Newspapers have something to offer

Every time I read or hear one of those grim predictions that newspapers are dying, I take it personally.

Partly for obvious reasons, of course, since I happen to work for a newspaper. But it goes beyond that.

It’s true that things are changing rapidly here in the 21st century, and that we all must be at least aware of the possibility that our world could be turned upside down at any moment.

Some companies didn’t pay attention, and their carcasses already litter the landscape. When I was growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., one of the primary employers in town was the Smith-Corona typewriter company, which decided at a pivotal point in its existence that the computer would never replace its product. Oops.

Of course, typewriters never really went away — they just became keyboards. It might be the same with newspapers.

I’m not arguing with futurists who see us morphing more into a digital product. It could very well happen, over time. My quarrel is with those who envision the very concept of newspapers fading away. This ignores the fact that we fill a function nobody else does — and in a sense, smaller papers such as The News & Advance are perhaps more irreplaceable than our larger brethren.

Some people don’t understand that, like the gentleman who called us recently to complain that he saw a Lynchburg story in some other newspaper.

“Why didn’t you have that story?” he demanded. “Are you people asleep at the switch?

It was then pointed out to him that what he read actually was our story. It had been picked up off the Internet.

I remember chuckling once at a weekly newspaper masthead that proclaimed: “The Only Newspaper That Gives a Hoot About Crawford County.” Yet there was wisdom in that homespun pronouncement.

Disgruntled readers sometimes threaten to quit reading us and begin buying the Richmond Times-Dispatch, or the Roanoke Times, or USA Today. Fair enough, but don’t expect to find out about Lynchburg City Council meetings or local deaths or how the E.C. Glass football team did over the weekend. It won’t be there, and chances are it won’t be on the Internet, either, unless it’s a story that originated with us.

Here’s a news flash: On the ground, as the current cliché goes, newspapers aren’t really a business in the classic sense. Yes, we prefer making money to losing money. Yes, we sell advertising.

What makes us unique, though, is that we don’t control our product. Our product — news —controls us. Our local education reporter was on vacation when Brookville principal Jim Whorley drowned in a boat accident on Saturday. With most jobs, she could have said: “I’ll get right on it when I get back Monday.” News doesn’t wait, however, so she cobbled together a story from long distance.

We all do that.

I think I’ve mentioned this before in this space, but we are really surrogates for you. We go to the civic meetings and criminal trials and sports events that you don’t have time to attend, and give you what I still believe is a fair and balanced account of what transpired.

True, there are those who think all this may one day fall apart in a hail of Twitter and text messages, that somehow all it will take to make someone a “journalist” is the right toy and enough batteries.

Don’t believe it. Our job is to develop a context to events, and that takes time and effort. We know who to call to get information, and they will usually call us back because they know that we are speaking to (and, sometimes, for) thousands of subscribers. What we write is screened through several layers of editing (OK, I know we miss typos sometimes) to avoid the sort of facile speculation and innuendo that network TV does all the time.

We haven’t quite figured out how to co-exist with the Internet yet, but we will. The classic newsroom with its rows of desks and cubicles may vanish, but it will be replaced by a network of reporters working from home. Instead of battling other media sources, we will meld with them in various ways.

The bottom line is, there will always be news, and you’re always going to need someone to tell you about it.