Are newspapers heading toward dinosaur’s fate?
Are newspapers heading toward dinosaur’s fate?
By: Bill Mead
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Posted by editor Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
Viewed 582 times
0 responses 0 comments Nearly half my life has been spent in and around the newspaper business. During that time I think I have seen the greatest changes in the industry since Gutenberg turned out his first printed sheet back in 1450.
Today there is a school of thought that newspapers are on the road to extinction with the growing availability of radio, television, the Internet, cell phones and other electronic methods of communication. The basis of this belief is that people won’t bother reading print media when so much information is available in other, easier formats.
There is some truth to this theory of the newspaper as an endangered species. Most papers today have to work at holding on to subscribers even with a growing population and in too many cases they aren’t succeeding. Many of the largest metropolitan papers are reaching a much smaller percentage of their local populations than they did 30 years ago.
But the newspaper fraternity isn’t completely asleep at the switch.
During the decades my wife and I managed (some say mismanaged) the Tehachapi News, we changed our operating system almost yearly in response to new technology and what we saw as changing requirements within the community.
By the time we handed off the paper to the present owners we had maintained the paper’s historic level of readership, boosting circulation by nearly 400 percent in the process. And we aren’t even very smart compared with most newspaper owners.
Hundreds of newspapers around the nation, especially community papers, have managed to hold their own as we did. But like every other industry, newspapering has to change with the times. If it does I’m convinced that printing presses aren’t about to rust away.
Although I’m retired and my brain is getting fuzzy around the edges, I still love the printed word. That’s why I recently bought a book called The Vanishing Newspaper written by a former newspaperman who has become a renowned college professor. I found it a little disappointing. Much of the 250 pages is made up of dizzying charts and ambiguous conclusions concerning what makes a newspaper successful. However, the author did include a chapter that was worth the price of the book. In that segment he said that too many newspaper stories aren’t very readable and that “plain talk” on the printed page can be turned into higher circulation. I say amen to that.
Betty and I discovered that truth long ago after we began printing articles by a kid named Jon Hammond who today writes “Pen in Hand,” the best-read feature in the Tehachapi News. Jon is a self-taught writer, meaning he is free of the bad habits taught in journalism school, the worst habit being the tendency of over-educated reporters to write in ways calculated to impress other pretentious reporters. Jon’s popularity rests on his instinctive ability to choose interesting subjects and then to write about them in an easy-flowing manner. Jon knows about as many big words as anybody around these parts but he is careful to keep them out of his stories.
I’m thinking of starting a consulting service for worried newspaper publishers. All I have to do is send them copies of “Pen in Hand.” It won’t do them any good to call Jon directly and cut me out. As some of you have found out the hard way, Jon never answers his phone.
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