A good deal of my life has been spent toiling on weekly
newspapers. That was certainly not my intention. My intention was
to be an all-star centerfielder for the Oakland Athletics. But as
the old proverb goes, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him
your plans.”
It would be easy to say that weeklies, like everything
else, ain’t what they used to be. But I recently stopped by my
old newspaper office (a trailer, actually, where the restroom
doubled as the darkroom), and…well, everything was the
same, including the Macintosh LC
computers and the dial-up Internet connection. The
ownership, however, had changed. Countless times. Once
all weeklies were family-owned enterprises. Then, about twenty
years ago, large corporations began buying them up on the cheap.
Now nobody wants them. At least two of the weeklies I worked for
no longer exist.
My first newspaper gig was at a family-owned business deep
in the Ozarks. The Advertiser was founded in the 1850s,
and had been handed down from father to son for several
generations. Every Wednesday at 3 p.m., the
townsfolk would line up at the front counter waiting for the
paper to come off the press. The queue would literally run out
the door and down the sidewalk. I couldn’t understand it. Why
would anyone line up to read front page stories headlined:
“Jasper among top coon hunters in state,” or to learn that Mr.
and Mrs. Albert Freen had company last week from out-of-town? It
turns out people are just nosey.
My first reporter job, back in 1986, paid an annual salary
of $14,000. Today’s weekly cub reporters might earn a lavish
$21,000, which is probably less than I made in ‘86, given the
cost of living. Journalism remains the lowest-paying of all of
the so-called professions, which is something smart journalism
school professors neglect to mention on the first day of class.
Even rookie kindergarten teachers and social workers make double
or triple the average reporter’s salary. And yet, J-schools
continue to turn away students.
Twenty years in the weekly newspaper trade has supplied me
with more than a few cocktail party stories. There was the story
we ran of country music legend and one-time death row inmate
David Allan Coe when he moved onto a ranch just outside of our
village, with his pet cougars
and his motorcycle gang, Outlaws
MC, as semi-permanent
houseguests. Locals regarded DAC’s presence as a mixed blessing,
to say the least. Coe stayed about a year before he up and left
town, long enough to open a museum of
curiosities, and to give a memorable and impromptu late-night
solo performance at the Hitchin’ Post saloon, where he recounted
a tale of teaching the young Charles Manson to play guitar. Then
there was the time we ran an investigative piece charging village
officials with violating the open meetings act, and the mayor
ordered his employees to drive around town and collect all of
that week’s newspapers. We found them a day later dumped in a
huge, stinking pile on the outskirts of town. They had been
urinated on, too.
MEDIA EXPERTS say that struggling daily newspapers can
learn smart business practices from weeklies. What they mean is
that dailies should concentrate on the essentials: move the
international news, crossword puzzles, comics, syndicated
columnists, TV listings and movie reviews online, and limit the
print edition to obituaries, sports, and lots and lots of
photographs of school kids. And beef up the local news.
The problem with this, again, is that weeklies aren’t doing
so well either. At least not the corporate-owned weeklies. Those
that are getting by are often run by laid off or semi-retired
daily journalists who buy a love-starved weekly and attempt to
nurse it back to financial health. Often the new owners are
husband and wife teams who make up the entire staff and do
everything from selling ads to writing stories to delivering
papers. If this happy trend continues, we may yet see the return
of the family-owned newspaper.
If not, perhaps some good will come out of the demise of
local news. Curious townsfolk may be forced to attend town
council and school board meetings to find out for themselves what
shenanigans their elected officials are up to. We may have to
turn off the big screen TV and get involved in our
communities. We may have to attend a Friday night football game,
rather than read “all about it” next Wednesday. Henry David
Thoreau believed the town meeting would be the salvation of the
republic:
When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come
together to a special town meeting, to express their opinion on
some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the
true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever
assembled in the United States.
If that sounds like too much work and too much investment,
you might consider buying a subscription to your local weekly —
while you still can.
