Along the Way: Don’t count out the newspaper industry

Among those everyday traditions of yesteryear that we miss, but which can never be again, is the newspaper boy.

As we prepare to observe another National Newspaper Week, those of us who’ve toiled in the daily news vineyard can only hope the entire industry doesn’t go the way of the shaggy-haired moppets who once delivered the papers.

They stood on street corners in big cities, shouldering the news of the world. In canvas bags they carried the latest edition of the newspaper, and they they’d shout for all to hear: “Extra, Extra” or “Read all about it.”

Or they’d recite the the big headline of the day.

In small towns and suburbs, they glided through tree-shaded neighborhoods on their Schwinns, their Western Flyers and Monark Super Deluxe bicycles, throwing folded-up newspapers at front porches with varying degrees of accuracy.

I’d be willing to bet a good number of our gray-haired neighbors here in Green Valley once delivered their hometown newspaper.

There’s too much danger out there today — too many predators, too many crazy people — to risk sending a kid out on a paper route. This is especially so in big cities.

As the 2008 observance of Newspaper Week approaches (it’s Oct. 5-11, in case you want a reason for a party), dark clouds hover above the precious printed word.

All traditional media, including radio, television and magazines, are facing troubled times. Advertising, readership, circulation and listening audiences are down, painfully, across the nation. The cost of newsprint is up, outrageously, everywhere.

At the same time, we are caught in a communications revolution and we’re not sure what to do about it. More readers, particularly younger ones, turn to the Internet for news and information.

To keep up with a dramatic shift in reading habits, the newspaper industry has experimented with a hybridization of newsprint and online publishing. It’s exciting for those of us who are, or have been, in the business.

But it’s confusing and complex.

Newspapers in particular search and search for answers, even though they’re not quite sure what the questions are.

One thing’s for certain, though, and any ink-stained old timer can tell you:

They haven’t yet found a way to use the Internet to wrap fish in, or swat a fly with, or dump coffee grounds into, or roll up and smack your dog in the fanny.

You can’t spread out the Web to catch paint spilled and dribbled as you put a new coat on a picnic table or lawn chair.

And you can’t get a grip on what’s happening at home and around the world with the same sense of trust and credibility that you get from the newspaper.

The truth of the matter is, there’s something about holding printed news in your hands and absorbing it through your eyes into your mind — and heart — that cannot be duplicated by computer.

Ink on paper will always be more reliable than pixels on screens.

In fact, what the Web does best is allow people to disconnect. What newspapers do is the exact opposite. Newspapers attract and hold the reader’s interest, his and her focus.

Another Internet bugaboo is the growing, very troubling danger and vulnerability, among children and young adults as they deal with the trolls of cyberspace. On thin ice, unfortunately, youngsters learn to blog with strangers and to set up Web sites loaded with personal information.

This stuff is available to the worst of our sickos.

Back to trust and reliability ... newspapers sift through chaff and worthless debris in search of nuggets of truth. No matter what you hear about us leaning left or right or upside-down, we really are honest toilers in that information vineyard.

Our tried-and-true guidelines of skepticism, the insistence on attribution and verifiability which, as an old newspaper friend, Pete Potter, said “have shaped the core responsibility of the journalism trade,” are absent in the new-age rush to the Internet.

In plentiful supply, though, are the hecklers and snarky, anonymous wiseguys of cyberspace who shout down just about every article printed online.

The newspaper trade is a smokestack industry dealing as best it can with the computer age.

Some have rushed online without much of a plan. Others have been forced to cut costs and jobs to deal with an insane national economy, loss of circulation and all the other problems of the newspaper world.

The newspaper business will survive — the country simply can’t lose something this important — but in what format, nobody can say.

Papers are trying hard to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world. Size and shape and format of the news are constantly being tweaked, always with the best interests of the reader in mind.

No matter how fascinating the Internet may be, there’s too much mindless graffiti and other garbage out there for it to be fully trusted. Or taken seriously, when you get right down to it.

In spite of the problems newspapers face, they have always lighted a torch of understanding and awareness.

If we’re lucky, they always will.

Corky Simpson, former Tucson Citizen columnist and first inductee into the Arizona Associated Press Sports Editors Hall of Fame, writes a Friday column for the Green Valley News.