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Denver may lack a major-league convention center, but it still attracts conventions, among them the annual gathering of the Colorado Press Association, now underway at the Brown Palace.
Since the association is for owners of newspapers, large and small, convention workshops generally concern the one topic dearest to a newspaper publisher's heart, and that is not the Public's Right to Know nor is it Protecting the First Amendment. It's money.
One popular seminar, a few years ago, was called 77
Ways to Make Money in the Newspaper Business.
The most
memorable suggestion was to install 15-watt lightbulbs in
employee restrooms, but no one explained whether that would
save on cleaning expenses or prevent employees from reading
on company time.
But the newspaper industry apparently has a public-relations problem, because this year there are also seminars about public confidence. From what I gather, a growing segment of the public doesn't like or trust the local newspaper.
This always used to baffle me when I was editing or publishing a small-town newspaper. I didn't expect to be liked, but it amazed me that people would believe a politician, who had everything to gain by lying, rather than the newspaper, which had nothing to gain by lying. You can see the phenomenon on a bigger scale with the current Iran-contra arms scandal.
Some critics charge that people hate and mistrust newspapers because they print so much negative news. But news is really nothing more than what people are interested in.
Let's face it. Most of us aren't interested in hearing
good things about other people. No elitist editor controls
such gossip as you hear and pass on -- it's entirely up to
you and your friends. Does it interest you that Doe got
a promotion because he does such great work
? Do you
pass that tidbit along? Or do you race to the phone when
you hear that Smith bungles everything he touches, but I
found out he's married to the owner's niece, and that's how
he keeps his job.
I've just spent seven Tuesdays in Westcliffe, making sure the weekly Wet Mountain Tribune came out while Jim Little, its publisher, was in India. During idle moments, I scanned dozens of exchange papers, and came to the sad conclusion that small-town newspapers regularly and deliberately deceive their readers.
One way is the ubiquitous puff
-- a piece of
publicity for an advertiser that is presented as news. In a
small town, the opening of a new business is legitimate
news. So, perhaps, is a major expansion.
But you often see stories
about the addition of a
new line of canned vegetables at the neighborhood grocer's,
or a new secretary at the realty office. The local
columnist, instead of commenting on issues, often presents
such incisive information as Looking for a new pair of
boots? Check out the big sale at Advertiser's Shoe Store.
And there are some great bargains on knicknacks this week
across the street at the Half-page-a-week Hardware
Store.
If those items are newsworthy, then so is the reverse. But you don't see stories that go into informative detail about local business failures or cutbacks. Someone who moved away from town 50 years ago gets a longer obituary than a business that served the community for a century.
Many newspapers don't stop there. They offer entire
special editions devoted to upbeat puffery, and the worst
is the annual progress
or community report
edition, which tells everyone that his town has superb
health-care facilities and an educational system unrivalled
in the Western Hemisphere. Business is great, and each Main
Street merchant is a mercantile wizard.
Understandably, the reader trusts his own eyes, and when his newspaper devotes page after page to telling him things he knows are not so, he wonders whether he can believe anything he reads there.
That, I submit, is the reason newspapers often lose the
trust of their readers. The average reader may not know the
internal politics or economics of the local newspaper, but
he does know when he's being deceived. It's this commercial
positivism,
not the negativism
charged by
certain critics, that gives so many newspapers a
credibility problem.
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