CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – The daily newspaper has gone the way of the milkman and the horse and buggy. Just as there are no longer town criers with a clanging handbell and a three-point hat shouting out the news in the town square, soon there will be no more ink-on-newsprint papers.
Truth is, the publishers can’t wait to get out of the printing business. Printing presses and the people who run them are an expense. Web sites are less expensive. And some people will actually subscribe to see what’s behind the paywall.
I share this because today is the first day of mail delivery for the Wausau Daily Herald. If you are a print subscriber, today’s newspaper will arrive in your mailbox, perhaps tomorrow, and perhaps the day after that. Sunday’s newspaper will be sent on Saturdays, not Mondays, which begs the question ‘how do they know what the news is a day in advance?’ As you may know, the Gannett newspapers that used to dot the Wisconsin landscape tell mostly human interest stories. The days of a Gannett reporter showing up at a Wausau Board of Education or a City Council meeting are long over. Their journalistic footprint in Central Wisconsin is down to almost nothing. Their building on the east side is locked and mostly empty. One summer not even the expense of mowing the lawn was spared.
A vibrant local newspaper used to be an important part of the media landscape. They had the luxury of space and time; complicated news stories didn’t have to fit into the tight on-air windows of radio or TV newscasts. We had the advantage of immediacy; they could “write long” and provide details that other news outlets couldn’t. Now we all have “X” channels. Instant news is in our pockets. Detail and context is gone.
I am just barely old enough to remember the newspaper delivery boy. Tommy lived around the corner from me. Two editions were published two editions back then; the Post-Telegram in the morning and the Bridgeport Post in the afternoon. Tommy had newspapers to deliver before school, and a new pile of newsprint was waiting for him when he got home from class. And he had to “assemble” the Sunday newspaper with the coupons and the comic section. He was the richest, but the hardest working, kid in the neighborhood.
When my father lived in New York, you knew which newsstands had the “sports final” if the Yankees or Mets played on the west coast the night before. Three or four editions of the New York Post or the Daily News were printed each day.
Now print is dead. Come and attend its funeral today.
Chris Conley
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