Tag Archives: newspapers

In Google Books, I found some history on the Kansas City Kansan, which delivered its final print edition today. Which is drawn from the minutes of a meeting of something called the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Commercial Organization Secretaries.  The group appears to be somehow related to chambers of commerce.  The following speech by Mr. Gibbs was part of a competition for greatest accomplishment by a chamber.  Mr. Gibb’s beat out three other finalists (there were 119 entries overall).

MR. GIBBS: Imagine yourself without a newspaper! You sometimes want to cuss the newspaper, but imagine yourself without it.

Kansas City, Kansas, a city of 100,000, without a newspaper —the largest city in the State of Kansas without a newspaper— served by the newspapers of a neighboring city—Kansas City, Missouri.

Sometimes, in some of the issues of the Kansas City Star, the news of a city of 100,000 commanded 17 inches! We called upon them and asked them if they would not give us more space, and we were always received courteously but never received much results from our calls.

The problem was checked up with the Chamber of Commerce for the Chamber of Commerce to get us a newspaper.

Many had tried to get a newspaper; many failures had occurred, but none had been secured.

No suggestion was made as to how it might be done, except this: “No; we won’t put a cent into a newspaper. There have been too many failures.”

Analysis of the situation: We must get a man from outside to give us a newspaper. He must have qualifications. First, he must be a Kansan, a man who can speak the Kansas language. Second, he must be a thoroughgoing newspaper man, and third, he must have financial backing so he can take a loss for two or three years, if necessary, in getting the thing established.

Such a man was Arthur Capper, a big publisher.

After eight months of report, survey, turndown and comeback, Arthur Capper made us a proposition: “Get $200,000 in advertising contracts and 15,000 subscribers, showing the good faith of Kansas City, Kansas, and I will start the newspaper.”

A campaign was laid out and all of the features used in all the war campaigns were put into that campaign, and the result was that on our quota of $200,000 in advertising contracts, we turned in $210,000; and on 15,000 subscriptions, we turned in 16,000. (Applause.)

The next step: Wait for the newspaper. Arthur Capper had to buy a building and remodel the building, get the machinery in, build the organization so we might start that organization up here (indicating the top), and not at the bottom and build up.

We gave him the subscription and advertising contracts to start the newspaper right off with 15,000 circulation.

Of course, he was equal to the task, and on January 31 of this year, we received the first issue of the “Kansas City Kansan.”

If Irvin Cobb had been in Kansas City, Kansas, that day, he would have had a feature story for a magazine.

Imagine a city of 100,000 people waiting for this paper. Here is an instance of one newsboy who got his bundle of papers and started down the street toward his corner. He had gone about 10 feet from the office and he was literally mobbed, and when he woke up he had his hands full of money and money on the sidewalk— and no papers. (Laughter.)

5000 extra copies were taken that day.

And so, on we might go, but we had the thrill of seeing a city of 100,000 souls receiving their own daily newspaper for the first time.

What about the future of the paper? It has today a circulation of 21,000 and it is going strong. Here is the paper, last Friday’s issue—a 24-page paper. Probably some of you would like to see it.

But what about the future of it? What is the future of it? Men, I want to give you Arthur Capper’s creed, and this is the creed that is being followed by every man in that organization of 125 that is running that newspaper—and, by the way, the Kansas City Star now has 13 men in Kansas City, Kansas, instead of 4.

Here is the creed: To do the right thing in the right way at the right time; to do some things better than they were ever done before; to be honest and square in all dealings; to eliminate errors; to know both sides of the question; to be courteous; to be an example; to work for the love of work; to recognize no impediments; to master circumstances. (Applause.)

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Found this history of the Rocky Mountain News via Google Books. The passage is from History of American Journalism, published in 1917.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN PAPERS OF COLORADO

In Denver The Rocky Mountain News has the distinction of being the oldest paper in Colorado. Its first issue was April 23, 1859, in a struggling, home-seekers’ settlement which had not yet a definite name. The discovery of placer gold some months earlier had made a settlement at the junction of the Platte River and Cherry Creek. On each bank of the river there was a rival town site, so that William N. Byers very wisely dated his paper as published at Cherry Creek, Denver Territory. The first issue of The Rocky Mountain News was printed on brown wrapping-paper. At the start it was published weekly, but later it became a daily. It has been published uninterrupted since its establishment, with a single exception in the early sixties when a flood in Cherry Creek wiped its plant out of existence.

