in news coverage.