Coupeville Sports

    Old school journalists and new school bloggers, caught in a stare-down. Who will blink first?

I am conflicted.

I remember what it felt like in early 1990 to see my byline on a story in a professional newspaper. At a time when my journalism classmates from Tumwater and Oak Harbor High School were just beginning their college days (or still writing for the high school paper), I had cracked, somewhat inadvertently, the world of the grizzled old pros.

It was a game story on an Oak Harbor/Shelton boys’ basketball game, in the days when Pat Herms and Ron Ferguson starred for the Wildcats. I think the score was 42-35 or 40-35; I know OHHS won.

Seeing my name there in black and white was a bit profound — for 18-year-old me, at least, probably not for the people who bought those 12,000 editions of the Whidbey News-Times (if you still have one, it’s worth -$4.89 on eBay).

It’s hard to remember now, in a day when the internet has swept into every corner of our lives, what it once meant when that print edition of the paper came off the presses (when I toiled in the press room for a year or two, it meant a lot of sore fingers…).

Wednesday afternoon. Saturday morning. The News-Times was the voice of the Island. What was on those pages mattered.

And it still does, after a fashion.

But the local papers — the News-Times, the Examiner, the Record — face a moment in time. A moment when they need to decide where they’re going and why they’re going that way.

I joke about them being pawns of their Canadian Corporate Overlords, those Canuck bean counters in Moosejaw, but Black Press and its offshoot, Sound Publishing, are no worse (or better) than a lot of large, monolithic corporations. The people that work for those newspapers are committed journalists — you have to be in this day and age, when newspapers slash jobs non-stop and large paydays are a thing of the past — who care about their community.

But there is a difference between being proud of the past and honoring it and clinging blindly to something that worked 20 years ago but has little relevance in 2012.

The local papers, and the people that work there, will be quick to tell you they are preserving a heritage, recording the first draft of history. My question — why does it take you so damn long to do it?

The internet is a powerful tool — a more powerful tool than print these days — but the local papers update their web sites sporadically (if at all). There is an argument that if you hold your stories for print first, more people will buy the print edition — but the numbers don’t back that up.

It’s easy to dismiss bloggers (most of whom are or were newspaper people) but the simple fact is, while you send a whiff of condescension our way, a lot of us are spanking your cushy behinds. We report faster, we cover things you don’t, all too frequently we are miles ahead of you on the story, and we don’t vanish into a black hole from Friday at 5 PM until Monday at 9AM.

A while back, the News-Times ran an incredibly asinine op ed from another paper, in which the writer all but claimed newspapers were doing God’s work and bloggers were simpleminded fools who couldn’t cut it in a modern newsroom.

That part’s true. Why be chained to a desk when we’re already kicking your entitled asses?

When you hit your desks Monday morning, you’re already 12 stories down and counting, and when you have your people spend time writing a story that your paper has already run three months before (I wrote it, before I parted ways), what, exactly is the point?

Yes, online journalism does not feel as real as holding a print copy of the paper in your hands. That’s a sad reality. But, no matter what you think, our stories aren’t somehow less tangible than yours.

My output (320+ articles in the last three months) dwarfs yours (and you have a full staff of paid writers and editors) and once an article is on the internet, it doesn’t just vanish. It’s there forever, the same place your stories are … or at least until the computers rise up and kill us all off.

The bound volumes of newspapers? They were covered in dust when I was at the News-Times, and that was nearly two decades ago. One flame and that’s all gone.

Like I said, I’m conflicted. I remember the past. But I also know it is the past.

Times change, and those who don’t adapt won’t be around very long. If you don’t believe that, go talk to the video stores.