Here's some good news: small newspapers are doing surprisingly well these days. Particularly, these are weekly papers, small-town newspapers that thrive on stories of largely local interest. They give several examples, and the most striking thing I see is the similarity to newspapers of a hundred years ago.

I do a lot of historical research through online newspaper repositories and sitting at the microfilm viewer, and the meat-and-potatoes of a newspaper in 1920 consisted of a front-page of national news and major local news, a page of just local news, a page of local 'interest' (who was visiting where, how the church social went), a page of recpies and dress patterns for the women of the house, a page of editorials and financial markets, a page of sports, and a page of classifieds. Eight pages, consistently and uniformly produced for decades on small presses for only a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers. Those same methods of news publishing are, apparently, still effective in today's 24-hour news cycle.

So, while those large newspapers have struggled to maintain their hold on news that's available through free sources on the internet, local newspapers are paying their bills by reporting on the stuff not provided by Yahoo! News: the things happening at city council meetings, in the school auditoriums, and in neighbor's back yards. I do suspect, however, that if you added up the budgets of the thousands of successful newsweeklies, they wouldn't even approach that of USA Today, but if they can pay for paper and reporters and keep the lights on, they're going to be the way communities get local news for quite a while.

Labels: newspapers

Sometimes, when people clean out their attic, they find old newspapers. What this guy found was better than just newspapers: he found a bunch of plates used in the printing process nailed to his attic walls. They don't appear to be the actual printing plates; those would be mirror-reversed for the printing process. These look like they're embossed, like either the mold for casting the printing plate, or something thick and soft run through the presses without ink.

Labels: newspapers, printing

This newspaper clipping was saved with no notes, no caption, no information at all. The age was based on where it was found, and her style of dress, which would appear late 1950s, early 1960s:
The back of the newspaper has a portion of a photo or an advertisement; it was purchased from a junk shop in Sheboygan,Wisconsin. The clipping had been stuck between the pages of a 1958 JC Whitney catalog, in the chapter on muffler sets.

Labels: newspapers, teen, things found in books

Mallary Jean Tenore wrote an article for Poynter about how she prefers paper, despite her reliance on the internetted world. My first thought was, "eh, it's going to just talk about paper, and nothing about the use of the paper," but she does, addressing that paper has its values and yet periodicals aren't using in an appropriate way for today's networked life. Tangibility, the thing I believe is the reason paper will stay around forever, isn't being used well when newspapers focus on the ephemeral aspect of their news. News that's here and then gone is something the internet does well; take a look at what paper does well and emphasize that. The newsing might have to change, but the medium will not.

I'll note that her 'pros' for paper, Tailorability and Manipulability, are two reasons I ignored a process my managerial predecessor at work hoped I'd continue. Employees used to write down their daily work on sheets, and when a sheet was full they'd turn it in to the manager, who's keeping track of productivity. The previous manager was working on an internet-based system, where users would log-in, enter their start-times and end-times, and fill in the amount of work they did.

From evaluating the previous paper-sheets, I knew the online version would only cause problems: tasks can't always be identified by a start time, an end time, and the production numbers. Things like 'checking for errors' and 'sorting things in numerical order' don't fit into the standard -- and what about unused time like a broken-down machine? To properly evaluate productivity, those odd notes were more useful than the regular statistics -- and most of the time I can get that data off the server anyway. Rather than going 'high-tech' to get rid of the annoyance of paper forms, I redesigned the paper forms to something more useful -- more room for comments, limited each sheet to one week at a time so that it's easy to find a particular date, and giving training on how to use the sheet. If I want to compare productivity, I can lay out all the sheets on my desk, lining up the days of the week, and see how the work lines up. This sort of stuff isn't done easily with a computer program.

Labels: newspapers, paper, publishing