| July 2008 | |
Community newspapers' franchise sets them apart
As an adolescent growing up in my father’s newspaper office on the plains of northwestern Kansas, I often marveled that he could move so deftly from the bulky keyboard of the Linotype to the smaller keys on the manual typewriter at his cluttered desk. At the latter, he would create his front page column, “Some Chaff, Some Grain.” I knew his columns struck the vein of the community. My mother worked long hours side-by-side with my dad, so family meals were mostly served at restaurants in town. It was there that I heard my dad alternately thanked, scolded, praised and occasionally challenged for his published opinions. That’s how I learned the impact of editorial commentary. So it is in memory of my father that I use his title for this year of monthly columns in the Texas Press Messenger. Chaff is described by my tattered Webster Dictionary as “the husk of grain, especially when separated by threshing.” It is also described as “to banter; make game of” and “anything worthless.” The same yellowed pages of Webster say grain is “minute hard mass” and “a single seed.” With your indulgence, the words in this space will sometimes be husks to blow away with the wind or banter (my wife, Carol Lee, calls it babble) and often worthless. But I will sincerely try to plant an occasional seed that might sprout a useful idea. I acknowledge up front that I am an avid reader, not of novels or serious books, but of newspapers and trade journals. I am never too proud to “borrow” good ideas from other newspapers or from industry experts. Most parcels of grain that I opt to pass along will be “adopted” with due credit, but hopefully not plagiarized. Before I go further, please allow me to express how sincerely grateful and proud I am to have the opportunity to serve the community newspapers of Texas in this capacity. It is an honor beyond anything I ever imagined. • • • A former employee at one of our North Texas weeklies, who has gone on to achieve broader responsibilities, called recently to ask my view on the difference between a community newspaper and a metro daily. Without hesitation, I answered, “Our franchise.” After a brief silence, he said, “I’m not sure what you mean.” I’m not sure I convinced him of the logic of my answer. I suggested that as community newspaper editors and publishers, we hold the franchise to report the day-to-day activities of our community and its residents and to chronicle what will become the recorded history of the community. We record the achievements and the needs of our citizens. We have a connection no other media can claim. The metro daily likely will report the high profile stories from our doorsteps, but ignore the school honor rolls, the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby, the United Way campaign, the civic club speakers and the personal items that weave the fabric of our hometowns. From my perspective, that gives us an exclusive franchise. Only our newspapers write and deliver those accounts to the residents of our communities. And with the exciting technology coming our way, we can deliver it quicker than ever before. Rob Carrigan, a nationally read columnist in Newspapers & Technology and coincidently now publisher of the first newspaper Carol Lee and I purchased in Colorado in 1966, wrote in January about how changing technology is impacting what I characterize as our franchise. More specifically, Carrigan wondered how the migration to a world full of digitized, fully accessible and fully interactive news content will impact the community newspaper model as we know it. Although he did not describe our advantage as a franchise, he said information in our community newspapers “is there because we are there.” “We have functioned, however inefficiently, for years as the de facto gathering place for all these scraps and ‘loose end’ information in our individual communities and niches,” Carrigan wrote. “We are where the obituary resides, and the wedding announcement, as well as the high school sports statistics and even the lunch menu at the senior citizen center. We are where the regular citizens nag the town council about the potholes. And where readers complain that the economy has gone in the toilet as those in charge explain it is not their doing. “If we are replaced by technologies that detour around this function, it is our own fault,” Carrigan concluded.
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