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Missing something?

By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Tuesday, February 13, 2007

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Some of you have probably noticed that Micheal and I are sort of trading off columns each week lately. That's because we're really busy getting ready to start up a print newspaper again, which is exciting and exhausting.

If you have fond memories of the Angleton Observer, as we do, you may be looking forward to the ink-and-paper Journal almost as much as we are -- I hope so.

I'm proud of The Weekly Journal. It does a job, and it filled the gap left -- for the community and for us -- when the Observer closed.

But there's something about a printed paper that you can hold in your hands, that isn't present in an online paper. And I don't mean just lining birdcages and catboxes, although those are perfectly good uses for old newspapers. I mean laying it on your coffee table to look at again later, cutting things out of it to put on your fridge, and mailing copies of the paper with your child listed in the honor roll to your family.

We've heard "print is dead" for a couple of decades now, at least. I'm sure everyone has noticed that all the big newspapers are scrambling to see how many bells and whistles they can get on their websites, and jumping through hoops to get you to interact with their websites. Getting their "hit" counts up lets them sell more advertising, and charge more for it.

Looks like they're preparing for the death of print, doesn't it?

Fact is, the percentage of households taking newspapers in the U.S. has declined steadily since the end of World War II. But the population increased so much that the percentage decrease in readership didn't matter for some time.

The declines caught up with the industry, of course. That's why there are so few two-newspaper towns left. The surviving newspapers, with no competition, had a tendency to become complacent.

Then the Internet happened. Of all the media the public used to rely on for news -- newspapers, television, radio -- newspapers stood to lose the most to the Internet, where an army of "civilian journalists" began competing with, and sometimes beating, their professional counterparts. All of a sudden, papers that thought they had survived all their competition are again fighting for their lives.

I hear you: Why in the world would anyone want to start a new newspaper in such a grim environment?

Well, another thing happened to the industry when two-newspaper towns became largely a thing of the past: The surviving papers, with no competition to worry about, maximized their profits by closing bureaus and/or severely cutting back coverage in outlying areas.

But a lot of people lived in those "outlying areas," and more were moving there all the time from big cities. They can get their world, national, state and big city news from a big paper, from television or radio, or from the Internet. But there was no place to get news about their own town's government, or schools, or medical facilities. There was no place to see pictures of their own children playing sports, or to find out about events where they lived. There was no place to promote their own charity events, advertise their own small businesses, or to sell things they didn't want to neighbors who did.

Those people needed their own newspapers. Small newspapers, owned and run and written in the places where they live and shop and go to church, where their kids go to school, where they pay taxes and vote.

Today, the only growth in the entire U.S. newspaper industry is in small, weekly, community newspapers that serve the people and areas ignored by major newspapers.

Areas like ours. People like us. Papers like the soon-to-be print version of The Weekly Journal.

We're excited, and we hope you are, too.

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