An extended stretch of illness left me homebound several consecutive days last week. In between bouts of sleeping multiple hours at a time, I found myself overcome with a combination of restlessness, boredom and soreness (from constant coughing and laying in the bed for too long).
During one of the brief stretches when I had the energy to climb out of bed for a couple of hours I found myself looking through an old box which I had not opened in years.
Inside were copies of old newspapers I helped edit and work on while in college. After being amazed — even in my weakened state — at how much time had elapsed since those papers were printed, I became to think about the state of the newspaper industry in general.
Big-time dailies are struggling to stay in business, victims of both their own poor decisions, the current economy and, of course, the Internet. Our state’s once mighty paper based in Atlanta continues to crumble right before our eyes. A publication which has done so much in the past century and a half has yet to figure out how to co-exist with the Internet.
That’s why I found myself glad I made the decision to stick with my first love: community publications.
Has the current economy been tough on hometown, weekly newspapers? You bet it has.
Has the Internet also made a dent in reader of weekly papers as well? The answer is also yes. Many weeklies have free websites as well, just as their larger, daily counterparts. This newspaper was, in fact, a website before it became a print edition.
However, most weekly newspapers seem to grasp a basic concept: use your website in a way to compliment your printed edition, not to take away from it. By not putting everything on your paper’s website, you still give readers a reason to buy your printed product. It’s something many dailies can’t seem to grasp (i.e. the big one in Atlanta), although for the life of me I don’t understand why.
While I do obtain some of my news from websites, I am, and will always be, an old-fashioned newspaper person. I enjoy holding an actual printed newspaper in my hands. I prefer reading it that way to reading it online.
That’s where the weekly have an advantage. You still have to buy the printed product to see many of the features that are included such as the weddings, birth announcements, etc. These items have been and will always been the lifeblood of community publications.
Hopefully, the larger papers will wise up (I fear it may be too late for what once was our state’s largest and most influential publication). However, look for your hometown papers like the Barrow Journal to continue to be here decades from now.
It’s something that I realized in recent days even though I felt like doing anything but working. Newspapers go back to the earliest days of Georgia. It’s one tradition that we need to insure continues.
Rest assured it is something I, and everyone at this publication, will do.
Chris Bridges is editor of the Barrow Journal. E-mail comments about this column to cbridges@barrowjournal.com.
