By BILL CHAISSON
An email, which came in response to yesterday’s editorial about the contemporary economic realities for small-town daily newspapers, outlined the struggle that a subscriber had with subscription billing when the Eagle Times switched to a new vendor for our website. As anyone who has attempted to do this with their own business will attest, moving all your content from one platform to another can be filled with hiccups that are often poorly explained or dealt with by your new vendor.
As a person in late middle-age I get frustrated with our economy’s present obsession with usernames, passwords, security questions, electronic accounts, online-only access to information, and all the “help” that comes along with it. I was a relatively early adopter to computer use. In early 1986 I sat down at a monitor hooked up to a microvax computer in an office in midtown Manhattan and began making spreadsheets with Lotus 1,2,3 on a dark screen with green letters. In those days I called up commercial developers, talked to them on the phone about rental prices per square foot in malls in Kansas City and Dallas and then entered the data into an electronic database. These days I could probably just get a username and password and get into their own electronic database and download the data I needed. Computers to me were primarily for work. The fact that my personal life has to be conducted through them now is annoying.
Newspapers were slow to embrace both computers and the internet. I remember on my journalism class field trip to the New York Times in 1977 that they had recently switched to new printing technology, but the old hot lead equipment was literally pushed aside and still standing along the walls. We were still doing cut and paste layouts in the early 1980s at the magazine I edited in college, but the newspaper I worked for in Ithaca only abandoned it in the late 1990s.
Early newspaper websites were all over the place in terms of their approach. Many companies were reluctant to “give away” their content and put online only a selection of what you found in the print edition. Or they simply posted “teasers” online that were supposed to induce you to purchase the print edition. Then the “pay wall” was invented, but found to be most effective for speciality publications that made proprietary information available to professionals (e.g., in finance or academia.)
The pay wall became necessary because — for reasons that have never been well explained to me — online advertising was initially offered at rates that were absurdly lower than print rates. These online rates could not support the cost of printing the paper, but they needed to be because why would anyone buy a print ad when the online ads were cheaper and more and more people had ready access to electronic media? I certainly don’t think anyone in the “legacy” newspaper business foresaw people reading a newspaper on their phones. As a geezer myself, I am amazed that people accept the necessity of a larger and more expensive phone in order to be able to do everything that one is increasing required to do online. I still prefer a desktop computer to a laptop, a tablet or a phone, but hey, I got into this over 40 years ago.
Newspaper employees, in my experience, don’t tend to be techies. Yes, many younger ones use their phones for the same social and logistical reasons that most young people do, but those who work for print publications don’t tend to know all the shortcuts in the computer applications they use all the time nor do they wade into the backside of the newspaper’s website with any enthusiasm. They have nerdy friends who like that stuff, but those nerdy friends all work for online-only publications that are eating the lunch of the legacy publications. Consequently, newsrooms are often filled with (older and younger) folks who are either reluctant computer users or (younger) folks who are genuinely unfamiliar with looking at a print newspaper, so using a computer to make one is an abstract experience for them.
Until I moved to Claremont I thought that the newspaper website (where people increasingly land only because they have found social media posts used as click bait) was how most readers wanted to look at the newspaper. However, in Claremont many people still seem to like holding a newspaper in their hands. I love newspapers as aesthetic objects; I think they should be attractive and have definite ideas of what constitutes “attractive.” I would want to make a good looking print edition regardless of what most readers wanted; it is just the right thing to do. And yet, here people still like holding a paper in two hands and running their eyes across about four square feet of space. Thank you for that.
The Eagle Times posts to Facebook and Twitter and to the DailyUV, but admittedly in a desultory way. Larger newspapers have a “web editor” who is all about this task. Here it is just one more task for either me or the production manager. We know social media posting is important, but the print edition is our focus. We post our own local content to our website, but I periodically go through and “house clean,” i.e. post stuff that was forgotten, fix headlines that include typos or missing words etc. In other words, the electronic media are like rooms in our house that we know need tidying, but we just don’t get to as often because the kitchen needs so much attention.
So, if you know someone who got frustrated with our website transition or is tired of running through their five free articles per month after following Facebook links, tell them that print edition is still our focus and the website is entirely built out now.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times, a full-time journalist since 2005, and is not about to embrace a paperless society.
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