Newspapers continue to have an image problem. Many of the bad rumors being spread around are false, or as the old saying goes "The rumors of my death are greatly over exaggerated."
But as another old saying goes "Where there's smoke, there's fire." I think the radio in my car was fully engulfed in flames this past Tuesday listening to ESPN's Dan Le Batard.
Le Batard is a nationally syndicated talk show host and Miami Herald columnist who likes to stir the pot, to say the least. A few years ago, it was Le Batard that tried to take out full page ads in the Akron Beacon Journal and Cleveland Plain Dealer bashing LeBron James when James decided to return to Cleveland to play professional basketball. But this past Tuesday, the pointed stick he was jabbing at the newspaper industry pointed to a real issue newspapers face. Today! Now!
Le Batard told the story of a little kid who was visiting a friend at another house and saw the father reading a newspaper. The little kid asked what he was doing. He had never seen this activity before. Puzzled, he asked how it got to their house. Astonished by that answer, the little kid was in total disbelief that such a thing as a daily newspaper could be produced and then delivered in the middle of the night to the family's front porch full of the latest news and information.
Clearly the industry has lost out on the child in this story as a future reader. The concern is how many (millions) more are out there that would be just as lost, just as astonished at the basic concepts of an industry that has been around hundreds of years.
Websites continue to expand as the appetite for news continues to grow. But the print newspaper, still the main revenue generator for many media companies, and still an extremely important franchise in hundreds of cities and towns remains on an unhealthy decline.
Reading programs and NIE projects are not creating awareness or habits to the youth. While there are some good examples of these types of initiatives, most across the country are weak and do nothing more than help provide hollow circulation numbers.
I'm not professing to have the answers to this problem. I wish I did! I also wish Le Batard wasn't laughing about this on his program. The problem is, I can't even call him out on it because he's right.
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