Newspapers: Worth Reading, Worth Reinventing

Gerald M. Costello, Interim Director, The Christophers
I am, I admit, a newspaper junkie.  To this day, I can’t get enough of the darn things.  I have daily delivery of three papers – the New York Times, New York Daily News, and our local North Jersey paper, The Record.  Most days I also buy the New York Post for lunchtime reading.  Bookmarked on my home computer are the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, two Tribunes (Chicago and South Bend) and The Oklahoman of Oklahoma City – plus, for those days with delivery problems, the Times, Daily News and Record.
Want more evidence?  The only full-time jobs I’ve ever had have been with newspapers, beginning with the old Paterson Evening News and including the three weeklies I’ve served as founding editor.  In the Army I was editor of my battalion paper in Germany, and I edited the ship’s paper on the troopship that carried us home.  A final note: as retirement looms, I told the local Little Sisters of the Poor home that I was up for any volunteer work they had in mind.  “We can use some help with the newsletter,” they said.
Okay; newspaper junkiedom established.  And the point of it all?  More than most people – far more, I suppose – I am devastated by ongoing reports that the newspaper business is dying.  It can’t be true, I want to say.  And yet the evidence is all around us.
Across the country newsroom staffs are being slashed.  Coverage areas are cut or eliminated entirely.  Circulation, profit margins and ad revenues are almost universally down.  And morale, they tell me, is at an all-time low.
It’s not enough to decide that the Internet is coming on strong, so much so that print is dead or dying, and walk away from the problem.  Newspapers are too important to let that happen.  Certainly they’re important to those of us at The Christophers, who look at papers as one of the primary means we have to spread our message of hope and inspiration.  (Odds are that anyone reading this column is doing so in a newspaper – for which we thank the editors who make it possible.)
So far most papers feel they’re adapting to the times if they create a Web site and provide browsers with their content online, usually free of charge.  That’s good, but to me the approach suggested by Leonard Pitts Jr. of McClatchy-Tribune Information Services sounds better.  Here’s part of what he had to say in a recent column:
“Maybe we should make our Web sites not simply online re-creations of our papers, but entities in their own right, destination portals for those who want news and views from and about a given city, but also for those who want to find a good doctor in that city or apply for a job in that city or reach the leaders of that city or research the history of that city.  Maybe the goal should be to make ourselves the one indispensable guide to that city...Maybe – heretical idea ahead – it’s as simple as requiring online readers to pay for the product, just as our other readers do.”
Pitts also referred to a recent “all-hands-on-deck” call to journalists by Carl Sessions Stepp of the American Journalism Review, telling them to “stop weeping over their industry” and reinvent and save it instead.  Pitts added: “Consider this my way of seconding his motion.”
Mine too. And that’s from a self-confessed newspaper junkie, one who’s been around the block a few times.
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