Karl Klockars

Admittedly, I’m a big nobody in terms of the print world.  I’ve had a couple things published, but really, not a whole lot of people are really listening to me.  And that’s okay.  I don’t mind.  I don’t expect a whole lot out of the newspaper world any more.

And recently we’ve seen the two major newspapers (that are hanging on by a thread around here) hollering to anyone that will listen (the numbers of which are shrinking by the day) that Newspapers Are Back.  Why are Newspapers Back?  Because a billion people ran outside and picked up an issue a couple weeks ago Wednesday.  Maybe you saw it – it had a big picture of a guy named Barack Obama on it.

Oh – and Oprah says so.  So obviously, they must be on the upswing.

Maybe you bought one yourself.  Maybe you’re going to keep it for a few decades as a little souvenir of a momentous day.  Maybe you’ll take it out in 50 years and show your kids and grandkids about the day we elected Emperor Obama – he was just a President then!  Remember those?

To herald a one-day run on a newspaper doesn’t mean that your whole business model has been redeemed.  I adore newspapers, I think they’re absolutely necessary for a whole lot of reasons, and I really hope they don’t go away.  But to claim that this is a complete revalidation of the newspaper industry is completely inaccurate.  You’re not a touchstone any more.

You’re a novelty.

In my future career as an alderman, I’ll be more than thrilled to see the world of newspapers go under.  Perhaps we’ll still see a few local rags digging around here and there, but in the world I see, every newspaper reporter will have to turn from muckraking to literal raking.  (All my endless skills as a writer, reporter and broadcaster are about as worthwhile as a landscaper’s – we all just take dirt and make it pretty, don’t we?)

But until then, I’d love to see every single broadcaster in the city take a few minutes every day to talk about a city without a newspaper or three.  Because as soon as the newspapers go out of business, they’re going to have to.  Do you know where all of your radio talk shows get their topics from?  Fark and Drudge, of course.

But after that, it’s still the local newspaper that is the go-to source for all of their daily manufactured outrage.  Without the newspaper – even one – radio talk show producers are going to have to do a whole hell of a lot more work.  And god knows that none of us aren’t going to want to do that.  We got into the business to meet B-list comedians and not wear ties to work.  Not to actually…work.  Uck.

The newspaper is the only place that in-depth investigative reporting gets done.  Chuck Goudie or Dave Savini don’t have 2 pages to spend or a few thousand words to burn through talking about government excess or wasteful spending – they get maybe 6 minutes – 12 if they think they can drag the story out for a couple nights.

And if there’s no video with those stories, they’re effed where they stand in their expensive shoes.  If it’s just a bunch of quotes off of some paperwork, they’ve got some graphics and a couple interviews, and that’s all she wrote.  No secret camera footage?  No damning security camera clips taken from the managers office?  No black-light on the hotel sheets?  Nothing?  Not much of a story.

But print?  With print, you can pull documents, print pictures, run graphics that don’t leave the screen 45 seconds later, and get a hell of a lot deeper than any other kind of media.  You can affect the brain a lot more than you can with 40 minutes of a screaming partisan commentator followed by 5 minutes of local headlines.  You can get more information across than 22 minutes of sports, water-skiing squirrels and a few police blotter stories peppered with footage of police tape and squad car lights.

It just works better.  But it’s just not flashy enough – and it’s not as immediate.  You have to walk to your front door in some cases, all the way to the gas station or big metal box in others.  I know, it’s a huge chore.  And too many people don’t want to do it.  So what will save it?

I don’t know.  But I have a couple ideas.

For starters, make subscriptions cost just as much as it would take to get the vehicle to the neighborhood.  The newspaper industry is not in the business of bringing news to readers.  They’re in the business of bringing readers to advertisers.  Obviously, giving away the Red Eye for free hasn’t killed it yet.  Take the hint.

I know that if someone offered me the opportunity to read the Tribune for say, a penny.  A nickel, even.  Versus the Red Eye for free.  I’m taking the Trib.  Sorry, 5 on 5 section.

I could be wrong here.  It certainly could be that newspapers lose money on every subscription.  I’m just saying – getting the paper in front of eyeballs has to be paramount, right?  The web sure ain’t making up the difference.  Not by a longshot.

That leads me to the next step – the website.  I would assume that everyone who is on the web is there for news.  Not for photos of Hillary Duff, and not for stories that you can find anywhere else.  They want the goddamn news.  So all the goofy travel stuff, the celebrity stuff, the extraneous crap – there’s plenty of places to get that stuff.  News, news, news.  If it has absolutely nothing to do with Chicago, get it off the site.  Quit cluttering it up.

Oh, and stop selling those idiot ads that push all the content on the page down about 5 inches.  I can’t click on the stories when it’s being shoved down by an ad that I’m not looking at, and I’ll just go somewhere else for that story about Obama in Chicago.  Maybe I’ll go to the Huffington Post for a link to your own story.  Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed, HuffPo is laid out like a goddamn newspaper.  Columns form and a big, “above-the-fold” lead story.  Wonder where they got that from?

Finally – cut the fat.  If you want to survive, get rid of just about everyone, go with a slimmer paper, and give us nothing but Chicago news, Chicago sports, Chicago events.  What about semi-local personality junk like Bill Zwecker, Michael Sneed and Stella Foster?  Fired.  Get a job at TMZ.  Jim Derogatis and Greg Kot?  Fired.  Go work for Pitchfork.  Eric Zorn?  Fired.  Get a blog.  Oh, wait, you have a blog.  Okay, well, um….take it elsewhere.

It’s not going to be fun.  You’re going to be down to a skeleton – which is exactly what you’re going to be left with after you whittle everything down as it is.  The only thing to do now is to re-invent yourself.  That’s it.  Web first, print second.  Dive right in, fellas.  The water is cold, dirty and uninviting.  So you should be used to it, right?

I’m not saying it’s going to work.  I don’t even think that we as a culture really deserve newspapers any more.  We haven’t treated you very well, have we?  No.  I’m sorry.  But we do need you.  I hope you stick around.  Because I can see what it’s going to be like when you’re gone.  I think Oprah can too.  It might take a while for everyone else to catch on.  And I hope there’s enough time.  Because it’s running out for every ink-stained wretch out there right now.