Newspapers' decline opens fresh perspective

What is a newspaper's true standing?
In a nutshell it has none. It does have the freedom to print whatever it wants. It's a no-brainer thanks to the First Amendment. A newspaper enjoys some special access thanks to the traditional position it has held, cultivated over years of pre-Internet news dissemination, when our options were severely limited.
The people who talk today about the important role held by newspapers and how we can't let them die, ought to step into a time machine and go back at least 15 years. You'll get smoke blown into your face if you walked into a restaurant. A newspaper-dominated information universe is just as odious, I feel.
The First Amendment protects me also with this humble site. If I were to ask you for a quote for my blog, you might be hesitant or want to know more about me. But why should you be any more open with a newspaper? Papers have an agenda and they aren't generally interested in the innocent and boring. Well, the larger papers aren't. But do we even need to treat the smaller papers as anything special?
Local "news" is the kind of stuff that can make certain people squirm. One might ask, at a fundamental level: Is a community newspaper an intrusion into privacy? Does it invade our personal space? Do we really need to know that a young man whose last name is common in the area is in trouble for a sex crime? Do I need to learn this through a screaming headline?
And does another headline have to scream at me that a local clergyman has sadly been caught for a serious human failing and has the law coming down on him like an anvil?
Law enforcement people handle these things. Newspapers do little more than stoke the gossip mill, and it's ditto with mundane news like speeding and seat belt citations. The district court "news" could go online under the direct supervision of people at that office, in the same way funeral homes take responsibility for obituaries. These entities do the work with tender loving care. Not like a bat out of hell at a newspaper office with one eye on the clock. Why can't the people who bow at the newspaper altar consider that latter image?
In the last years of my "dead tree" newspaper career, I definitely noticed the public retreating from wanting attention in the paper. They'd sound prickly on the phone. Whereas people in the past might have been flattered to get a call from the paper, that sensation has faded along with the perception that the local paper is special or entitled.
The budding online world, by contrast, empowers people and organizations to share information with target audiences on terms they set in a bottom-up communications model. It's a liberating and less-intrusive information ecosystem, not to mention eco-friendly. The latter dividend is most certainly impressed on us in looking at the current Morris newspaper, in which the ad circulars for Alexandria business alone are an abomination. Sorry, but I don't do that much shopping in Alexandria.
Why talk to a newspaper reporter? It's a fundamental question. Is this reporter certified in some manner? Could he/she have been hired off the street? The First Amendment is a right, but it doesn't bestow any special status on these people. So often they're in denial and talk like it does.
You know who isn't mesmerized by calls from newspaper people? The University of Minnesota. The University is well-known to be averse to the legacy print media. It's my understanding that the U has a policy for its employees that if you get a call from a reporter, you refer that person to your supervisor. The U would say this is just a matter of proper procedure, while reporters smell evasiveness. I side with the U on this one. I think the Clem Haskins academic cheating scandal hardened this stance.
When the Minnesota Daily tried to do an article on the effects of proposed budget cuts on various departments within the U, they ran into a stone wall and tried crying "foul." This was maybe two years ago.
What special status did the Daily enjoy that empowered them to go poking around in a way that might put the venerable U on the defensive?
There is a lot at stake with the University packaging its image in an optimal way in the year 2010. I might add that Jesse Ventura and Mark Yudof, for all their differences in their roles as governor and U president, respectively, would do a "high 5" together on the points I'm making.
It is not a civic obligation to talk to a reporter. It is a risk. The reporter may be distracted by personal problems and be working at a harried, probably unreasonable pace. Why is the reporter's "deadline" your problem? It isn't.
I told my former boss not long ago that the Brian Williams he knew then, in the newspaper trade, was an anachronism. Whereas I might have won some admiration for being frenetic in my work pace, sometimes trying to be two places at once for example, this was no longer a work model to be emulated.
What the U of M knows vividly is that the reporter will be assembling material from his/per perspective which definitely is not likely to mirror the U's. Nothing in the U's stance is contrary to the First Amendment. It's all about entitlement, and the newspapers don't have any. Hey, maybe I do!
This site, "I Love Morris," reflects the guiding credo of the new online media: "Do what you do best and link to the rest." I trust the news sources I'm linking to. They sure make it easy for me.
Local institutions are making strides joining the new and evolving information ecosystem. But it's still a work in progress. "Hyperlocal" is exciting and people need to tune in. Our local public school district has recently improved its website but I'd still like to prod them to go further. More on that later.
Paul Gillin of Newspaper Death Watch states, with some hyperbole I feel, that Watergate was the worst thing to ever happen to the U.S. newspaper industry. He argues that Watergate made reporters feel like they should be celebrities. There is a nugget of truth in that, but the industry's implosion really isn't so dramatic. As with all things in business, it's evolution.
I read "All the President's Men," the Bob Woodward/Carl Bernstein treatise on their career-making episode (Watergate), about three years ago during my first winter being unemployed. It was a paperback that I had purchased back when it was current, but had never gotten around to reading. Maybe seeing the movie (twice) gave me less incentive to read. But the book was an eye-opener from the standpoint of the quaint world it revealed, a world in which, if you called someone and said you were a reporter with the Washington Post, or knocked on their door and said the same, that someone would likely be awestruck. Might even ask you in and offer you a cup of coffee. I remember that world and it had some charm, definitely, but it was also a world full of sexism, smoking and drinking, and naivete on the part of many toward politics. Everyone used caveman typewriters.
I remember at St. Cloud State University during the mid-1970s, I saw an article in the campus paper ("Chronicle") that had a quote attributed to "a high SCSU administration source." I think this writer probably saw "All the President's Men" twice (or more) like I did. We were deluding ourselves. We were never that important.
Incidentally, that attribution reminds me of a book title from the late humorist Art Buchwald, a book no doubt penned in the same era: "Getting High in Government Circles." (Art announced his own death in a video recorded shortly before, but it got little TV play, probably because it seemed creepy. It was really funny, the way Buchwald intended.)
"Background. . .off the record. . .cloak and dagger. . ." Who cares? Is this any way to get government accountability? No, and the powers that be, like at the University of Minnesota, came to realize this. Take off your capes, newspaper people. Heaven help us if our institutions can't cultivate their own channels of accountability. And they seem to be doing this. The blogosphere probably helps because it's an "on the record" conversation, not merely whispers.
The fading away of our ink-and-paper newspapers warrants a nod of acknowledgment and little more. Let's all harness what's new.
-Brian Williams - Morris Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com