(With appologies to J. Peterman.)
I’m a marketing guy. But before I was a marketing guy, I was a newspaper guy. Started early. I was about 13 when I threw my first paper route. Back in the days when there was still an afternoon paper, and you could watch anything you wanted on TV as long as it was on CBS, NBC, or ABC. Grew up reading the paper. Eventually did a lot of writing, a good bit of which ended up in a paper or two. Still read the paper every day. By the hardest. Get most of my news from (drum roll, please) the Internet. Not the full-goose-Bozo, commie-pinko-junkie, don’t-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way-of-a-good-rant sites. No sir. The usual: MSN, FoxNews, CNN, Bloomberg, et cetera. Newspapers now deliver “yesterday’s news, today.” Aside from local stories, there’s nothing in there I didn’t read the night – or day – before. Sad, really. Doesn’t have to be that way.
Things change. Newspapers don’t. Or at least, they haven’t. They must, to survive.
My theory? Do what they do best and ditch what they can’t. Try long-form stories. Exposés. Biographical sketches. In-depth reporting. Make it interesting. Lose the feeds from AP and Reuters. It’s too easy to get them online. I want to read something that speaks to my soul. Something challenging. Engaging. Illuminating.
I don’t want to read something that I can get, for free, online. I don’t want to wade through pages of stock prices that were irrelevant before the ink even hit the paper. I don’t want to waste my time with fluff stories about who went to what party. Not my thing.
Give me something that makes me think about more than which Hollywood “star” is going into rehab, or who’s cheating on who. Give me reason. Give me intellegent discourse. Give me something to make me keep reading. Or wave goodbye. And may the last one out the door, turn out the lights and shed a tear for an industry that’s gone the way of spats, button-down shoes, and whalebone corsets.
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