The day The Rocky Mountain News started was one of the most exciting in frontier journalism. When the news of the discovery of gold in the “Pike’s Peak Region” had reached as far east as the Missouri, it promptly started two small newspaper plants which had for their motto, figuratively speaking, “A newspaper near Pike’s Peak, or bust.” One left Omaha and was owned by William N. Byers, Thomas Gibson, and John L. Bailey; the other set out from St. Joseph, Missouri, and consisted of the outfit which John L. Merrick had purchased from The St. Joseph Gazette. Both outfits had to cross the plains by ox teams.

Merrick was the first to arrive. Not knowing that competitors were on the way, he leisurely commenced preparing for the first issue of The Cherry Creek Pioneer. Ten days later the Omaha plant arrived and the competition for the honor of the first paper in Colorado began. The settlement offered a suitable prize to the winner and appointed a committee of citizens to referee the contest. Both The Rocky Mountain News and The Cherry Creek Pioneer announced their date of first publication April 23, 1859. At ten-thirty o’clock, on the evening of April 23, the first copy of The News, a four-page sheet, was pulled from the old Washington hand-press. Other copies soon circulated among the pioneers surrounding the log cabin print-shop. A little later The Pioneer also appeared on the streets. The decision of the committee, however, was that The News had won by twenty minutes.

Worn out by his efforts and depressed by defeat, Merrick the next morning offered to sell his plant to his rival upon terms which were later accepted. Merrick then set off for the mountains, not to hunt for news, but for gold.

As the pioneer settlement grew into a larger town, The News always led in a movement for law and regulation. In his attempts to clear the town of its rougher element, Editor Byers often wrote his editorials and news with a rifle across his knee while armed men guarded his printers. For nineteen years Byers conducted The News.

Under difficulties seldom equaled, and never surpassed, he brought out his paper. When the Indian outbreak caused an embargo on traffic over the Western plains in 1864-65, he frequently ran out of white paper, and in such emergencies he printed the news on wrapping-paper, gathered from Denver stores. That he might have the news before the mails from the East arrived in Denver, he established an overland pony express. By means of a relay of horseback riders he had brought the news from the nearest express lines with a speed which to-day almost seems incredible. Of course, it was expensive to run such a private pony express, but The News in those days cost forty-four dollars a year and single copies sold for one dollar and twenty-five cents apiece. In 1878 the paper was sold to the Rocky Mountain News Printing Company, with W. A. H. Laughlin as editor and principal owner.

Two papers were established in Denver in 1867: the first of these was The Daily Argus, begun on October 25; the second, The Rocky Mountain Star, begun on December 8. A third attempt was made by N. A. Baker, who, after bringing out a few issues of The Colorado Leader, left Denver, to go to Cheyenne, where he founded the first paper in Wyoming.

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Newspapers should have kickass web sites.

Take your typical major metro — a content producing staff that out paces in training, experience and numbers any rival.

A typical metro remains the best advertising buy in town, retail and classifieds.

The free cash a good metro site can through off on print up sells alone (let alone new, incremental advertising revenue) can fund an operations and specialty content staff that most start ups would envy.

With proper focus and strategy, there is no reason for a good-sized, well-run newspaper operation to repurpose its print product for online.

All of those resources should allow the online operation to feed off of, but not be a duplicate of, the print operations. It should allow a newspaper operation to avoid the soul-sucking, readership-killing repurposing of print content online and the aggressive pursuit of web-centric content practices.

So why, more than a decade into the web era, do most metro newspapers still largely reproduce the print edition online?

The consternation today over the Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to withhold premium print content from Philly.com has the digital class all atwitter (pun intended).

In Twitter, my friend Scott Karp says:

You can’t coerce people into choosing one medium over another. All you can do is serve them as best you can in the medium they choose.

Wired Journalist partner Zac Echola says:

They did a pretty epic job opening the door for competition. I mean, it’s one thing in a small community to do this, but a major metro?

