Life & Wisdom Quote by Will McDonough

McDonough’s numbers land like a quiet slap: more channels, fewer voices. He’s not nostalgically counting mastheads for sport; he’s staging a parable about how “more media” can still mean less journalism. The first half of the quote is an obituary for a local ecosystem that once had redundancy, rivalry, and the daily irritant of being answerable to competitors across town. Seven newspapers meant multiple editorial agendas, more beats covered, more chances for a corrupt deal or a civic failure to get noticed by someone with ink and lawyers.

Then he pivots to television, where abundance is framed as progress but carries a trap. A dozen stations sounds like diversity until you remember how broadcasting scales: the same syndicated segments, the same press-conference footage, the same incentive to chase cheap spectacle. McDonough’s juxtaposition is the mechanism. Print shrinks through consolidation and cost; TV proliferates through technology and advertising. The city experiences both as “choice,” but the choices aren’t equivalent. One is a thinning of watchdog capacity; the other is an expansion of outlets that can amplify, recycle, or distract.

Context matters: “started at the Globe 40 years ago” is a credential and a warning. He’s placing himself as a witness to the long slide from dense local competition to a duopoly, while the culture congratulates itself on a dial crowded with options. The subtext is that civic information isn’t measured in outlets. It’s measured in independent reporting, institutional memory, and the unglamorous labor of showing up.