The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper

I grew up with a newspaper in my hand. The newspaper was my best friend, taking me from where I lived to the city, state or country that I did not know. It was a welcome friend that arrived on the front stoop or driveway from people I hardly knew.

My father always had his nose in a newspaper, usually the San Francisco Chronicle. I probably caught the habit from him. He had a special way of reading the paper: first sports (green pages, for some reason in the Chronicle) and then Herb Caen for the gossip low-down on the City. For some reason (being different from one's parents?) I started with the front page and ignored Herb. What did I know about celebrities who visited cool bars and restaurants when I was too young and unimportant to attend?

As a youngster in Palo Alto, I was a paper boy for the San Francisco Call Bulletin. The real money (dependent as it was on number of papers delivered) was having a Palo Alto Times route. Unfortunately, the Times routes were all taken, and I was stuck delivering only 40 or so less-than-stellar Call Bulletins on my bike over an eight-mile route system.

The worst part of my newpaper days, by far, however, was trying to "collect" (as my route manager sternly informed me) from the 40 or so less-than-stellar customers that often did not want to pay. My parents insisted that I ride my bike (with lights, of course) at night so I would have a better chance of finding someone home. My parents subscribed to the less-than-stellar Call Bulletin as well as the Palo Alto Times because they felt sorry for me. Also, they paid me. (The Call Bulletin had a great sales incentive program: only 20 subscriptions for a new bike and 300, as I remember it, for a trip to Washington, D.C. I was lucky just not to LOSE subscriptions!)

After reading my parents' newspaper through high school, I was thrilled to subscribe to my first newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, when I started college at the University of California-Davis in 1961. It was so cool to get my own paper. Little did I know that 22 years after graduating I would be in another Valley city, Fresno, reading another McClatchy paper, The Fresno Bee.

My 22 -year odyssey from UC-Davis to Fresno involved the military, advanced education, a wonderful wife, two wonderful children and two wonderful jobs. Each community came with a newspaper to read: Syracuse and the New York Times; Columbus, GA and the Army Times; Arlington, VA and the Washington Post; Madison, Wisconsin's Capitol Times and Wisconsin State Journal; Racine, Wisconsin's Journal Times and Milwaukee Journal; and the Chicago Tribune in Chicago.

In 1988 I arrived in Fresno. After purchasing a home and having PG&E turn on the utilities, I reached for the phone to subscribe to The Fresno Bee.

It was always a given as the years rolled by that the newspaper would be on the stoop or driveway. I assumed that my two children would find pleasure reading the newspaper in the same way that I did. How wrong I was as I soon learned from my children's generation.

My son and daughter (and their spouses) are very well educated with good jobs in Chicago and Santa Barbara. None of them, however, read a newspaper. (I think they think I am a little weird, kind of an old fashioned fuddy-duddy with my reading habits.) They are, of course, very computer-literate, slyly assuring me that they use technology to keep up with topical events. They are typical of their generation in abandoning the traditional newspaper.

Advertisers have carefully tracked these generational trends and are moving from the print medium of newspapers and news magazines (yes, I also have been reading my dear Newsweek since my days at UC-Davis) to the Internet.

To their credit, newspapers are trying to counteract this trend of diminishing advertisers and subscribers. Some adaptions are pretty dramatic such as Detroit Media Partnership L.P., which operates the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, that has ceased home delivery of the papers' print editions on all but Thursday, Friday and Sunday. On the other days, the company sells single copies of abbreviated print editions at newsstands and directs readers to the papers' expanded digital editions.

While the Free Press and the News would be the first dailies in a major metropolitan market to curtail home delivery and drastically scale back their print editions, other newspapers are contemplating similar moves in response to the erosion of advertising and the rising costs of printing and delivery. The Christian Science Monitor, another example of a radical adaption to the shifting news landscape, recently announced it will stop printing a daily newspaper and move instead to an online version with a weekly print product.

Fresnans may ask why they should care about the problems of Detroit newspapers, the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company (includes the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers), The Gannet Company, which publishes 85 daily U.S. newspapers including USA Today, which recently reported a 36 decline in net income, and others suffering from the serious downturn. Fresnans should care because some of the newspapers I used to read are now gone, some are reduced to a shadow of their original size, and others are hanging on by their fingernails. Fresnans should care because my children's generation will determine whether they will continue to receive the Fresno Bee on the front stoop/driveway or will receive it at all.

The Bee, part of the nation-wide McClatchy chain, has seen its advertising dramatically plunge. No newspaper can survive simply by the subscription price. Advertising is what drives revenues, and revenues are in free fall at McClatchy. The Bee is now offering reduced price subscription options such as home delivery only on selected days (think Detroit papers) and e-Bee (newspaper delivered electronically).

Even if The Bee and other newspapers survive, they will be hard-pressed to provide the in-depth coverage of local, regional, state, national and international that has been my lifelong pleasure to read. International bureaus are the first to go because of their expense. Next comes national news coverage. Local news is targeted more to "what sells." Coverage of local government is not eliminated but is covered by fewer reporters or only as part of a reporter's beat.

In once sense, democracy is placed at jeopardy as Americans are left without a clear window on the world, the nation and their local government. Dependence is shifted to television and the scores of "talking heads" that pop up on cable television (or in blogs like mine?). One of the more mundane but important services of the local newspaper is succinctly pointed out by Jeffrey Zaslow in the Wall Street Journal where he says that you don't want to die on a Sunday in Detroit now because the opportunity for your acquaintances to learn about your death through the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News obituaries won't be available if the papers aren't delivered.

Sadly, I don't think that the newspapers as I know (knew?) will survive. The "newspaper/news magazine" will probably morph into some form of an electronic blog heavy on opinion and light on facts. "Hard" news will come primarily from a few major sources, the AP or UPI of the 21st Century. Comuters with opened newspapers on the morning train to work will be replaced by an updated Blackberry, Palm Pilot, I-Pod or whatever the creative folks in Seattle and Silicon Valley think up next. A computer or sophisticated TV-like device will replace the newspaper at the breakfast table.

There will still be a name on the Internet "masthead", but the garish headlines and paper/ink smell of the Call Bulletin or the green sports pages (and friendly Herb Caen) of the San Francisco Chronicle will be long gone.

Coming attractions...
1) Reprise the 2001 City of Fresno Opportunities and Solutions Summit 2) Tales from nine years standing on Fresno's street corners.

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