Changing Times In The News Business

Our country, in particular New York City, dodged a real bomb this week thanks to some very observant citizens and some fantastic first responders who acted quickly in Times Square to an SUV that was loaded with potential explosives.

In another area of our country, many people died as heavy rains in the Nashville area overwhelmed rivers, bridges, homes, schools, and amusement parks.

In the Gulf of Mexico, just a few miles south of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, a giant oil slick caused by a leaking oil well was creating havoc to the economy and environment.

In Louisville, Ky., a three-year-old thoroughbred racehorse with maybe one of the greatest jockeys in history onboard, thrilled tens of thousands at Churchill Downs and millions watching on television as it raced past 19 other horses to capture the 136th running of the Kentucky Derby on a sloppy racetrack.

In Lubbock, we learned that crime and highway drunks have not increased one iota since county citizens overwhelming approved wide-open liquor sales six months ago, despite warnings from anti-liquor forces to the contrary.

All in all, last Sunday morning was an awesome day for those of us who are news junkies.

Every one of the stories was worthy of front page coverage in the daily newspapers. Okay, I realize that the Lubbock story was worthy of front page coverage only in The Avalanche-Journal, but you get my point.

So, why weren’t they all on Page One of the A-J?

The answer—the Internet!

When I became editor of The A-J in January 2000, Internet news was fairly new. Sure, most newspapers had a website where they simply shoveled their print news, but most newsies didn’t want to break stories there because they didn’t want to see their print stories on the six o’clock local news stations.

As editor, my philosophy about news was that there were lots of other places information from London, Washington, Dallas and other distance places could be obtained, but the only place A-J readers could get information about Lubbock was from The A-J.

For sure there are other news outlets in Lubbock, but as my friend Benji Snead will tell you, I was arrogant enough and competitive enough to believe that The A-J was the primary source for news about the goings on in Lubbock.

In fact, there are news sources in Lubbock who will say that I bullied them into telling us what was going on by threatening not to cover their news conference or event if they didn’t give us the story in time to publish it in the newspaper before their news conference.

They would be right!

As editor, I was all about local coverage. Other news from around the world was important, too; but I wanted our newspaper to be the “go to” news and information source about Lubbock.

As our Internet site, lubbockonline.com, continued to grow, I began urging our reporters and editors, who had ink in their blood and a contempt for electronic news, to begin pushing their stories to our website as soon as possible in order to add lubbockonline.com to that “go to” category.

To be frank, I was met with a helluva lot of resistance in the newsroom, so much that I began offering small bonuses for stories that were turned over to lubbockonline.com before the six o’clock newscasts.

Even then, though, I could be talked into holding a big and exclusive story from the Internet until 10 p.m. in order to make sure that it was in the print newspaper before the electronic media had it. I went along with those requests, I think, because I still had ink in my blood and believed that the newspaper was where “important” news should be “broken.”

Back in those days, if a big story broke from somewhere else in the world, it was still pretty easy to convince me that it belonged on the front page.

But, the truth is, as some of my newsroom editors will attest, I was happiest when every story and photograph on the front page was from Lubbock or the South Plains, and all wire copy, no matter how big the story was relegated to the inside pages.

So now let’s go back to last Sunday and examine the news menu and where I read about each of the events:

1. I always start my day reading The A-J in print because I still enjoying holding the newspaper in my grubby hands. That’s where I learned about the impact of the alcohol sales, the deaths of the Census workers and a multitude of other stories that took place in Lubbock.
2. I went to newyorktimes.com to read as much as I could about the foiled car bomb in Times Square (and returned several times that day as the story was continuously updated).
3. The courierjournal.com in Louisville, Ky., was where I read about the Kentucky Derby and the hoopla surrounding the event. As fate would have it, that’s where many readers had to go because an electrical problem at the newspaper’s plant prevented the publishing and delivery of the Sunday paper until Monday morning—an editor’s nightmare for sure.
4. In order to learn as much as I could about the flooding in the Nashville area, I pointed my computer browser to tennessean.com, the internet site for the Nashville newspaper and found stories and photographs that were available nowhere else in the world.
5. As the oil spill disaster continued, I wanted to read what the New Orleans Times-Picayune was writing, ergo off to nola.com I went.

As much as I love The A-J, there is no way that it could have provided me with the information from these four national stories to whet my appetite. My newspaper had wire stories about each of these national events in less detail, but it had them nonetheless.

Many people, mainly those from my parents and my generation still turn to the newspaper for their news—they want to hold that precious newsprint in their hands. But the times are changing and the newspaper must change with it.

Quite frankly, it wouldn’t bother me to have a much smaller newspaper with 95 percent local news and information.

The other five percent of the news, if I were running the paper, would be headlined “News From Elsewhere,” pointing readers to the website of the local newspaper where the event occurred.

I know that not everyone has a computer or iPad or other devices to access the Internet, but it won’t be too much longer before every American will get their news digitally.

For me, it will be a sad day when the print newspaper finally goes away (and it will), but for news junkies who become accustomed to looking for news outside their hometown, they’ll hardly notice.