The Newspaper Industry Showed Up

A buddy I consider a brother and I were talking about the current state of affairs in the newspaper industry. We mentioned the old Walt Kelly cartoon, Pogo. Way back on Earth Day in 1970, Kelly drew Pogo standing in a forest filled with trash and garbage. He had a forlorn look on his face. The caption read, We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us.

Sadly, and for far too many reasons, it fits the newspaper industry now.

(Stage whisper off to the side for the regular eight or nine of you who read these scribbles – my apologies but I’m about to sail off on a tangent about the newspaper industry. If you have better things to do, I understand. Or, if you want to save this and read it at bedtime, it might save you a couple of sleeping pills!)

Anywho, everyone knows that the newspaper business is dying . . . except that we’re not. Truth to tell, we have more readers than ever. We have readers who pick up the printed (you know, wood pulp) version. We have readers who read us on their phone. We have readers who log onto the website. We have readers on tablets, laptops, desktops, rocky tops and rolltops. OK, maybe not rolltops, but you get the drift.

What we haven’t figured out yet is how to properly explain to businesses that advertising is about number of eyeballs and we ain’t lacking even a little in that category. That, my friends, (and for the one or two of you still reading) is the problem. Readers are wonderful and believe me when I tell you we love ‘em dearly. But at the end of the day, they don’t pay the freight. Advertising dollars are where most of the money comes from and we’re still trying to crack that nut.

That’s where we screwed up you see. We had it all. We had the readers AND the advertising. We were Facebook before Facebook. But we didn’t want to evolve and change with the times and so some geeks in a garage invented a better mousetrap and there you go.

Fast forward to last week.

It should not be a shock to you that our friends in politics – who have loved to hate us since about the time Mr. Richard was sending the bungling burglars to the Watergate hotel – have taken advantage of the perception that relevancy in today’s world has eluded my brethren and I. So, for the last, oh, I don’t know, 86 gazillion years in a row, the folks in the Indiana legislature have tried to pull public notices out of Hoosier papers.

They haven’t got it done yet, but they have come close. This year is no exception as HB1312 aims to drive a stake through the heart of every smalltown newspaper in the state. Will they get it done? Too early to tell, but if last week has anything to do with it, perhaps there is hope yet!

You see, a wise four-term state senator who also happens to own this particular product you are reading, told us that we needed a show of force. He pointed out that if county clerks or assessors had an issue at the Statehouse, there’d be 92 or so of them show up. Ditto with county recorders. Teachers? Forget 92. They’d show up by the busload! The problem for us newspaper types is we would send our state press association and three or four of our best representatives to a committee meeting. You know. Quality over quantity.

It didn’t work.

So a few weeks ago, a bunch of newspaper types got together – made some signs, printed up some T-shirts, spread the word and bada bing bada boom, about 125 or so of us met for a good, old-fashioned rally right outside the Senate chambers last Wednesday! Even better, it wasn’t just editors and publishers. We had folks from circulation departments, advertising departments, business offices . . . and best of all (God Bless ‘Em Each Every One), readers!

Yours truly was there and other than being in the Odessa American newsroom when a photographer there won the Pulitzer Prize (a monumental event I had absolutely nothing to do with), this was the neatest thing I’ve seen in my career.

Will it do any good? I don’t know. There are still weeks left in this session and the lobbyists for the cities, towns, counties and schools are working diligently against us. But if the state senators and representatives care about their constituents and not those lobbyists and special interests, then it would seem we have a shot.

I’ve dwelt too long on my business . . . but if you’ll indulge me one more minute, let me wrap up with this. The picture you see on today’s front page is what it’s all about – and on a very personal level. The little 7-year-old boy is named Sullivan West. He is staring at a bust of former Gov. Frank O’Bannon – an owner of an Indiana newspaper. There are three posters. One says Newspapers are the Heart of Your Community. The other two have a combined message: Killing Newspapers – Killing Democracy.

I believe that. Newspapers were the only private business the Founding Fathers felt needed to be in the very first Amendment of the Constitution. Today, newspapers need to find a way to win this fight AND to do better to live up to that. We’re working on it.

The coolest part of the picture is that it wasn’t framed, wasn’t set up. It was just a captured moment in time. Nah, check that. That’s the second coolest part. The first? Little Sully is my grandson. Thanks Sully Boy for putting it all in perspective!

Two cents, which is about how much Timmons said his columns are worth, appears periodically on Wednesdays in The Paper. Timmons is the publisher of The Paper and can be contacted at [email protected].