Newspapers are not dead, so stop shoveling dirt on top of them

Journalists, heads up. Here is a little manifesto I think you need to hear. I have seen your cowardly “leave now” Facebook group. I spat on it. And then I had to clean my screen.

I do not think any of You realize the future of newspapers is not trashy, TMZ.com tabloid gossip, or short, useless information (ahem, quote rails), or unsubstantive briefs.

The future of newspapers is stories. No shit, morons, stories. Those things we all learned how to write in college. Twenty-, 30-inch stories with meat. Not this white bread crap. Wheat bread. I am not talking that seven-grain flaky stuff. How many grains? How many you got?

So stop killing newspapers and crying that no one reads your rag, and start putting your heart into your industry. But oh, you say, people do want fluffy shit spoon fed to them with ugly graphics. Well, I’ve Got News For You, sometimes people do not know what they want. In fact, We all know people do not know what they want. It is our job to present people with what they need. Why else do we do what we do? Pandering to readers is one thing, but thanking the guy who is pissing all over your shoes and asking if there is anything you can do to help him is, well, that is just gross.

Call me old fashioned, but I imagine people who want to read a newspaper want to read it, not just look at the pretty pictures. Because, let us face the music, I do not know about you, but my newspaper does not arrive with crisp, 1080p pictures in it. More often than not the registration is off, and really the only thing that looks good is the text and the black-and-white images that have peppered broadsheet pages for ages.

Call me crazy, but as a reader, I would rather read four stories about the movie industry than three stories and ten briefs about which Hollywood Tartlette smacked who while they were drunk, or who is going to divorce court. There are publications for that kind of jetsam (if you work for these publications, keep it up! As long as you print that crap, my argument stands. And by us not running it, more people will buy your magazine. We all win).

If I had to equate some of the papers I have seen with, say, office equipment, it would be easy to make a metaphor about them and a copy/fax/printer/scanner/telephone/coffeemaker. Spreading Yourself too thin over too many areas can only lead to a fax stained with coffee, endlessly scanning itself and printing brown copies until the toner runs out, the outlet catches fire and you cannot dial 911 because, dammit, that was the telephone, too.

What I want in a paper is a printer that can reproduce Rembrants. A printer that can give me stunning copies of my digital photographs. I want to read well-written stories, and I do not mind if they are long. Why do You People think they still print magazines like The Atlantic and National Geographic? People like to read.

And sure, I know both those examples are not superb, but You get the idea.

Since when did we, as a local paper, become obsessed with providing national content online? Oh wait, that was not us, it was Someone Else. And, honestly, I think Someone Else has lost their way. There is no brand recognition there. They have traded a hundred years of an established brand for, well, advertisements and the latest Lindsay Lohan news.

We are a local paper, so why do we care about writing online headlines that are Google-search friendly? We are a local paper, and one day it is going to be cheaper to not print a paper edition. Is that a scary thought? It should not be. It is what is next. But when that day comes, we will not be publishing for the hundreds of Google pages no one looks at. We will be publishing for our readers.

We must start putting out Web sites that are tailored to people reading a newspaper, not search engines and advertisers. We need to stop thinking about “how many Web hits can we get” and start thinking “how best can we serve our circulation.” Because at that point, you Dinosaurs, your Web hits will be your circulation.

Search results do not matter. Who cares how many people in Oregon can easily find via Google what happened at last week’s Abbottstown Borough Council meeting? They should be able to find that information on our Web site. Easily.

Let us stop thinking about Numbers, and start thinking about People. People will keep this business where it needs to be: Afloat.

Maybe I just have more faith than You in the role of trained, professional journalists. Maybe I am not ready to turn over the gatekeeping to seething Vampires like Andrea Huffington. Maybe I just think everyone on Digg is just copying everyone on Slashdot, but Slashdot was mean to them so now they whine on another site.

Remember the crawler? Do you know why that worked for TV news? Because TV news is the tofurkeyburger to our New York Strip Steak. Why do you want to shove crawler-like brevity on a truly captive audience? When people buy the newspaper, they expect to read things, not to read three inches on some dud in Hawai’i trying to overthrow the government, but 23 inches on a group of Hawai’ian “separatists” who have “taken” a historic palace and trying to succeed from the U.S.

I hope some of this sinks in.