Being Free

It was my first big story for the Columbia Missourian. I had spent a week interviewing mine owners, angry moms and even hydrologists to figure out why so many kids were (allegedly) getting lead poisoned down in the boot-heel corner of Missouri. It was a pretty complicated picture, and as a brand-new grad student in journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, I tried to squeeze it all in there — a section on the peculiar hydrology of the limestone bedrock of the region, more on the nasty medical problems too much lead can cause, rounded out by the statements of the mine operators that came in the form of a conference call with what seemed to be a dozen corporate execs.

Next, my story went through the copyediting process — this was all part of my newswriting class, taught in a fully functioning daily newsroom. At that point, I was sure I’d be the environmental reporter at a daily newspaper somewhere after finishing my degree. I sat down with my editor — a grad student like me, but in her second year — and she started scanning through my copy. She asked a couple questions, changed a couple things, then, as she gathered how long a story it looked to be, she scanned down to the bottom. Looking a little irritated, she started back at the top, then cursored down again, eventually settling about a third of the way into my story. She highlighted the text from there to the bottom. After she hit delete, she turned to me, apparently perfecting the hard-bitten demeanor she hoped would take her far, and said, “Nobody cares.”

That was the end of my very short career in daily newspaper journalism.

I know I shouldn’t have based any big decisions on the behavior of one bad editor — and I certainly shouldn’t have been offended when my emasculated story played the next day on the last page of the paper, right there under a story about sorority rush getting underway — but I did.

From that moment, I just knew the daily newspaper model was not for me. I was just coming off an internship at Seattle Weekly, and I was impressed with the lively storytelling there — that was the kind of journalism I wanted to do. The other thing that was big at J-school in the late 1980s was the influence of the still-new USA Today. More graphics, shorter stories, no big words, make it all look more like TV — all dailies were embracing that vision, and there wasn’t much room for boring stories about blowback from lead mining.

So I finished my degree studying publishing at Missouri and, a few years later, our family launched The Inlander.

I’ve been reminded of that moment lately, as America’s daily newspapers have struggled. Change, in theory, is quite exciting, but as it’s been applied in recent years, it can be terrifying. We are seeing some of the longstanding pillars of American life fall — banks, automakers, daily newspapers.

The Spokesman-Review has cut way back, big names like the Chicago Tribune and New York Times are swimming in red ink, and even the storied Seattle Post-Intelligencer may shut down. To anyone who cares about civics, it’s a sad story. But a lot of us saw it coming and bailed out to an innovative new breed of newspaper — our experiment here owes a huge debt to pioneering weeklies like the Village Voice, the first of our kind, founded in 1955. The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies has 130 member papers in most big American cities, with a combined print circulation of more than 7 million — that’s a million more than Time and Newsweek combined.

While daily papers were moving toward more sizzle and less steak, a la USA Today, and started running into trouble when the Associated Press, once their exclusive franchise, began selling content to every Website on the Internet, urban weeklies continued to connect with readers. It turns out that people like their newspaper free, and they like it filled with lively local coverage they can’t get anywhere else.

Nobody is immune to the challenges — TV has to contend with DVRs, while radio has satellite and Internet radio, not to mention the iPod, to deal with. It’s a scary time to be in media, and we here at The Inlander stand humbly in the face of the tests to come — but we’re ready for them. This column may seem a little self-serving, but the more I hear about the trouble in daily newspapers and how print is dead, the more I want to remind everyone: That’s not our story.

What never seems to be a part of the discussion about turmoil in the media world is that it’s also a challenging time to be in the kind of business where you rely on media to connect with customers. And that describes most businesses out there, especially small, local ones.

One of the other things that impressed me about Seattle Weekly was how important a focal point it was for the community — a story about an obscure art opening resulted in a mob scene at the gallery, and even the smallest ad could draw in curious urban explorers. And that was a big part of why I wanted to start a similar newspaper here in my hometown — to connect readers to their community, to help entrepreneurs meet customers and, ultimately, to create a more exciting place to live.

Print is alive and well in these pages; our free, weekly newspaper is stronger than ever — readership and page counts have been at all-time highs for us over the past year, and we continue to have the nation’s highest market penetration among urban weeklies. I think we are fulfilling our mission better than we ever have, and right now, more than ever, we all need to be connected.

We continue to believe in what we’re doing, and many of you seem to as well. I just wish I could track down that mean old editor to thank her for opening my eyes and recommending a career in the newspaper of the future.