The Value Of Newspapers
Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review – May 7, 2008
As I daily scoop up my two newspapers from my front
porch and later partake of my mailed Trib, it`s
difficult to imagine that the newspaper business is, as
some gloomily portend, at death`s door.
But it`s not difficult to see why the financial rap
is on.
The stock of the nation`s third-largest newspaper
company,
McClatchy, between April 2005 to April 2008, dropped
for many reasons from more than $70 per share to under
$10. That`s despite being one of the
best-run newspaper concerns in the industry,
according to John Bates, president of the Northern
California Newspaper Publishers Association.
We all know about declining ad revenues due to the
rise of Internet. Some argue these electronic pied
pipers are leading the young out of print media forever;
newspapers simply can`t deliver the attractive
demographics, they say.
But newspapers offer many intangibles. The value of
your daily newspaper is an intense form of intellectual
mainlining—a drug of choice that includes not only my
favorite puzzles but well-wrought articles of urgent
public interest. Why try to absorb something for a
sustained period
crouched over our computer screens when we can sit
with a cup of coffee in our breakfast nook or with our
feet elevated in our lounge chair?
Not only do we get substantive perspective about
national or local news better from print but also
specialty items that speak to personal problems, health
issues, travel ideas or book reviews. It`s stuff that
can be regularly accessed—not popped out of the jungle
of jiggling image messages that confront one on the
typical, often confusingly cluttered main page.
Of course, when you are riding to work, you can bring
your laptop along. But it`s better having your
paper—that compact pack of inexpensive info on weather,
sports and everything else—folded in half for easy
reading as you stand with packed train or bus riders.
Yes, newspapers` vital ad revenues are drastically
down and this is lifeblood of print media income. Will
amalgamations of newspaper properties continue and
ultimately parallel that same phenomenon in radio, where
automated stations squeezed the life out of radio? I
would argue that the talk-show hosts have kept that
medium alive and well; good reporting and sharp
columnists can do the same for papers.
Newspapers always will be the quickest, cheapest and
easiest way to plug into the local scene. Yes, the print
market has shrunk but the access to any particular place
using the local paper remains primary for most of us.
Just as the reports of Mark Twain`s death were
greatly exaggerated, so too has been the death of
newspapers. Perhaps the newspaper industry will evolve
into new configurations—a few national papers but many
solid, big-city and small-town papers that defy the
investment gurus` predictions by continuing to build
readership and revenue in the competitive world where no
singular medium can or will ever be a total monopolist.
So, stand by, dear readers. Your morning newspaper
fix, like your morning coffee, is not going away anytime
soon.
Donald A. Collins [email
him], is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own.
