News flash: America’s newspapers are ailing.
The date on that item should have been June 10, 2000, or earlier. But the Federal Communications Commission just got around to completing an 18-month study to discover the obvious: there is a whole lot less local reporting going on in the U. S. of A. these days be-cause newspapers don’t have the revenue they once did.
Doing research on Iola in the 1960s makes me very aware of the changes in the Iola business district.
A generation ago, the Iola square boasted at least twice as many businesses as it holds today; businesses that advertised in the Register frequently and depended on those advertisements to bring patrons into their stores.
Once a week the grocers on grocery row — Jefferson between East Street and Jackson — ran full page ads. Many housewives clipped the ads and carried them into the stores, specials marked, when they did the week’s shopping.
In addition to those “chain” stores, there were 50 or more one-family businesses that sold a huge variety of goods and services. Many of the families which owned and operated them depended on the profits they made for their livelihood.
The savings they accumulated sent their kids to the university, built a house and provided for their retirement. They had a solid, substantial stake in Iola’s prosperity — present and future.
The business community contributed mightily to the social community. The men and women who owned and operated businesses also sponsored Little League teams, threw banquets for school sports teams, helped finance 4-H clubs and found other charitable ways to build Iola while they were promoting their stores or businesses or professional offices.
Much of that community enhancement involved advertising, which bolstered the Register’s bottom line and helped make it possible to hire reporters, editors and photographers to write and assess Iola’s history, day by day.
About that same time, discount stores entered the scene. First Gibsons, then TG&Y, then Walmart. Over a few decades the business scene here — and in every other small- and medium-sized town in the U.S. — changed fundamentally. Chain stores such as J.C. Penney’s, A&P, Kroger’s and Sears closed because Iola wasn’t big enough for them any more. The family-owned businesses began to disappear. Those which hung on, shrank.
As much merchandise was being sold. Perhaps more. But the profits went out of Iola. The managers stayed only long enough to win a promotion. Iola’s business community shrank and changed in nature.
Register advertising shrank, too.
THIS ISN’T A SOB story. The Register has fared better than most newspapers, large or small. Its news staff is as big as it ever was. Iola’s news is still being reported for Register readers and, because the Register is a member of the Associated Press news cooperative, reports of events that occur here and are also of a wider interest are sent to a very wide network of readers, listeners and viewers.
Unfortunately, that is not the case elsewhere. All — repeat, ALL — of the major newspapers in the state and nation have had to lay off reporters and photographers and cut back on the news that they publish because they no longer can afford the investments in reporting and in-depth re-search they once considered to be their primary reason for being.
The consequence of this shrinkage manifests itself, the FCC’s 18-month study concluded, “ … in invisible ways: stories not written, scandals not exposed, government waste not discovered, health dangers not identified in time, local elections involving candidates about whom we know little because a newspaper lacked the resources to track down the facts about them and inform its readers.”
What newspapers no longer are doing that they — and they alone — once did has made our democracy weaker and more vulnerable. ’Tis a true pity.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
