TV books and changing times

September 11th, 2008 at 06:06pm Linda Grist Cunningham

A couple months ago, the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch stopped delivering its newspaper to Harrisonburg, VA, about two hours away. Delivery stopped because gas prices, newsprint prices, a bad economy and alternative sources of information all combined to make it unreasonably expensive to keep delivering the newspaper to readers that far away.

My mother and dad, long-time RTD readers, were not happy, nor were thousands of other southwestern Virginians who had relied on the RTD for generations. The editor of the RTD is one of my “friendly acquaintances,” so I gave him a heads up to expect some nasty correspondence from my mother. I told her she wasn’t going to win and explained why. “Don’t care,” she said. “I understand why. I’m just mad and they need to know their decision completely upsets what I and hundreds more like me start our days with.”

Thank God for the loyal newspaper reader. They are my mother and my mortgage payment. In the Rock River Valley there are an unusual number of loyal readers (more today than at any time in our history) and we reach almost 80 percent of the adults who live in Winnebago and Boone counties. We are not, contrary to popular wisdom, dying or disappearing. We are, however, smack in the middle of a technological change not seen since Gutenberg invented moveable type back around 1440. Newsprint prices are at record levels and climbing. Add to that the every-100-years-or-so, global economic “adjustment,” and it is a wildly wicked time in the information business.

So, we’re adjusting, and, if we do it right, we’re transforming. And all that change is making readers unhappy.  Thanks to decisions we made 10 years ago (news on the Web), the new press (narrower and shorter pages) and a deep commitment to local news, the Register Star, at least for now, isn’t in the survival throes like the ones in the big cities. Do you know that the Chicago Tribune could be, somewhere around the end of the month, a three-section newspaper with a strikingly different design? Did you know the Trib eliminated its print help-wanted sections? Did you know the New York Times shortly will be four sections instead of double that? Did you know that this week the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., the state’s largest newspaper and a family-owned one, completely stopped using news from the Associated Press?

Those are just a smattering of what’s happening. There will be news forever. There will be newspapers for almost that long. But, it’s rapidly becoming a very different model and readers — like you and my mother — don’t care. You’re just mad.

So, back to the TV book. Last Sunday, we replaced the “little book” with the bigger tabloid version. You hate the size. We accidentally left out the WGN listing. You were not amused. It will be back in next Sunday. We don’t have the late night listings and we have too much daytime. Half hated; half loved. We’ll try to figure a better balance. I hate that bigger book, too; the little one was ever so much handier. Though, I must admit, I stopped using the TV book a couple years ago when I went TIVO and Insight-cum-Comcast offered the TV Guide channel.

So, why annoy you loyal, little book fans? Because it was either the do the big book or dump three staffers. And, we need every journalist, ad rep, pre-press tech, online producer and general cook-and-bottle washer we can keep here in the News Tower if we are to come close to fulfilling our mission statement: To serve the Rock River Valley as the leading information source that empowers our community, while never compromising our principles.

People or paper? I’ll take people over paper any day.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized