Wolf football players Xavier Clark (left) and Ramon Booker enjoy the CHS Homecoming parade Friday. (Shelli Trumbull photos)
Longtime Wolf coach Larrie Ford (left) hangs out with a quality crowd.
CHS cheerleaders Kirsten Pelroy (left) and Ciera St Onge are all smiles.
Aaron Trumbull, matinee idol.
Kacie Kiel is camera shy (for the first time in her life).
It is not 1924 anymore.
Sadly, I don’t think that’s a fact that has ever really sunk in for the Canadian-owned newspapers on this Island.
As a former employee of both the Whidbey News-Times and Whidbey (Coupeville) Examiner, I don’t say that with as much glee as you might think. It is, instead, with a certain amount of sadness as I watch once vibrant institutions slide further into obscurity.
There are very good people at both papers — actually, they’re the same people, since they no longer have separate staffs, regardless of what they might like you to think — people whose writing and reporting skills are of the highest caliber.
But the papers themselves, subsidiaries of the giant (and I do mean giant) Black Press empire, are stuck in a ’20s mindset.
They refuse to acknowledge that the internet has long ago become the primary way people get their information. They have a lot of weapons at their disposal and continually choose to shoot themselves in the foot without provocation.
What has inspired this rant, you ask?
This Island is made up of small towns. We are not covering Detroit or L.A. or Moscow. It is small towns.
And when you cover small towns, events like Homecoming football games and parades, events that draw in a large cross-section of a town, are vitally important to those small towns.
Stuff like that is, or should be, the lifeblood of what they, and I, do.
But, here we are 24 hours later, a time period when I have run three separate photo essays (with 25 photographs) covering every aspect of Coupeville High School’s celebration, from parade to halftime show.
Now this diatribe runs it to 30 photos.
I also had a story on the game — which, by virtue of featuring Coupeville hosting South Whidbey, was even more ramped-up in interest locally than otherwise — up online an hour after the game finished. That story had a fresh photo of Jake Tumblin, so that would be 31 pics.
This is the time period when modern-day readers — the people living in 2013 — turn to the internet for exactly this. Immediate, intimate coverage of life in small towns.
Whether on Facebook or on a blog, they want to see it as soon as possible.
But, if you turned to the News-Times, Examiner or even the South Whidbey Record today, you found diddly and squat. A newspaper empire that sits closer to Coupeville’s football field than I do — and I only live a little over a mile away — is silent.
And that’s a shame.
They may tell you they are holding the photos and stories for the print edition of the paper. Except that doesn’t arrive until Wednesday, and we are in 2013 and not 1924. Readers are not waiting for the newspaper to hit the stoop anymore.
So then they’ll tell you they’ll put some of what they have up online Monday, when they go back to the office. Except 72 hours is about the same as 72 years in 2013 and you don’t have to be in the office to upload a picture.
I mean, good lord, how is it even conceivable that I, the last cave man who refuses to get a cell phone, much less a smart phone, continues to kick their pampered asses so easily?
They should be ashamed. They should wake up.
It is 2013 and this business has changed. If you don’t realize that at some point, there will be a day — much sooner than you think — when the small towns you serve no longer even realize you exist.
And that is sad.
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