One on my followers, Kev097, reacts to my pro-decision tweets:

More likely bloggers will nicely summarize stories that aren’t online- their readers won’t bother to seek out print.

Predictably, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Outing are down on the idea.

Jarvis:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Outing:

What’s long held back the newspaper industry and gotten it in the current mess has been holding back online innovation that might impact the legacy product (print). The kind of serious innovation that might have avoided the turmoil we’re now seeing among newspapers (especially larger metros like the Inquirer) could only take place with an attitude of “Let’s completely forget about the print edition and just try to build the best damn online service possible.”

My concern is that the Philly effort doesn’t go far enough.

I say, never put those stories online, but still make sure every single reporter and editor is working hard to ensure a great online edition.

For how many years on Outing’s Online-News list did I read about the evils of shovelware? If the archives were available, I’m sure I could find quotes from Outing himself saying something along the lines of “stop reproducing the newspaper online.”

We were all right in saying that, so why is it wrong now to say “let print be print” and “let online be online.”

Your online product should focus on:

• Frequency. Plenty of updates. Web-first publishing. Tell me what is happening in my town right now.
• When there is a big story, hammer it. Own it. Frequent updates, a flood of information, video, blogs, forums, public documents, databases, maps, graphics.

On a pure news basis, those two approaches are proven audience growth winners.

Reproducing the print edition online, not so much.

Even better, make sure your kickass print reporters know how to write for the web, which means more of a blog style, more of a conversational style, maybe even a little opinion, when doing those web-first updates.

There are a ton of other web-centric things newspapers can and should do with their web sites, but none of them include publishing first online enterprise and investigative pieces, columnist, lengthy features, trend stories and even analysis pieces.

Techcrunch published today a poll that showed that on a typical day, 39 percent of the Internet audience went online to check the news. That’s 39 percent of the not quite 80 percent of Americans who even have Web access (75 percent in 2004(pdf), I assume it’s higher now, but maybe not).

That is a number that represents a boon of an opportunity for newspapers, but it also points out how far online must come to be an major news destination.

While the Philly papers have a market penetration below 35 percent (I think), many U.S. newspapers remain well above 50 percent.

More Americans still get their news in print than any other source. Yes, the number has been declining, but newspapers still remain a mammoth force in news media.

Even while penetration/circulation declines have been beguiling to the industry, they didn’t begin with the internet. There is something larger, sociological, or potentially a problem with journalism itself (as I’ve said before), that’s going on.

It might be foolish indeed to expect online to save American journalism, given those trends. So why insist now that a metro newspaper must, must put its entire edition online?

Furthermore, let’s face it, while a well-run newspaper website operation can throw off lots of cash, it’s largely dependent on the newspaper success itself, and the cash flow is still insufficient to support a metro newsroom.

As much as it pains me to say it, we still haven’t found the business model that can support and sustain current newsroom operations.

Meanwhile, as the Readership Institute has pointed out, a lot of people still read print.

So why shouldn’t the Philadelphia Inquirer, or any other print operation, take steps to further differentiate the print and the online products, especially if such steps can potentially stem any tide, any contribution that shovelware/repurposing of print content makes to circulation declines.

Face it, we still need print to pay the bills, that is, if we want to maintain news operations that at all resemble traditional newspaper newsrooms (and whether we don’t or not is a completely different discussion).

UPDATE: Zac Echola makes the point in a blog post that I may be giving Philly too much credit. And he could be right. So let’s just say, differentiation is the model I advocate, and let’s hope that is the direction Philly can be smart enough to take this in. I had not given enough consideration to the part of the memo that prevents staff bloggers from trying out ideas in blog posts first. That’s not smart. And it is a bad sign that the curmudgeons are winning in Philly. On the other hand, the memo does say, “This does not mean that we will put the brakes on the immediate posting of breaking news that puts us first in a competitive Web marketplace.”  Mixed message? I guess we’ll see.  It’s important to remember Philly.com is run by Eric Grilly and Mark Potts has been involved with the site, and they’re no slouches. Continue reading →

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Here’s a quote for any online manager dealing with a newsroom of curmudgeons. It’s from Theodore Roosevelt. Blow it up big and post it for all to see.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

(via Tech Crunch in a totally different context) Continue reading →

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