Kudos to Mark Bernstein ’83 for his summary of small-town newspapers. I was struck by the lesson he got from his mentors at The Perryton Herald: “There are a hundred stories a day to write about in a small town, if only someone will look for them.” I’ll leave it to other alums to debate whether and why local newspapers fail to look nowadays.
What impressed me most about the early lesson is how closely it resembles the transient personal news that fills online chat/messaging. Such chat involves far more throughput for an individual than the relatively static content on Craigslist, Fandango, or Monster.com (though those impact sources of advertising revenue, as Mark noted).
It’s tempting to say Mrs. Billie B. Sanders, the Herald’s social columnist, anticipated the zeitgeist of the early 21st century, but I think she was simply lucky and savvy enough to express in writing what countless humans have relayed to each other verbally for millennia. One advantage that both print media and webzines share is that “freezing” information in written form stabilizes it; thus, it can be proven/disproven more easily, and relayed with less distortion, than conveying news verbally, which is often as unreliable as a game of telephone.
In Response to: The Future of Journalism: Home Team