Writing for fun and profit

About 2 months ago, we stopped taking the local paper, the Durham Herald.  This was actually a big decision for me and my husband, since we had been regular subscribers for 30 years.  So, we ignored the last bill.  After delivering the paper for a couple of weeks past our "subscription renew" date, one morning the front walk was empty.  About a week later, we got a bill for $12 for those last weeks of unpaid delivery.  Then, today, we got a letter with an offer to resubscribe at a new, improved rate, plus a questionnaire asking why we had let our subscription lapse.

Hallelujah, a chance at last to articulate what has been making me crazy for the past few years. 

I understand that newspapers, especially and specifically local ones, have really suffered with the change to electronic media.  They've been swallowed up by large corporations.  They've lost the local staff, folks who actually knew something about the city and the region.  They've lost advertising because of the economic downturn and because they can no longer brag about their wonderful subscriber base.  There's a generation of people to whom an actual daily newspaper is fast becoming a quaint relic of "olden times", right up there with paying bills by writing a check and sending it through the US Mail.  With a stamp.

Fighting these tentacles of change is, I'm certain, really hard, really disheartening, and probably destined to not turn out well.  But gosh, if I were in the newspaper business, I would die trying to save my honorable profession.  I'd use every trick I could possibly conjure to lure new subscribers and keep old ones happy.  I'd have a live person answering the telephone, and not one of those heinous computerized "press 1, press 2" option trees.  I'd make sure the folks delivering my papers to customers got an education in little things like actually putting the paper within reach of the front door, and making sure it was properly protected from the elements.  I'd give subscribers perks that were not available to others.  I'd do everything I could to make a subscription seem attractive, affordable, and absolutely essential in order to get one's fingers on Durham's pulse.

But most of all, I'd respect my customers--who are, after all, READERS--by making sure my newspaper was the best edited daily record I could possibly produce.  And oh, how the Durham Herald has woefully, miserably failed in that respect.  I can forgive a lot of things but not poor writing.  Over the last year, breakfast with the Herald has become a sport for my husband and me.  We each used to take a section of the paper and use a red Sharpie to circle grammatical errors, misspellings, or just plain big old mistakes.  (Whoever identified the fewest mistakes was the one who had to get up and refill both coffee cups.)  Not one day ever went by when the marker was not wielded. 

My all-time least favorite trick, though was the "Disappearing Article".  These were articles which were purchased from the wire services and reprinted in the Herald.  I have no problem with this as a concept; it keeps reporters, somewhere, writing, and it affords local readers information on national and international affairs that would be otherwise unavailable to them if they had to depend on the resources of the local press.  Almost every day, though, I used to find a good article about, say, the war in Afghanistan, or some explanation of one of the finer points of economics, I would get all settled in, and the article would JUST STOP.  As in, the editors just printed what they had room for, and to hell with the rest of the article.  Often I would end up going to the computer and looking up the article on the Associated Press website, just so I could read the rest of it.

How insulting to readers!  Did someone think nobody would notice?  Or that we don't care?  What could possibly be the justification for such a ridiculous decision?  I imagine access to reprints of AP articles is not free, that papers pay a subscription or membership fee.  So why bother to pay the fee and print only half, or a third, or a tenth of the article?  As many times as this particular scenario happened, it left me with the indelible impression that the Herald was basically using the AP stories as filler, to take up the space left over after all the advertisements were laid out.  And I just couldn't stand it another day. 

If the management of the Herald can convince me that they've really changed, I'll try again, because in fact I miss the daily local newspaper.  We subscribe to The Wall St. Journal even though I find their right-leaning editorial opinions offensive.  Skipping the op-ed page keeps my blood pressure under control.  But it's an incredibly well-written paper, which never insults the intelligence of its readers with misspellings, mislabeled photographs, or truncated articles.  And somehow they manage to get it to my door six days a week for $100/year.  Of course the owner, Rupert Murdoch, is subsidizing the paper to make sure it stays important and viable, and I get it that the Herald can't afford to lose millions of dollars a year.  Really, I'm not asking them to compete with The Wall St. Journal.  I'm just asking them to be the best local paper they can be.....but apparently, that's too much to ask.