Make The News From Here Available With A Click

When television first announced itself in the late ‘40s, it was a communications bombshell.

I remember watching the first public telecast from a Chicago station while perched with an eight-inch receiver on the flat roof of a building in Evanston, 20 miles north, at the limit of the broadcast area.

The newspaper industry gave television only passing notice except as a technological marvel. Then, for the next 50 years, newspapers dwindled in number, lost the cream of journalists to television, and played catch-up in the communications business.

We are witnessing a repeat performance. The newspapers of the mid-20th century believed their business was to report the news of the world and the opinions of society. It was not. Television had appropriated delivery rights for the news of the world and added opinions and analyses to Sunday’s broadcasts.

A newspaper’s business had changed. It was to provide its constituents with cogent information about themselves and their particular part of civilization. A compromise developed only when newspapers embraced the idea of television, electronic delivery and when they belatedly established their own local telemedia outlets.

Today, local newspapers compete fiercely with independent television and radio services to document the events, hopes, and aspirations of the local community. They aim for success by doing it better in print than television can with 15-second pictures and six-second sound bites.

However, there’s a new kid named Internet on every block, in every town and city, and he threatens to take over the marketing base that has enabled newspapers to survive. What strategy will keep the kid from destroying access to local news?

The only unique values of the Internet are speed and access. When I open my World Wide Web browser, I see a user-customized page, my personal electronic newspaper. I can read efficient summaries of world, national, business, entertainment and sports events of the past two to 24 hours as reported by Reuters.

The major area events reported in Portland, Seattle, Denver and San Francisco are on the same screen. So are weather reports from the half dozen cities I’m interested in, today’s key technology reports and the latest 20-minute update on my stocks and mutual funds.

Alas, there is no local news. Of course, I can quickly link to KHQ, KXLY, KREM or Spokane.net web pages, but I will nearly always read reports of the same events related on last night’s television report. There is little to enhance my understanding of the community unless I opt for a lengthy search.

Furthermore, I have interrupted the process by which I go to work on my computer, further delaying my personal work output.

Of course, I can walk through the slush to my mailbox to get my paper, which will give me all the local stuff I crave and a mass of advertising which I may find useful or not, but which I can delete without a mute button or a mouse. That, too, delays my work output.

It is essential for the print media to recognize that to continue to communicate with the community it must do so in the mode most prevalent among its constituency. Half of all households in the nation today have access to a computer. I suspect that means considerably more readers of the Internet than readers of newspapers.

Soon, computers and the Net will be more common than the telephone, and as easy to use.

Print news and local reporting need not wither away. Both need to jump at the opportunity to be an integral part of every browser that invites them. I will invite them and I am confident I’ll be in a crowd of Washington and Idaho electronic readers.

When local newspapers, and not just the big dailies, accept this opportunity for instant access, they will not need to leave their revenue base behind. Viable news browser links and web sites are a natural for local enterprises that cannot afford the time or expense for their own electronic advertising. What the Yellow Pages and newspaper inserts have been to my generation, the Internet will be to our children.

Electronic news editions that carry links or direct ads for local businesses will be far more effective - and probably more cost-effective - than the pounds of paper most of us discard each week. Environmentalists will rejoice, and so will economists.

As Adam said to Eve when they were leaving the Garden, “My dear, this is an era of change.”