Saturday, March 07, 2020

My love for newspapers and my fear for their future

My mom used to tell the story of how at the age of two or three, I was looking at a cracker box and asked what those funny things on the box were.

The funny things were words.

From that point on, I developed a fascination for words. I pointed at everything and asked Mom what this word was and that word. I must have driven her crazy.

I began reading two publications- the Neosho Daily News and TV Guide.

One day when I was four, our neighbor Jim Harris had to tell Mom how cute it was that I was sitting in the yard pretending to read the newspaper.








She quickly corrected him and I had to demonstrate that I was reading it and that I understood what I was reading.

Throughout my childhood, I read the Neosho Daily News and Joplin Globe every day and when I was in high school, I bought the afternoon Joplin News Herald from my classmate Alan Oxendine.

For a long time, my dad drove a truck for Neosho Nurseries and whenever he returned from the road, he usually had copies of the Kansas City Star, the Tulsa Tribune, Tulsa World and Daily Oklahoman for me to read.

For a brief time when there was a route in the Newtonia area, we even subscribed to the Sunday Kansas City Star.

I loved newspapers and couldn't get enough of them.

That love continued into adulthood as I became the youngest (and worst) editor of a Missouri newspaper in 1977 at age 21 with the Newton County News.

As I continued working for newspapers for 22 years, every couple of months or so, I would go on a nostalgic binge and go to Joplin and Pittsburg on a Sunday, do some shopping and pick up Sunday editions of the Springfield News-Leader, Kansas City Star, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tulsa World, Pittsburg Morning Sun and Wichita Eagle to go along with the Globe and the Neosho Daily.

Any time with a newspaper was time well spent.

I miss those days.








The Carthage Press, where I worked from 1990 to 1999 is gone, McClatchy, the owner of the Kansas City Star, has filed for bankruptcy. Community newspapers are vanishing.

This is a tragedy for the nation and not just because it is a treasured part of history that we will never be able to recover once it is gone.

Many reasons are given for what appears to be the impending death of newspapers. Where family-owned newspapers were content to serve the community and do well with an eight to 10 percent profit, once Gannett and other chains discovered by buying multiple newspapers, combining services and cutting jobs that profit could be increased to more than 30 percent.

Until the day when all of the cutting and the advent of the internet burst that bubble.

When the internet arrived, newspapers did not adapt well, gave away too much content and were too shortsighted to prevent the bulk of classified advertising (help wanted ads, real estate listings, etc.) to be taken from them by various websites.

In past years, when newspapers went out of business, there was usually a competing publication to continue to supply news. That is no longer the case. Many sizable communities no longer have daily newspapers and some have no newspaper at all.








I realized many years ago that the newspaper world had passed me. In 1999, when my job at the Carthage Press ended, I had four excellent full-time reporters and a part-time reporter, who was just out of high school, working for me.

When the Carthage Press went out of business last year, Managing Editor John Hacker and Sports Editor Brennan Stebbins were putting out two papers a week. It is a credit to those two, that it was still a good newspaper. They were no receiving no help from ownership.

The same ownership has almost destroyed the Neosho Daily News, the paper I read to Jim Harris nearly 60 years ago.

One person, Community Editor Lea Ann Murphy, is the only newsroom employee and is not only responsible for two weekly editions, but also for supplying the news for the weekly Aurora Advertiser.

Her recent column about that situation was both well-written and heartbreaking:

As most readers are well aware, at the Neosho Daily News, I am a one-woman news department. I’m the reporter and photographer, one of the columnists and the editor. If it’s on the page, it’s because I placed it there. There’s no “they” or “we” when it comes to the news department - it’s me.

I do have both a regional editor and a state editor but on the local scene, it’s me.

I’ve fielded a few phone calls when someone asks for the editor and when I respond it’s me, they say they want to talk to “the man” or “a man” called them about news. I’ve had calls where someone said that the press boss called them, which would be amazing since we haven’t printed at the Neosho Daily since late 2018.

I am happy there is a Lee Ann Murphy to hold the fort at the Neosho Daily News so that hopefully another generation will live to either leaf through its pages or scroll through its website.

I fear it will soon meet the same fate as the Carthage Press.

(I will have more on the subject later tonight. The photo shows that Neosho Daily News owner Gannett is selling its property and will soon move the Daily to a smaller location.)

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