PRESS LORE
Old ideas will hang on!
The dream of so many newspaper editors - fine daily papers, still have a secret desire to, when they retire, buy and run a small town weekly.
Newspapering is a difficult occupation for one to leave. You don't just give it a quick thought, stand up and walk away from it as you might with other jobs. The news is still there; still happening and needs to be reported, written, printed and distributed to people eager for word of their world. It is the plan of many such old hands at newspaper work to get away from some of the hard work and yet keep some of it the more pleasurable moments close by.
. I have seen it tried with opposite results ; some and others not so good.
It is true, too, that a newspaper job is not the easiest job to leave. Newspaper is something that is more or less made from scratch every living day and they means you live what you do. It is seldom a matter of time clocks, style books, rules and rigid regulations and more of an inner urge a person learns to control as best he or she can in order to publish a worthwhile journalistic record of events and of the interactions their views cause among people.
As is the case with some many vocations today, there have been some radical changes in the nature of news gathering, news dissemination and news reading habits of subscribers in recent years. This has erased much of the real or imaginary glamor so often associated with the field.
Take a look at your own reading habits. Haven't they changed in recent years? You are doing less reading; seemingly not as much you once did in conventional newspapers. We now get most of our news from TV, radio, and from the various versions of both hometown and national - even international - papers and magazines on the Internet. We dwell on the particular type of news
we wish to follow - local, national or world-wide. We look for editorial comment either by editors of those sources we read or by that of independent person who may not be associated with the journalistic world at all. Readers today pick and choose their news from a variety of sources and are not confined to just one local just one “local” paper. Such terms as “Bloggers” and “I-Podders” - unknown a few years ago - are now becoming quite common.
People are said to object to having old newspapers pile up in their home. They see little reason why they should provide storage space for thousands of advertisement sheets for used cars, perishable foods, medicines they'll never use, exotic world of travel they could never afford and the birth of an Internet creation called “Craigslist” has all but put an end to “Classified Advertisements” in daily papers. Even without these features one of the nation's leading newspaper is getting larger and heavier as the months go by until it will soon take a forklift to throw it against our front door each morning.
There was time when a busy editor, retiring to run his weekly paper a a hobby, looked forward to having a full week in which to ponder what he intended to say in his editorials. No more. One week is too late in today's instant journalism.
A.L.M. January 8, 2005 [c571wds]
