The Printer’s Devil

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I don’t know if it’s still there but there used to be a large barn along Kansas state highway K-4, a wind-swept two-lane highway running east-west beside what was a Union Pacific main line between the two small towns of Hoisington and Claflin.

The barn was perched on what passes for a higher hill along the highway near Claflin.

On the barn’s light-colored roof was painted a large black silhouette of a horse and Amish-style buggy, the trademark of a furniture store in Claflin.

The furniture store advertised heavily throughout the region and the buggy on the barn was part of the marketing campaign. It apparently worked.

The store covered an entire city block in Claflin, and at the time, except for high school football night, seemed to be place all the cars and pickups parked.

That might also explain why the furniture store’s owners so determinedly and constantly fought the Kansas Department of Transportation, which sought to remove the barn-top sign in the name of the Lady Bird Johnson highway beautification law.

Here’s a quiz for you:

• Did the furniture store owner put the buggy on the barn and fight KDOT because the farmer liked him?

• Did the furniture store owner put the buggy on the barn and fight KDOT because the farmer was a frequent customer?

If you answered no to both quiz questions, you’re correct.

So why the battle over the buggy on the barn?

It was where the people were, driving along K-4.

Well, duh. Simple, huh?

Another simple question.

Why do people read newspapers?

Because they want to read the writing that’s in them.

Not the grocery ads. Not the photos. Not the gorgeous layout. Not the community portals to the Internet.

It’s the writing, stupid.

Simple, huh?

You wouldn’t know it if you read all the newspaper trade publications.

Constantly, publishers, experts and hangers-on decry newspapers’ loss of readership, how reading isn’t fashionable, TV, computers, blah, blah, blah.

And then they proceed to act like it.

Which is publishers and newspaper companies act as if they hate their readers.

I repeat. The people who depend on readers for their fat profits hate their readers.

Heresy!

Yeah, I know. Newspapers fret endlessly about “connecting with their communities.” They host focus groups of subscribers and community members and ask them what they want to read. They loudly profess their passion for providing excellence for their readers.

All baloney.

Readers are abandoning newspapers because newspapers have abandoned them.

Readers are “whitepage trash.”

You would think that businesses who depend on getting people to read their wares would pay top dollar for the writers.

Instead in CorpsNews, newsrooms are “expenses” and the work force is cut to the bone — actually sawing off half the bones as well — far beyond the ability of the pitiful remains to provide decent news coverage for the highly touted “local news.”

And for the few people left in them, newsrooms are sweat shops and the pay and benefits are scandalous and shameful and the hours long and stressful.

I once heard a publisher proudly announce that salaries in the publisher’s newsroom were “competitive.” That is competitive with other CorpsNews outlets.

In that community, the reporters (the whole purpose of a newspaper) were paid less than most office secretaries, at the same rate that ChinaMart paid its elderly door greeters and slightly more than JiffyMeat pays undocumented workers to saw ham hocks off pork carcasses.

And according to conventional CorpsNews wisdom, readers are dummies who can’t read above the eighth-grade level or any story longer than 12 inches and are so dense stories have to be written with WOW leads so they can get the point without much mental effort.

Their readers aren’t interested in politics and can’t be bothered to read anything but fluffy feature profiles or heart-rending sick-baby stories.

Their readers are so lazy that stories have to be larded with sensational headlines and colored photos that will compete with TV and the Internet.

Their readers are so incurious that they aren’t interested anything but local news unless it’s a disaster that kills 100,000 people (six if they’re white Americans) or the latest pop princess with blonde hair and big breasts who gets drunk at all the hot Hollywood parties and forgets to put on her thong underwear.

Whitepage trash.

Because their readers won’t read, newspapers have to be like television or magazines or the Internet to compete.

But nothing too good for our readers!

I know differently.

I’ve worked for small-town newspapers for longer than I care to remember.

I’ve watched people pick up the paper at the checkout of the grocery store. I’ve heard them discuss the paper when they think I’m out of earshot. They’ve called me to ask me about something I’ve written. They’ve sent anonymous letters pointing out my grammatical sins.

I’ve been lectured by an old meatpacking employee with an eighth-grade education on how to write decent newspaper stories.

Those people read the paper each day from front to back. Every story. Local, state, national or international. They paid hard-earned money for their subscription and they want every word’s worth.

I don’t how many city or county commission meetings I’ve been at when some truck driver or waitress would wave a copy of a story I’ve written and nail commissioners on something buried in the “in other business” part of a commission story jumped to an inside page.

And kids too enthralled with computers to read?

I’ve known kids stand in line at midnight to buy the newest Harry Potter books and give themselves headaches reading them — a lot of them do.

If you’ve not read a Harry Potter book, I can tell you they’re not “Bunny Foofoo” reads. The books are 700 pages long. Most characters are densely written, the settings are detailed, the plots are subtle and sophisticated, even for adults, and deal with thorny subjects as lust for power, prejudice, murder and violence, and good and evil.

Kids a lot of read Judy Blume and other authors, and there’s no Bunny Foofoo in those pages.

Whitepage trash?

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, it’s the publishers and newspaper companies who are the stupid ones.

Rather than admit that newspapers are committing suicide by driving away readers, it’s more convenient for CorpsNews to dismiss readers as whitepage trash too stupid, too lazy and too enthralled by television, computers and other distractions.

Only by joining television or the Internet, will newspapers survive, they say.
But book publishers will tell you that the opposite has happened over the years — TV and movies have stimulated book sales and reading rather than ruined them.
Ironically, broadcasters and film producers — the great enemies if you listen to the American Newspaper Publishers Association — do more than newspapers to promote reading.

Authors do the rounds of morning TV news shows across the country. How many talk to reporters and editors? I’ve been told I was one of the few newspaper types who went out of his way to talk to authors.

Many movies and television shows, especially science fiction, routinely commission paperbacks to expand or add to the shows. Some are boilerplate but others aren’t too bad and are enjoyable reading.

TV talk show personality Oprah Winfrey’s book club readers buy and read millions.

National Public Radio routinely interviews writers and has writers submit on-air essays and commentaries. NPR broadcasts lists of “best summer books” and ask authors for lists what they read.

What are newspapers doing besides whining about losing readers?

For one thing, newspapers are discontinuing their book review pages wholesale because they don’t think they were getting enough advertising for them.

Yet (for reasons I’ll discuss in a later post), nearly all newspapers have printed and will continue to print a section that is a constant and even bigger money-loser than a book section — the weekly listing of television shows.

Nothing like getting people to read.