Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I recently did something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. I canceled my print newspaper subscription to the News and Observer.  (Well, actually, I backtracked to a Friday-through-Sunday subscription after my wife pitched a fit over the cancellation.)

For the first time in nearly a half century, I do not wake up every day to find a newspaper at the end of my driveway. When I was a kid growing up in Buffalo, New York, we got two daily newspapers – the Courier Express and the Buffalo Evening News. It’s hard to imagine that level of competition existing today.

Why cancel? Well, money was part of it -- an annual subscription now costs nearly $200 and that particular month all three of my kids seemed to need shoes. And food. And the two big ones were petitioning for yet another cell phone bailout.

There was also the huge pile of paper that seemed to pursue me relentlessly: in my car, in my living room, on my workbench. Read me.  Read me. Read me. I generally scanned each issue, but except for Sunday, never really READ them. (Skim-reading is an occupational hazard for PR people.) I felt like I was falling behind, never, ever, to catch up.

Secondly, hard-copy publications are hardly “news you can use,” Research, client communications, comment and analysis – all this now happens online. That darn hard copy was always somewhere else when I needed it.

Thirdly, my family stopped using the newspaper as an advertising medium years ago. An ad for a neighborhood garage sale costs $26, about half the take for some of our less successful events. Need to sell something? Craig’s list is better, faster and free.  Full-color pictures, unlimited words, and crazy people don’t get your phone number.

Finally, there was the green issue.  I was accumulating hundreds of pounds of paper every year.  Sure, I tried to recycle it, but found out that our town discards newspaper if it gets wet on rainy collection days. So a good part of our hoard went in the landfill anyway.

So I cut back my newspaper purchases.  And then the News and Observer layoffs started. Coincidence? Maybe. But if an English/History major in the PR business isn’t subscribing, what does that mean for the future of newspapers?

Based on what’s happening at the N&O, it means no more true “beat” reporters.  Such specialization is a luxury in the short-staffed bullpen of the future. We can expect even less reporting on dry (but important) subjects like state and local government, taxation or insurance,  and probably not a whole lot of primary research or investigative journalism.  Too time-consuming, too labor intensive, too expensive.

Perhaps most concerning, we can expect journalistic points of view to skinny down to, well, one.  The Charlotte Observer and the News and Observer are really one publication from a business standpoint.  So the viewpoint of Bill Kruger – now editor in charge of the newspapers’ joint state capital staff -- will likely establish the political point-of-view at both publications. One guy decides what news hundreds of thousands of readers will get?  Makes me long for the days of two daily newspapers. 

Oh, I forgot. I killed them.