The newspaper. This old thing.
The New York Times and Boston Globe, and seemingly every other newspaper in the country, have laid off dozens — hundreds — of reporters. The Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy, the Rocky Mountain News and Cincinnati Post, rest in peace.
As a community reporter walking my beat, people often stop me and ask, as though I’m at a funeral, “How are you holding up?”
I’ll sometimes get pats on the back, pitiful looks and “You’ll be OK, right?” Then there are the apologetic assurances that there will certainly still be PR jobs out there for me.
The condolences stop just short of cards: “Sorry to hear about your industry.”
It certainly feels like the newspaper industry is no longer in the shape it was when today’s Hall-of-Fame inductees handed it over to us for safe-keeping.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m tired of the pity and I’m tired of hearing about the imminent collapse of journalism. I don’t have to tell the people in this room that our newsrooms still matter.
But I will. Because sometimes, it’s good to hear.
Three years ago, I wrote a story about a 29-year-old woman who came down with a mysterious illness that essentially froze her body. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Only her eyes could scan a room. After the story ran, suggestions on diagnoses and treatments arrived from all corners of America. Her ailment remains a mystery, but the local publicity surrounding her case is still attracting the likes of the top diagnostic physicians in the world. She’s being studied by an elite medical task force in Baltimore, and I’ve heard her plight may still be given even greater attention in the coming months by CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Two years ago, a former coworker of mine wrote about a family of eight living in a small motel room. Both parents were out of work, and the dad was shoveling snow at the motel to avoid getting kicked to the streets. Within a few days of publishing that family’s story, offers of help came pouring in from all over the country. A man from Washington state called to offer the family use of his second home in Harpswell for the winter, while others dropped off money and food to help them get by.
Also last week, we ran a short story about how local eighth-graders would have to cut short a special hands-on boatbuilding program because of school budget cuts. Yesterday, I received an e-mail announcing that a local business saw the news and donated the money necessary to keep the unique program afloat.
These are just stories that came to mind recently, and only stories from my newsroom. I suspect everybody in this room can think of times when stories you’ve published in your newspapers that have similarly impacted readers. Not just in a broad, philosophical way. Not just in a way that contributes to the greater education of the populace, although that’s important.
But in a real, tangible way that can be touched and heard and felt. A young woman with a strange illness is getting the best health care on earth. A young family with nowhere to go now has a home and food. Students in our local school are getting out from behind desks to learn the practical applications of mathematics and team-building used to make a wooden skiff.
Newspaper companies absolutely must be aware of burgeoning technologies. Newspaper companies must be flexible to embrace a changing world of readers and consumers.
But newspaper companies must also remember that more than any other media outlets in the world, people trust us, and we have an impact.
Television stations routinely recruit newspaper writers to speak on-air as subject matter experts. When was the last time a story in your local newspaper sourced a television reporter as an expert on a developing news story?
According to the Pew Research Center, 99 percent of stories linked to in blogs are “legacy” media outlets. For the most part, that’s us.
It seems to me that even the media outlets clawing to supplant newspapers as this planet’s preeminent sources of information rely pretty heavily on newspapers to get their information. Few people question this or find this surprising.
At the bottom of almost every major local, national or global story, there was a newspaper journalist digging to find the truth. Even if you hear Sanjay Gupta talking about it on CNN, there’s a very good chance the seed for that story came from a newspaper, maybe a little 10,000 circulation daily in Maine.
It is my conclusion, that newspapers and their hardworking staffs of journalists, are still the heavyweight champions of the information world. Our dominance is still ingrained in and accepted by society. There may be fewer or us. We may be struggling through a business adjustment. But without us, there is no news.
We should embrace this, and we should be emboldened by it. Thank you.
Seth Koenig is a reporter for The Times Record, a daily newspaper in Brunswick and Maine’s 2009-10 Journalist of the Year 2009-10. His remarks were made Oct. 17 during the annual meeting of the Maine Press Association.
