Editor’s Note and The Ailing American Newspaper

Over the next seven days I’ll either be posting a lot less or posting off and on with several days totally off. The reason: I’m on a major trip, driving through the American West and Northwest. Some drives between major stops entail 1100 mile drives. Sunday through Wed I will drive more than 1200 miles total during three days, ending with an appointment in LA, then driving 3 hours home to San Diego. Already several things have been glaring on this trip:

1. In some towns you can see businesses that have closed due to the recession.

2. You can also see signs of the stimulus. Driving up and down mountains en route to Idaho last night, I passed a project with a big sign saying that it had been funded by stimulus money (using the official name of the act).

and the most glaring:

3. More than ever American newspapers are seemingly on life support due to factor not often mentioned in news analysis of the industry.

It used to be that when I travelled a lot of hotels and motels gave away USA Today or their local paper. Or they had full stocked newspaper machines outside.

Or you could go to a 7 Eleven and choose from a stack of papers, local and USA Today. Or you could go to a grocery store and get a newspaper there.

Unlike a lot of people, my favorite way to eat a meal while on the road is to load myself up with a huge stack of newspapers and magazines, sit at a table totally alone, and read them.

On this trip I’m using a book. (The late columnist Mike Royko to be exact..)

On this trip, newspapers are so thin that by the time I get them that I wondered why I even bothered since I already read a lot of what they have — and more — on the Internet. The hotels and motels on this trip — except one — didn’t hand out papers. But some do have a computer for guests (which invariably has a line of people waiting to get online).

And if there were machines outside it took forever for the new edition to appear. By then I had already GONE to the Internet because I couldn’t find a newspaper. Or I’d listened to CNN on satellite radio. A lot of newspapers in middle sized cities (and even some big ones) now seem less newspapers than what we used to call a “shopper” when I worked on newspapers.

Papers may or may not be in front of grocery stores but deliveries seem later than they used to be. In one town where I stopped I simply could not find a place that had newspapers in stock.

Also: if you see people who are reading newspapers (which itself requires using our skill of observation) it is invariably an older person.

Since I don’t have the time or money to hire a private detective to find newspapers, I now resort to…the Internet.

The bottom line: the delivery system for American newspapers ain’t what it used to be and that spells very bad news indeed for the industry’s long term prospects.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Times, and some other big city papers which are easy to get in their cities and still have meaty content.

But those papers (which are also not in great shape) make up a smaller portion of the news industry. Out in the hinterland, the situation seems more dire: if people can’t readily find an BUY your product and your circulation is down how can you run a viable business?

All of this is said in sadness. I wrote for newspapers overseas from India, Bangladesh, Cypress and Spain for several years, then worked on two chain newspapers — (then) Knight-Ridder’s Wichita Eagle-Beacon and (then) Copley Newspaper’s San Diego Union. My two big outlets overseas, where I was considered more than a “stringer” but a kind of super stringer filing stories via Reuters several times a week and sometimes every day, were the Chicago Daily News (long since closed) and the Christian Science Monitor (now online only with a great new weekly edition).

FOOTNOTE: One of the silver linings for those of us who are newspaper fans is USA Today. You can still get it as you travel around the country. It has solid content and a great mix of news and features of all kinds. It is also thinner these days (both in pages and even page size) but it’s out there — and perhaps it’s one of the papers that will survive. Someone who wanted to duplicate what I did in self-syndicating would find it tough today, not because the papers aren’t buy but because the papers aren’t the papers they were — and there are now few of them.

And, I fear, there will be fewer 10 years from now.

Especially if those who want to buy them have trouble finding them.