![]() ![]() They were completely contrary to nearly everything our industry said and did.įor most of my career, print revenues plunged and circulation numbers fell, all while whatever team I was a part of focused on the digital-delivery of newspaper content in the hopes of growing an audience and finding new ways to help pay for the journalism.Īt this point in my life, after I’d been blessed to work with (and learn from) some of the smartest people in the newspaper industry, it now seemed clear no one had figured out how to solve this problem. I was going to take my own advice.īesides, Kushner’s ideas seemed interesting to me. We should love the journalism, not the medium. I used to say all the time that the most important part of the word newspaper is “news” - not paper. How was a digital journalist who loved local news and focused on audience trends going to figure into this plan? The Register was only going to worry about paid subscribers. When Kushner’s team bought Freedom, it was made abundantly clear The Register wasn’t going to focus on digital. The chance to work with Ken at The Register seemed worth it. It didn’t matter to me that there was no stability at the paper. This was before the then-ownerless Register was purchased by Aaron Kushner and his 2100 Trust group. It’s a story for another time, but I’ve loved The Register since learning about it in college. Then another one of my heroes, longtime Orange County Register editor Ken Brusic reached out to me. And I was absolutely done with newspaper websites. I was out of my element and done with newspapers. Some were total bombs.īut by the summer of 2012, I didn’t feel the passion anymore. Working with lots of incredibly talented people, we built tons and tons of websites. Just thinking about it is making me crave highly caffeinated green soda.įor the next 16 years, newspapering took me across the country. It was one of the most rewarding times of my life. I did whatever I could to build the best website possible for the hometown newspaper I adored. I drank gallons of Mountain Dew, listened to a ton of questionable music at even more questionable volumes, and rarely left our web team’s desks - which were buried in our newspaper’s morgue. I learned everything I could about the Internet and how to build websites. I decided to go all in on online newspapers. He knew 85 years ago that our industry must always evolve. New methods of communication I think will supercede the old.” I think most of the machinery now employed in printing the day’s, the week’s, or the month’s doings will be junked by the end of this century and will be as archaic as the bellringer’s bell, or the herald’s trumpet. But whether the reporter’s story will be printed in types upon a press, I don’t know. A reporter is perennial under many names and will persist with humanity. Someone will have to tell the story of the day’s news and the year’s happenings. Someone will have to do the bellringer’s work. “Of course as long as man lives someone will have to fill the herald’s place. In 1931, William Allen White - one of those heroes - wrote this in a personal letter to Lyman B. This was a hard decision because seeing my byline in The Capital-Journal was better than Christmas. I knew a little bit about how the Internet worked and I was asked if I would like to help with our newspaper’s new website. My heroes were an editor who died in 1944 and a folksy sportswriter who smoked cigars, played a lot of golf and wrote more than 8,500 columns for the paper I grew up reading religiously.īy the time I achieved one of my life goals in the mid 90s - to be a staff writer for the mighty Topeka Capital-Journal - things were already changing in the newspaper world. I’ve wanted to be a reporter since the third grade. Inspiration came from words - words I read in one of the three newspapers my family subscribed to in Osage City, Kan. Technology always fascinated me when I was kid, but it never really inspired me. For the longest time, this blog was called Internet Punk. Most people in the media world think of me as a digital journalist. And I still get giddy when I talk with them.īut, with the help of some of the most gifted and dedicated journalists I’ve ever met, I have done a few things on the web over the last two decades, too. I’ve written tons about the original members of journalism’s Justice League- the first newspaper nerds. By that time, there were a ton of digital pioneers doing amazing and interesting things with news. It was around 1996 when I got involved in newspaper “new media” - which is what it was called back in the day. I wasn’t one of the original online journalists. ![]()
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