The Role of Newspapers? Be Relevant.

The role of the newspaper.

It's the Topic of the decade. As print flutters between being obsolete or merely deeply wounded, it struggles for relevancy in a world gone hyper-electronic. The days of delivering the news to a waking world at 6:30 am or to greet weary workers as they arrive home are long gone. The web and mobile phones changed all that a decade ago, but an obdurate industry and no less than four wallet-breaking "technical advancements" (cold-type, color printing, pagination, and the web) in the past four decades, has pushed the industry to its knees.

A Google search on "Future of Newspapers" presented 99,500 results. An even more pessimistic query of "end of newspaper" yielded 26,200. And if we think it is tough today, what will it be like a decade from now, when today's children, tethered to iPods and Xbox Live, do not have memory of newspaper's days as "Messenger-in-Chief?"

It was with this in mind that I approached my son's middle school English teacher to pass out a questionnaire I had created with his 6th grade students. He graciously agreed. The questionnaire had its failings and was in no-way scientific, although I have identified ways to improve it and would like to repeat it in a broader socio-economic context. In the meantime, it did provide a hint at what tomorrow's consumer of news might do.

I must admit that I went into this with a presumption that most kids would not even have seen a newspaper, let alone read one. I was wrong. Eight percent said that they had never read one -- and another eight percent said that they had read one once. Still 59% read a newspaper once in a while and 22% said they read them all the time.

I also asked kids to provide the definition of a newspaper. The answers ranged from the mostly obvious "like a big book with lots of articles in it," to the truly insightful: "a carrier for advertising" and, even, "a primitive form of t.v. that has channels that differ from each region."

But I wonder if, after the last couple weeks, their perception of newspapers changed. You see the middle school is Clarence Middle, the same Clarence where Flight 3407 plummeted into a house killing 50 -- five from our tiny hamlet. Clarence is a rural outpost of Buffalo, and while our population has grown considerably in the last decade, it really is quite removed both geographically (20 miles) and socio-economically from the rest of the area. So despite having moved here from the New York/New Jersey region over four years ago, I still didn't embrace the Buffalo News as my hometown paper.

My consumption of the News consisted of -- front page, op-ed and sports, with about a once a week check of the "Northern Suburbs" to see if the stringer for our area had filed anything. That changed on February 12th, when practically the entire 180-member News staff suddenly found Clarence, and I found my local paper. The coverage of the event was thorough -- and superb. The reporters not only covered the tragedy, but they captured the psyche of the residents here -- that we are essentially a commuter town. Many of my neighbors, like my husband and me, travel by air on a weekly basis. We all held our collective breaths as we waited for identification of victims -- with plaintive texts to friends -- "where are you?" or in some cases just, "hello?"

The reporters did, as they were supposed to. They told the stories of the victims in moving detail, and began to unearth a controversy that maybe flying the popular regional propjets into icy (shocking) Buffalo -- is not so safe after all. In fact, today, at 12:37 the News updated the front page to let residents know that a counter-demonstration was coalescing at the crossroads of the accident site -- to drown out some imbeciles hellbent on using today's memorial services to promote their poisonous agenda.

The News' TV Critic Jeff Simon was right when he said that the online News finally had come of age. He also pointed out the pitfalls of trying to be newsbreaking and accurate -- early reports said it was a US Air flight -- not a Continental one, while other media were reporting it was a twin-seater versus a commercial airliner. Accuracy, speed and thoroughness are sometimes at odds. And not to negate the contribution of the three local broadcast stations -- they did a fine job on the breaking news -- but they couldn't sustain the indepth coverage for the ensuing days when we, like addicts, hungered for more.

Juxtaposed to this essential coverage was the ad-hoc city that sprung up at the local library -- when more than 40 satellite news teams from all over descended. It was silliness watching news team after news team in their makeshift outdoor studios: lights, anchor and camera crew, all reporting the same thing -- a mile from the scene. As I was asked repeatedly, "where can we go buy sandwiches," I realized how irrelevant they were. They weren't local, they didn't understand the area, nor did they comprehend the concern of the residents, nor the fears of kids like my 10-year old who immediately grasped: "this could have been our house. It could have been you or daddy."

And while the industry and executives go neurotic over whether or not newspapers are still relevant, the answer is in their question. If they have to ask, then they are not. Choosing to load up editorial with wire copy, to report the same stuff as everyone else, is no different than the 40 news crews that took a camera shot of an empty road. Gutting a news room is insane and a clear path to irrelevancy. Your editorial is not only the hook into your community -- they are your marketers. They are the public faces to your constituents that remind us to pick up the paper.

Clearly, you can't build a business plan around having a tragedy in your community -- but the lesson should be that people will read what is impactful to them. When you have trained me not to read the local news more than once a week -- because you can't update more than that -- you start falling into that bucket of irrelevance. And if you really don't know what makes your newspaper relevant, I have a newsflash: ask a 6th grader.