My Hometown Paper

My local hometown paper when I was growing up was a very small, thin set of newsprint called The Journal.  It was delivered (I believe) three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday).  It served the town I grew up in and perhaps 30 miles in every direction.

It was what one would expect from a small town paper:  Lots of local interest stories, a crime blotter (although not nearly as entertaining as the Unalaska one), marriages, obituaries, a small run of comics, local high school sports, and the classified ads. Somewhere buried I have occasional pictures from long ago of me, frozen forever in black and white newsprint, singing in front of a Christmas tree or in a parade.

But then, I as I grew up, so did they.  First they went to three days a week and Sunday, then five days a week and Sunday (with color comics).  Mind you, the content itself varied in volume - Tuesday papers, for example, were notoriously lacking in news. 

The justification, of course, was that the town was growing and there was demand for what they offered.  We were becoming a media consuming society you see, and people demanded the increase in circulation.  World and State events slowly made their way on to page two.  They actually had more than one section of paper.  And those fancy color comics.

But an odd things happened - the price continued to go up for the paper.  At some point, the paper stopped growing but the price continued to.  Cost of newsprint and paid professional reporters and all.

And then, of course, this thing called the InterWeb came along.  Suddenly, people could get their news in almost an instant.  Any reason for getting a paper for news that was not local suddenly seemed silly.  And with the price increases versus the free content of the InterWeb, the paper began to die.

The fancy large building that they built for the upgraded paper is mostly rented out to someone else now, the offices largely closed and the newspaper itself (I believe) printed somewhere else.  The editions have dropped dramatically as well.  It only comes out twice a week now, on Mondays and Thursdays.  Still very slim, but with lots of local news in it:  great if live directly in the area, not so important if you do not.

I read that last week almost 1,000 press personnel, reporters and cartoonists, some with over 30 years of experience and Pulitzer prizes, were laid off.  They were shocked of course, and could not understand why such things had to happen.  I never really like to see people lose their jobs - bad memories and impacted people - but at the same time, I could not help but be a little amazed by their lack of understanding:  the market has changed and the price people are willing to pay for news and content no longer matches what people expect to make.

In a way, like my hometown paper:  very good at offering value in a small niche, but not so good at selling their value in a crowded market with other alternatives available.  Sadly, like most industries and companies, this was only discovered after the curve had begun to decline.

Oddly enough, I wonder if they view their hometown papers the same way.