Published: October 06, 2009 11:49 pm      

John Cannon: Changing to survive: 10/7/09

By now, you surely have read or heard of the struggles of the newspaper industry in the age of the Internet and 24-hour television news. I have been told by more than one person newspapers are dying and I am part of what may be the next to the last generation of newspaper journalists in America.

Newspapers are dying, we are told, but I don’t believe it. Newspapers are changing, and those that do the best job of adjusting to the demands of readers are those that will survive and possibly even thrive in the new world of mass communications in which your newspaper arrives via the Internet each morning — or each hour or minute — instead of being dropped on your front porch.

I don’t much like this trend. I’m an old fogey who still likes reading the morning paper while eating breakfast and working the crossword puzzle after catching up on the news. But I’m also an old man who likes baseball better than football. There aren’t many young baseball fans these days, nor are there as many young newspaper print readers as we would like.

But newspapers are not the only industry being forced to change to survive. Others also are battling to remain competitive in a high-tech world.

A few days ago, a reader called and said he could not find the name of a person who had written a recent “In Your View” letter in the phone book.

“That’s because he only has a cell phone,” I explained.

Land lines are becoming obsolete. All of my children only have cell phones. In fact, my daughter, son-in-law and oldest granddaughter all have cell phones with their own numbers. I suppose the only reason my youngest grandchild doesn’t have her own cell phone is that she is only a month old. It surely will be at least six months before she gets a cell phone.

I was one of the last people in American to get a cell phone and proud of it. Even after my wife bought me my first cell phone as a Christmas present, for more than a year I rarely carried it, used it even less and didn’t even know my cell number.

Well, I’ve been converted. Sort of. My wife and I recently joined my daughter and her family in a family plan deal in which I received a new phone in which I can supposedly take photos and dial up the Internet — except I don’t know how to do any of that and don’t intend to learn.

I also plan to keep my land line to my home. We have had the same phone number for more than 30 years, and when my home phone rings, I can usually find it in time to answer it. Not so with my cell phone.

Every time someone opts for a cell phone instead of a land line, Ma Bell loses business. Who would have ever thought it?

For most of my nearly 40 years in the newspaper industry, I have begun each day by opening the mail. I still do, except I don’t get much snail mail any more.

Instead of the big stack of letters that used to arrive on my desk each morning it now arrives via e-mail. Fifteen or so years ago, we never received any letters by e-mail; now the vast majority of our “In Your View” letters arrive that way.

For me, this is a good trend, because e-mail letters are always typed and do not have to be retyped to prepare for print. If a snail mail letter is typed, I scan it. It is time consuming and the scanner makes a lot of mistakes. For example, it thinks my last name is Camon instead of Cannon. But scanning is faster than typing.

Most of the handwritten letters I personally type into our computer system. Newspapers do not believe in secretaries, but sometimes one of our clerks will help me with this task.

The U.S. Postal Service, which failed to make a profit in the days before e-mail, really is struggling with most people using e-mail for personal correspondence and to pay bills instead of sticking a stamp on an envelope. The Postal Service already has laid off workers, and the idea of dropping Saturday delivery is again picking up steam. Expect a lot more post offices to close in the coming years.

I just hope the postman never stops delivering to those who live in isolated homes “up the hollow.” They probably couldn’t get Internet access or cell phone reception if they wanted it.

I could go on, but you get my point. Technology is changing the way we live. We now do our banking on the Internet instead of at the bank and we scan our own groceries instead of having a clerk do it for us.

All this technology is eliminating jobs, but that’s nothing new, is it? We don’t have much need for horses as work animals any more, and people younger than me have never experienced the unique and not very pleasant odor of taking a test run off on the school mimeograph machine.

Newspapers are going to survive in some form. They have to. They remain government’s best watchdogs. Without them, our country and its government are in real trouble.

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2649.