Retirement, e-joke tell same tale
Jim Fall
What do a friend’s plans to retire and a joke circulating through the electronic world have in common?
Well, in this case, they both tell the same story.
I could say the same sad story, but I am not certain that would be true — in either case.
The old friend who declined my job offer when I was publisher/editor/lead reporter/ad salesman/circulation manager/janitor at the Albany Ledger will soon be stepping down from his 25-year stint as executive director of the Missouri Press Association.
He later encouraged me to take a shot at a similar position that was opening up in Montana.
The Missouri newspaper establishment should be duly grateful that Doug Crews, then a weekly newspaper guy at the Fairfax Forum, rejected my offer to move to Gentry County to accept the same sort of sentence with The Stanberry Headlight.
Unbeknownst to me, Douglas was already in conversations with Bill Bray, the sage from King City who was nearing the end of his illustrious time as Missouri Press director and instructor at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.
How does any of that tie in with a joke currently making the Internet rounds, at least in some of the circles I have access to.
It goes like this:
Visiting with my daughter for the weekend, I asked if I could borrow a copy of the newspaper.
“Oh, Dad, com’on,” she said. “This is the 21st Century. We don’t waste money on the newspapers.
“Here, use my iPad.”
I can tell you this … that damn fly never knew what hit him.
So there you have it, in a nutshell.
As if you didn’t already know, or at least have some serious indicators, our newspaper world, the whole information dissemination world, is rapidly changing.
I was certainly not a newcomer to the world of weekly/small daily newspaper publishing when I went to Albany. That was my major when I was at Missouri and I had spent some years on the front lines before taking the plunge.
But my time there taught me, among other things, just how important a newspaper can be to a community.
Any newspaper, daily or weekly, to any community, large or small, it really makes no difference.
And, the more I am around, the more I realize that it doesn’t make all that much difference how it is disseminated, so long as it is, in fact, disseminated.
One of my first “projects” in Montana was to provide some assistance to a fledgling company that was developing an “intranet” sort of system to be shared among our newspapers around the state.
The guys whose idea that was and I made the rounds, from Anaconda to Lewisrtown, from Kalispell to Miles City, sharing the “wonders of electronic media” and advising publishers to take whatever steps necessary to ensure their newspapers “protect your franchise as the area’s information source.”
That struggling startup company has grown until today it provides website management services to The Daily Forum and more than 1,500 other newspapers and radio and television stations in all 50 states and Canada.
The Montana Newspaper Association has survived — and progressed — since my retirement after 10 years as its director, and the Missouri Press will survice after Doug Crews steps down in the next few months.
Just as I differed from MNA executive directors I followed, those who came after have not fallen into the pattern I had made.
The same will hold true when Missouri Press falls in line behind its new mentor.
And this news dissemination business — newspapers in my world — is changing, probably for the better.
I do wonder, sometimes, if it is all for the better, but I do understand that “our franchise as the area’s inforamtion source,” does have to be protected.
I admit to reading my morning newspapers on-line on my iPad (that I don’t use for a fly swatter) and as I am around and talk with our staff, I understand how much that electronic presence means to our overall franchise.
E-mail, I get. Facebook, OK.
Twitter, I’m not so sure, but I get the feeling I better get with that program too if I want to pull my share of the load for The Forum.
I’ve made the move from hot type to offset, so I can do this too.
