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March 21, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: If you are holding this paper in your hands, I love you

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Wherever I go these days, dinner party or supermarket, I hear the same question, followed by the same general declaration:

Q: “Are newspapers just going to disappear?”

D: “I hope not because I don’t know what I’d do without my newspaper.”

My responses to the question and the declaration are, “I’m not sure,” and, “Me either.”

The sentiments mirror the paradox that is “print” journalism today: Readership has climbed at most newspapers, but paid circulation has dropped over the past decade and, with it, advertising has fallen precipitously.

How can this be?

Because more people are reading newspaper Web sites and getting their information for free while the number of people who pay to have a paper delivered, mailed or vended is declining (see my colleague Mark Bennett’s Perspectives observations on page D1). Internet advertising revenue, which newspapers began to reap way too late in the game, cannot touch revenue from traditional print display ads or classifieds.

Result: Lots of readers, but less money for operations.

How newspapers got themselves into this fix is the subject of many doctoral theses. (After 35 years in journalism, my own version sounds a lot like a Gene Debs speech.)

One thing anybody who actually works in the profession knows, however, is this: Despite what you hear from critics of the MSM — mainstream media — our troubles should be blamed on flat-footed business models and accelerated national lifestyles, not on the mythical attitudes (liberal, arrogant, out-of-touch) of reporters and editors who physically produce the “content.”

At any rate, like automobile plants, the hospitality industry, home construction, the recording industry and many other U.S. business institutions, newspapers are being drastically down-sized or outright closed.

The same financial cowboys who, only a few years ago, giddily paid hundreds of millions of dollars for one newspaper or a small string of them, now are mortgaged to the hilt and desperate to unload their “under-performing assets.” But no one is buying.

Page size and news space have been reduced. In some cases, entire days of operation have been cut. Across the country, staffs are being slashed, from the circulation department to the copy desk. Journalism veterans, a few years from retirement and with a storehouse of expertise and institutional memory, are being shown the door — with or without severance or their pensions intact.

(For a refreshing account of what those veterans can bring to a workplace, read Jill Geisler’s “Ten Reasons You Should Hire a Journalist” at www.poynter.org.)

The new American business mantra, “Do more with less,” guides every newspaper, large or small. Perception is on the brink of becoming reality. Newspapers do indeed seem to be dying — or committing suicide.

And yet, we have … you.

What are we, the doomed, supposed to do with you millions of loyal, subscription-paying, need-a-paper-in-my-hands readers? I know because you tell me in person and in messages that your newspaper is still important to you. Even the governor of Indiana agrees. Earlier this month at the annual Hoosier State Press Association meeting, Mitch Daniels offered to help the organization find ways to aid the struggling newspaper industry. One sentence of his address echoes the warning many of us MSM folks have been trying to get across in the swirl of unprecedented change.

“We should never overlook what newspapers mean to a free society,” Daniels said.

Those of us who are left in the newsrooms of America (today, anyway) treasure our readers. While it might not seem like it from the thinner papers on your front stoop or the howler typos that sometimes make it into headlines, we are working harder now than ever for you.

Even if you curse our content, our carriers or the changes we make in the TV listings, we realize you honor us every time you re-up for another six months or a year. I haven’t met a newspaper person in eons who is not humbled by that support.

So, if all of us must deal with a brave new world of citizen journalists working for free in cyberspace — until they get bored or someone can figure out a way to finance real news operations on the Internet that cover the school board, cops and planning commissions — what do you the print consumer and we the suppliers do about today? Just pack it in?

No way. When you think about it, newspapers have always been about the immediate and transitory — about yesterday, today, tomorrow and a little ways down the road. But not much more.

With that “now” in mind, here is an invitation:

To those of you who still choose to pay money for a paper edition of your news; to those who cannot imagine sitting down in the morning with a cup of coffee and a computer screen; to those who continue to cut out newspaper stories, recipes, cartoons or photos and post them on the fridge, send them to loved ones or fold and carry them in your wallet —

Tell me why.

Write, e-mail or phone and tell me why you don’t know what you would do without your Tribune-Star in your hands.

Tell me what it is that compels you to spend some of your shrinking discretionary income and your crunched time on a much-maligned mainstream media newspaper.

I will collect your answers for a couple weeks and report back to you in a Sunday column, printing as many as I can. (Brevity rocks, especially with voice mail.) Since we’re all in this lifeboat together, we might as well get to know each other.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229, stephanie.salter@tribstar.com or P.O. Box 149, 222 S. Seventh St., Terre Haute, IN, 47808.

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