The end of newspapers
02/07/16 04:35
Warning! I’m about to get on my soapbox and go for a brief rant. Feel free to skip today’s blog if you’ve heard enough of this kind of thing this week.
Many years ago, when we lived in Idaho, I worked very part-time for two weekly newspapers: The Kuna-Melba News and the Meridian Weekly. Initially, I developed and maintained the mailing lists for the papers and printed the address labels each week. I wanted a computer and printer and so I made a plan for the computer to pay for itself. I would set up the labels and let them print overnight. Jams were relatively rare in those days of tractor-fed dot matrix printers and I developed a pretty good set up. The machine succeeded in earring its way. Then, when the newspaper switched from manual layout to computer page layout, I acted as a consultant to the owner and helped select the computers, printer, software and other items. I taught myself to use the software while teaching others to use it. Then, suddenly, the owner became ill and died. Not only did I officiate at the funeral, but I oversaw the production of that week’s newspaper - and every other edition of the newspaper for several weeks until a new owner could be found.
Through that connection and other connections, I became familiar with some of the employees of the daily newspaper in town. The Idaho Statesman was owned by Gannett Company. They weren’t at that time the largest newspaper company in the US, but they were rapidly growing. They published USA today and had begun to purchase major US newspapers. I was able to witness some of the products of their growth as I visited the bustling newsroom with three or four dozen reporters, working at a rapid pace. I toured the production plant with all of the people running the giant presses. I got a flavor of the ad department with sales representatives doing the actual layout of advertisements on computers as they consulted with customers over the phone.
The business fascinated me.
When we moved to South Dakota, Rapid City was roughly half the size of Boise. Still our Rapid City Journal was a respectable newspaper. Owned by Lee Enterprises, I was familiar with the parent corporation and knew of Lee’s commitment to local editorial control of the newspapers they owned. I became friends with some of the employees of the newspaper and spent some time in the newsroom and working with an advertising accounts person. At that time our church was advertising weekly in the newspaper and, in addition, placing feature adds during Lent and Advent and for special occasions.
The first day I visited the newspaper in town was the busiest I ever saw the newspaper. The space that used to be the newsroom now is a beauty salon and the physical space occupied by the newspaper is about half of what it was in those days. The shrinkage in the number of employees is even more dramatic.
I’ve been around newspapers enough to know that they survive on advertisements, not on subscriptions. So it surprised me when the newspaper cut back so dramatically on its ad sales force. Pretty soon, I was doing all of the design and layout on the church’s ads simply because I knew a lot more about ad layout than any of the employees of the newspaper. Then the newspaper went through a series of price hikes and we cut back on advertising. Then one year, in a mood of austerity, we eliminated the advertising line from the church budget. We didn’t place any ads that year. Amazingly, both worship attendance and membership went up that year. It confirmed what I had already suspected. We were putting ads in the newspaper to make our own people feel good about their church. The ads were doing nothing to attract new people to the church.
We’ve never looked back from that decision. We simply quit advertising in the newspaper.
I remain, however, a subscriber to the newspaper. I read quite a bit of it. I’ve never figured out why our particular newspaper is so inconsistent with its sections. First of all the paper is now too small to warrant sections. It could easily be published as a single document. Secondly, the paper has been for many years inconsistent about what it places in the sections. Editorials may be in any of the sections, depending on the whims of the editor or space available or other reasons that aren’t clear. The comics dance from section to section for reasons that escape my understanding.
Subscribing to the print edition gives me access to the online edition and I find that I read it more than the print edition. At least sometimes there are more up to date items in the paper. As our ways of consuming news have changed, the newspaper contains less and less news. Most of the items in the newspaper, I get from other sources before they show up in the paper.
Unfortunately, the newspaper doesn’t understand the basics of an online presence. Its web page features the “most popular” news items: that is items that have already appeared on the page. It is not at all uncommon to find stories among the headlines that I read several days ago. This week there have been two articles appearing in the #1 position on the home page of the newspaper site that were written several years ago. This morning I scanned through 20 different photographs. The newest of them was taken in 2014. Many were from 2012. You get the picture. The newspaper is no longer about news.
I used to get the newspaper for obituaries. However the price of printing obituaries has gone up so much that we all read obituaries from funeral home web sites these days. The families have access to free posting of obituaries and everyone can read them for free.
Day by day little by little the newspaper has become irrelevant in my life. I don’t want to stop subscribing, but I have to admit that it is a very poor value for the price. And I know a lot of people who no longer receive a newspaper and who get their primary news from different sites than newspaper sites.
I’m sad. It appears that we are witnessing the death of an industry that once was vital and important.
I remember a conversation that I had with a newspaper employee early in my time in South Dakota in which he advised that we increase our contract with the newspaper because they understood the business of advertising better than a church could. Now I see that the newspaper not only doesn’t understand advertising, they don’t understand the news business, either.
Both our local newspaper and our church were founded in 1878. Unfortunately, it appears that only one of those institutions is going to make it to its sesquicentennial.
