My writing is not in the rear view mirror

I hope that my occasional writing about local sports has some value. The endeavor is much different from what it used to be. It wouldn't surprise me if some people said my writing is better now than it was before. "Before" would be the 27 years when I wrote for the Morris newspaper. Back then I had a "job" and would put in well over 40 hours a week.
A job! We no longer judge self-worth by having a full-time job. When I left the Morris paper, my family decided to have its Sunday afternoon buffet meal in Cyrus, so as to be lower profile than otherwise. I was sort of drifting in the world. I wanted to avoid conversations about what my status was. The nature of mass communications was changing. Really the whole world around us was changing. The steadily advancing digital world was an inexorable force. It cannot be resisted. You are left behind if you do not adjust.
Many people have been challenged trying to keep up. The newspaper industry has been subjected to much duress. It has not vanished but it has been thrown into spasms of change. Who would have thought the Hancock paper would just disappear? Am I right to be shocked by that? I was surprised to talk to a few Hancock people who seemed not to be distressed. One of them more or less shrugged about having the Morris (or "Stevens County") paper mailed to them instead. It seemed the old parochialism was gone! No fierce defensiveness on behalf of Hancock vs. Morris.
I saw much of that parochialism through my life. I saw it emanating from Cyrus. Today Cyrus is transformed into what I would consider a very nice little placid community, perfect for retirees and commuters. Do the people of Starbuck even care anymore that they no longer have "their own" high school? Are Starbuck people concerned that they send their kids to a school somewhat out of town, there to share with the Glenwood kids? Do we still note the parochialism of Starbuck vs. Glenwood? Is there still a residence in Starbuck that flies a Confederate flag out front? OK I digress with that last question.
The Minnewaska school is of the "cornfield" type ("in the middle of nowhere") that the state has reportedly said will never again be built. Ditto Lac qui Parle. I enjoyed writing about the Minnewaska Area basketball team this past winter. I hope more than a few 'Waska area people were able to find my material. They can come back and read that stuff at any time in the future. Keep in mind I have two websites (or blogs): the one you're reading now, and my "Morris of Course" site. I created the second site so that no one site would ever get crowded with sports posts during hectic sports times. It is not my purpose to get immersed in sports.
While I enjoy the sports writing, I am always aware that the audience for this is limited. It is intense with its interest but limited, more limited than what the fans at any time would want to believe. People might ask: in a hypothetical, would I enjoy grabbing my old seat and writing for the Morris paper again? It is an impossible hypothetical to weigh, because the paper has downsized so incredibly. Of course, much of my work over 15 years was for the Hancock paper. That paper is virtually gone, gone with the wind. I consider the cancellation to have been premature. Hancock can still support its own K-12 school system with confidence high. Any town with such a thorough school system should still have its own paper, for a decade longer maybe. Eventually the digital inroads in our habits will be just too much. That's the conventional wisdom.
But school news has made a very slow and grudging migration to the online world. So as newspapers dry up and disappear, will people really accept the limited attention being afforded by online? Maybe the parents/fans don't really demand as much as we think. Maybe their actual need for the coverage isn't that great, but what they really want is political, i.e.they want their local paper to pay attention to the local sports teams just to affirm they care. In the purely online world, maybe it's enough to have access to score/schedule information and little else. We can get that from the Pheasant Country Sports website.
In the meantime I'm happy to be writing about local sports here and there. With the newspaper I'd face the very impractical expectation of covering every area team all the time, every team that might conceivably expect coverage. Again much of this seemed political: "pay attention to us." I wouldn't attempt to do this today because it's an unrealistic proposition. In the past when newspapers had rather a monopoly, people seemed more easy-going with expectations. It was enough to just do my best. Today I might be hanged from the highest rafter if I were to make a typo. So I'm out of that racket now. I cover the teams I feel like covering, when I want to cover them. No one ought to care. You don't have to pay to consume my work. It's easily ignored if that's what you want to do.
The retrenchment in Morris commercial media has been shocking. The Hancock Record is gone and so is the free circulation Ad-Viser. I used to pick up the Ad-Viser in Lowry on Friday and fill the van so full with bundles, I'd get teased about whether there was room for me in the van! Now it's simply gone.
The Morris paper made the big switch from twice weekly to once. I remember when Mike Martin was downright emotional about games getting covered in the very next issue of the paper. So a Tuesday game would have to get covered in Thursday's issue and if it wasn't, it was cause for all-out hair-pulling. Certain people had anger management issues. Now the paper is once a week and it's not even that big much of the time. It shriveled up to just ten pages in one issue following the Christmas/New Year's holiday.
 
Morris newspaper circulation plummets
That one 10-pager itself may have expedited the process of decline. But let's get into circulation figures. A friend who pays more attention than me, recently emailed me on the topic. So interested was he, he photographed the report that appears annually in the Minnesota Newspaper Association directory. The report published in 2017 showed a circulation of 2800 for the "Stevens County Times." And then we look at the photo of the fresh 2018 report showing circulation of 2186.
I forwarded the email to a local acquaintance with strong interest in how the Morris paper fares, and he responded: "Wow! A 22 percent drop in one year. Amazing."
What does it mean? Normally such figures would suggest that a management change is needed at the paper, immediately if not sooner. Not only do I not sense that, I sense the Morris paper manager is showing the kind of arrogance that has become her trait. Does she answer to Jody Hanson in Alexandria? I had some contact with Jody, enough to conclude she's too nice a person to be in Forum Communications management.
I'm certain that Jody knows what's happening in Morris so what's the deal? Expectations are obviously low for the Morris paper. Is this setting the stage for something drastic like what we saw in Hancock? We have to wonder, based on the prevalence of Alexandria-based advertising circulars in that pile of weekly circulars. Doesn't it seem like pollution anyway? But maybe what's coming is this: Forum Communications is preparing to establish an area-wide paper based in Alexandria. There would be no more Morris paper.
Forum would just start mailing the new area paper to those on the Morris subscriber list. This is how they phased out Hancock. I wonder if the subscribers to the old Hancock paper had the option of getting a refund if they pressed the issue. They could easily argue that they chose to buy a "Hancock" paper.
By the time the Morris paper gets nixed, maybe no one will care anymore. I thought maybe that's what happened with the cancellation of Hancock. The decline of newspapers was once considered pretty big news. Well, it's big news if people react with a feeling of shock. Maybe that's no more. By the time newspapers truly fade into obsolescence, no one will care because we will all have moved on to something else. That's how our economy works.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com