No thanks. I’m still not interested in buying a newspaper. As I tell everyone who is kind enough to ask, my favorite thing I’ve ever done in my life was put out a newspaper every week. It was also the most difficult. The lifestyle seizes all your waking hours, and you don’t realize to what extent until you have been able to step back from it for awhile.
Our current Lincoln County newspaper situation is a bit volatile. I hope for the sake of the area residents that something gets resolved. I’m confident that it will.
One thing about old newspaper columnists, we always like to give our opinion on subjects, whether people want to hear those opinions or not. That being said, here are a few of my thoughts about a small town newspaper…
• One of the most important features of your local newspaper is the public forum. It is supposed to be the voice of the people. Readers should be able to express their opinions—positive and negative—without being censored or ignored. Even if you are criticizing the newspaper or the guy who decides what goes on the opinion page. In my days as a newspaper editor, I never kept a letter that was bashing me or my opinions from my readers. The subscribers were always well aware of my opinions, they deserved to hear the other side and formulate their own judgment on the subject at hand. There are exceptions to the rule when bashing others to keep the paper protected from libel…but nothing was off limits when voicing your displeasure with yours truly. The newspaper business is not for the thin-skinned. If you can’t take criticism don’t take the job.
• I’ve always felt it was a conflict of interest for me to hold public office while covering that same body. Your job as a local publisher and editor, in part, is to be a watchdog for the people. It is too tempting to be less than transparent when you control what the people read.
• Don’t take yourself too seriously. Have a sense of humor and know when it is appropriate to let it show on the pages of your newspaper.
• A newspaper survives on its advertising revenue, and it takes a large amount of that revenue to collect all the news and photographs each week, lay them out in an easy-to-read format, have them printed and deliver them to your doorstep. A very large amount. And if you think for a moment that any of the fine people who do this for you each week are overpaid, you are sadly mistaken.
• It is impossible to cover, or even know about, everything that happens in your town. If you want your newspaper to know about the tree planting in honor of the 1958 Arco High School Glee Club at 8:00 Sunday morning, call the newspaper office and tell them. Better yet, go to the event yourself, take a picture, and submit it with the event information. They will be happy to print it, but at least give them Sunday mornings off when possible.
• Everyone makes mistakes. With hundreds of bits of information coming into the newspaper office each week, once in awhile your paper is going to miss printing the blurb announcing the semi-annual meeting of the Petunia Club. It does no good to yell into your phone on Wednesday morning. They didn’t leave it out on purpose.
Okay, I admit I certainly SOUND like someone planning on getting back into the newspaper business, but rest assured the answer is still no. I’ll stick to this blogging thing. It doesn’t pay very well, but weekly submission is optional. I’ve been doing this for a year, and although it is always possible, so far nobody has called and yelled in my ear.
And next week I’ll be back to give more of my unsolicited opinions…or not. Why didn’t I think of this blogging thing years ago?
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