The good news is that the church will be here for another century at least. It turns out that our future was not dependent upon advertising in the newspaper.
Many years ago, when we lived in Idaho, I worked very part-time for two weekly newspapers: The Kuna-Melba News and the Meridian Weekly. Initially, I developed and maintained the mailing lists for the papers and printed the address labels each week. I wanted a computer and printer and so I made a plan for the computer to pay for itself. I would set up the labels and let them print overnight. Jams were relatively rare in those days of tractor-fed dot matrix printers and I developed a pretty good set up. The machine succeeded in earring its way. Then, when the newspaper switched from manual layout to computer page layout, I acted as a consultant to the owner and helped select the computers, printer, software and other items. I taught myself to use the software while teaching others to use it. Then, suddenly, the owner became ill and died. Not only did I officiate at the funeral, but I oversaw the production of that week’s newspaper - and every other edition of the newspaper for several weeks until a new owner could be found.
Through that connection and other connections, I became familiar with some of the employees of the daily newspaper in town. The Idaho Statesman was owned by Gannett Company. They weren’t at that time the largest newspaper company in the US, but they were rapidly growing. They published USA today and had begun to purchase major US newspapers. I was able to witness some of the products of their growth as I visited the bustling newsroom with three or four dozen reporters, working at a rapid pace. I toured the production plant with all of the people running the giant presses. I got a flavor of the ad department with sales representatives doing the actual layout of advertisements on computers as they consulted with customers over the phone.
The business fascinated me.
When we moved to South Dakota, Rapid City was roughly half the size of Boise. Still our Rapid City Journal was a respectable newspaper. Owned by Lee Enterprises, I was familiar with the parent corporation and knew of Lee’s commitment to local editorial control of the newspapers they owned. I became friends with some of the employees of the newspaper and spent some time in the newsroom and working with an advertising accounts person. At that time our church was advertising weekly in the newspaper and, in addition, placing feature adds during Lent and Advent and for special occasions.
The first day I visited the newspaper in town was the busiest I ever saw the newspaper. The space that used to be the newsroom now is a beauty salon and the physical space occupied by the newspaper is about half of what it was in those days. The shrinkage in the number of employees is even more dramatic.
I’ve been around newspapers enough to know that they survive on advertisements, not on subscriptions. So it surprised me when the newspaper cut back so dramatically on its ad sales force. Pretty soon, I was doing all of the design and layout on the church’s ads simply because I knew a lot more about ad layout than any of the employees of the newspaper. Then the newspaper went through a series of price hikes and we cut back on advertising. Then one year, in a mood of austerity, we eliminated the advertising line from the church budget. We didn’t place any ads that year. Amazingly, both worship attendance and membership went up that year. It confirmed what I had already suspected. We were putting ads in the newspaper to make our own people feel good about their church. The ads were doing nothing to attract new people to the church.
We’ve never looked back from that decision. We simply quit advertising in the newspaper.
I remain, however, a subscriber to the newspaper. I read quite a bit of it. I’ve never figured out why our particular newspaper is so inconsistent with its sections. First of all the paper is now too small to warrant sections. It could easily be published as a single document. Secondly, the paper has been for many years inconsistent about what it places in the sections. Editorials may be in any of the sections, depending on the whims of the editor or space available or other reasons that aren’t clear. The comics dance from section to section for reasons that escape my understanding.
Subscribing to the print edition gives me access to the online edition and I find that I read it more than the print edition. At least sometimes there are more up to date items in the paper. As our ways of consuming news have changed, the newspaper contains less and less news. Most of the items in the newspaper, I get from other sources before they show up in the paper.
Unfortunately, the newspaper doesn’t understand the basics of an online presence. Its web page features the “most popular” news items: that is items that have already appeared on the page. It is not at all uncommon to find stories among the headlines that I read several days ago. This week there have been two articles appearing in the #1 position on the home page of the newspaper site that were written several years ago. This morning I scanned through 20 different photographs. The newest of them was taken in 2014. Many were from 2012. You get the picture. The newspaper is no longer about news.
I used to get the newspaper for obituaries. However the price of printing obituaries has gone up so much that we all read obituaries from funeral home web sites these days. The families have access to free posting of obituaries and everyone can read them for free.
Day by day little by little the newspaper has become irrelevant in my life. I don’t want to stop subscribing, but I have to admit that it is a very poor value for the price. And I know a lot of people who no longer receive a newspaper and who get their primary news from different sites than newspaper sites.
I’m sad. It appears that we are witnessing the death of an industry that once was vital and important.
I remember a conversation that I had with a newspaper employee early in my time in South Dakota in which he advised that we increase our contract with the newspaper because they understood the business of advertising better than a church could. Now I see that the newspaper not only doesn’t understand advertising, they don’t understand the news business, either.
Both our local newspaper and our church were founded in 1878. Unfortunately, it appears that only one of those institutions is going to make it to its sesquicentennial.
The good news is that the church will be here for another century at least. It turns out that our future was not dependent upon advertising in the newspaper.