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.
The Butterfly Net 
Time.
It was all a time thing. Hair growth. Dust bunnies.
Good times. For better. For worse. I had fear shopping for food. The worst was coming. Fear of rising prices. Since I was categorized as in the wealthiest class of the upper 10% on earth, what was it like in the 3rd world? I felt authentic fear of prices in the supermarket the other night.
The weather. Hot. Cold. Diminishing daylight. Cold was coming soon.
I was in denial—not looking. It was about a job change. I did not want to change.
Mark Halperin was here last night. I listened to him speak about the state of the media, and campaign 2008. He cited surveys about the interest in the young in current events. They expressed surface interest. Yet these were the non-readers of the news. The indifference of youth was not new, to the news. But it now was making a financial impact.
In the crowd, I saw a priest, who administered to the sick. Quite intimately in my family. He had buried my grandfather. His first act as a new pastor. Time. My time. The years. I was alive.
We spoke briefly about James Patrick Shannon’s autobiography, entitled Reluctant Dissenter. His name was in Shannon’s book, since he accompanied him to Rome to participate in Vatican II. He was the youngest cleric in Rome. Serving as the bishop’s secretary, he said he never saw much of the light of day for 2 months.
A Pastor. Now retired. Time And now the US Conference of Catholic Bishops had annnounced they were turning back the clock to pre-1965, with the language of the Catholic Mass. Time. He was in listening to Mark Halperin too.
To talk about God, amongst the non-believers. McCain, Obama had to feel uncomfortable. So how did the candidates feel, to address religion and politics. Together. Time, the magazine. Haperin worked for them. He covered these guys.
A sense of humility. I was being asked by a friend what my blog website was. I was writing these time pieces. Did I really want someone I knew to read this stuff? Life was about sharing intimacy to a different degrees, with those who knew me. I had a sense of the humble, within. To discuss what I had seen, made me feel humble, in the secular world, when it included allusion to God. I was uncomfortable to talk about God with people I knew.
Listening to Mark Halperin, he cited the remaining 7 news organizations in the world. The financial success of the organization would determine what they could cover in the future. Local organization did not have the financial strength. To cover, to explain what was happening. In a changing world.
Listening to Mark Halperin, I thought of the indifference of youth. Indifference to the news, to religion, to God? The world had changed. Kids had grown up in the 401K world, the era of leveraged buyouts, hedge funds. Leadership had been from afar all of their lives, with corporations and even church leaders coming from places far away, sent like in the days of the British Raj, as the Brits tried to rule India.
In a changing world, we would all become indifferent with this kind of leadership model. THIS was the new paradigm that was destroying institutions. We had lost the local leader, who could make a difference here. There no longer was a local guy who had strength to talk the world. Or maybe the confidence.
This was the world that did not appeal to the young. Indifferent, they did not buy the paper. It never had been locally owned anyway, in their lifetime. The newspaper was like a stranger starving in a 3rd world country. And most of us went about our daily life not conscious of their plight.
This sense of belonging: In New York, the Mets acquired a relief pitcher from the Washington Nationals this week. Ayala said that coming into this Mets’ clubhouse Monday reminded him of his first day in the major leagues when he first wore an Expos uniform. He had played with 5 of these guys before. It was all about a sense of belonging. He broke into baseball with Montreal in 2003 and major league baseball purchased the team and moved the Expos to Washington in 2005. He had just gone from worst to first.
Time. For better. For worse. A good newspaper had writers who knew how to tell the story.
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