I received this email from my boss. This essay was written in response to a question about the future of community journalism. THIS is how I feel. This is why I love what I do.
By Dolph Tillotson
I think we should shut our ears to the buzz of distraction and focus on what we do best -- tell stories, engage readers, help to build communities.
Smaller newspapers like their big-city brothers are struggling with change. In fact, I think anyone in business these days is facing the same struggle. Name a business that is not struggling in 2012 to cope with the pace of change. I can't think of one.
However, it's also true that community newspapers face a different and somewhat less daunting set of challenges than metro papers do.
Our enterprises are smaller and more manageable. Likewise, our cost bases are smaller and more manageable. In addition, our markets are smaller, better defined and much easier to serve.
These days, the name of the game in the news business – at least as it is practiced outside of Washington, D.C., and New York – is to be focused locally. The cliché of the month in our industry is "hyper local." Interestingly, community newspapers have always been hyper local, something metro papers apparently are just discovering.
There's a practical reason for that. It is much easier to deliver a clearly identifiable and highly localized package of information tailored to the needs of readers in, say, Nacogdoches, Texas, than to do the same thing in Houston.
Consequently, most of our 15 community newspapers still operate at profit margins that would be enviable in other businesses. Those margins may be less than they were five years ago, but they're still respectable enough to attract investors and buyers for community newspaper companies. Actually, our company is forecasting in the year ahead that our business overall will be a little better than this year, and that's encouraging.
Having said that let me also say emphatically that small-town newspapers face their own challenges. The last thing anyone in our business should do is to become complacent.
We should be working every day to deliver more local news and commentary across more different media platforms to more and more readers. We should strive every day to tell stories more completely and more compellingly about the communities we serve than anyone else can. We should fight – and I use the word “fight” deliberately – to inform, engage and even inspire readers as never before.
Sometimes, it seems to me that our industry has lost focus. Our publishers and editors have been pummeled by the rapid pace of technological change, by the media's fixation on Internet competition, by the advent of mobile phone and iPad apps and by the ongoing debate over whether or not to charge for Internet access to our products.
With those hornets buzzing in our ears, it's too easy to lose sight of the fact that our job is much the same as it has always been.
The media platforms may change, but we are essentially storytellers.
That mission – telling stories – is a function that is basic to the human condition, and it has been since our ancestors gathered around campfires in the days before writing. It's still basic, and it's still vital. Community newspapers are the one medium in the world that can give small towns focus and a forum, a careful and caring focal point for discussion of the crucial issues all communities face.
Certainly it is our challenge to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. No doubt about it. However, it may be an even more important challenge to fight the distractions and stay focused on job No. 1, which is to tell stories more completely and in more compelling ways.
Our company owns 15 community newspapers from Georgia to Del Rio, Texas. Yesterday, more people read the content we generate, in print and on the Internet, than ever before in this history of those 15 newspapers. Even more will read what we write tomorrow. That story is the wonderful news about community newspapers that no one seems to be telling, and we should be shouting it every day.
We should not retreat, as some in our industry seem intent upon doing. We should take a collective deep breath and fight back with all our heart and energy -- fight back against complacency and boring stories told boringly.
We should focus on being the beating heart of each community we serve. We must be the lifeblood of the dialogue and progress in each community. We have to be not just competent but passionate about the job before us.
I think community newspapers have the chance to thrive for many decades to come. The chance. The opportunity.
Whether community newspapers seize that opportunity depends on how well those newspapers are run, how vital they are. I can’t wait to see how that story turns out.
Dolph Tillotson is the former publisher of The Galveston County Daily News in Galveston, Texas, and a former president of SNPA. He can be reached at dolph.tillotson@galvnews.com
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