Evans “Buddy” King
A couple of weekends ago, I was in my old college town for a football weekend. I was staying with old friends, and, as is my wont, I got up early and went out for a morning run/walk.
It was out in the country, in the beautiful hamlet of Crozet, at the foot of the glorious Blue Ridge Mountains.
As I was struggling along, l saw something that shocked me. It was a young woman, probably in her mid to late 20s. She came out her front door, walked a few steps and bent over and picked up a newspaper!
A newspaper! I was no more shocked than if Big Foot had passed me on the other side of the street, walking his shih Tzu.
It made me think about how the decline of newspapers during my lifetime, particularly of the print variety, is probably as big, and as sad, a change in our culture as any I can think of.
I have been blessed in my working life to represent a true “newspaper family”—now 5th generational and going strong.
I have worked on the acquisition of dozens of the family’s papers—from Maui to Nashua—and have gotten to work with editors and publishers from Minot to Sanibel Island. So my love for newspapers is strong, at times visceral.
There is a reason that the domain name of many newspapers is “name your city.com,” like “montcova.com” and “Roanoke.com.”
Not to sound overly trite, but local newspapers reflect and reveal the fabric of the communities in which they exist.
They used to be, and hopefully still are in most places, the pulse of their towns. Newspapers are both biggest cheerleader and biggest critic of their locales. That is what they should be.
So it was a little heartwarming for me to see a millennial picking up a print newspaper and carrying it back into her house. Most likely she was taking it to her aging parents, with whom she was living after college, and perhaps it was the Washington Post (I haven’t bought it since they started making plastic kitty box liners), but I chose to believe that she was going to sit at the kitchen table and read the local Charlottesville paper herself, looking to learn about what the local editor felt was newsworthy, or at least of interest, in the area.
I am certainly not against digital reads. I do that myself. And my newspaper clients have digital versions of all or almost all of their papers.
But I still subscribe to home delivery of my hometown newspaper, the Clarksburg Exponent, if for no other reason than civic pride. I want to help keep it in business.
Plus there is a wonderful, nostalgic feeling to getting the paper off of your front porch and at least glancing through it over coffee before you go to work. And then there are the obituaries.
I used to think that it was morbid when folks said they got the paper “for the obits,” but as you get older and have made your life in a community, and have hundreds and hundreds of friends and acquaintances, you really don’t want to disrespect your neighbors by not being on top of this sad part of life.
As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t go to other people’s funerals, they won’t come to yours.”
The biggest impact of the decline of the traditional newspaper industry, print or digital, is the decline of accountability.
I am hardly the first to mention it, but with all of our sources of news today, and the ever present “social media,” it should not surprise to anyone that some news is contrived or manufactured. Even fake! There is too much competition.
And since Watergate, every “cub reporter” (how’s that for an old newspaper phrase?) wants to be the next great “investigative journalist.”
Sometimes there are stories there and sometimes there aren’t. But by golly something has to be written.
“Back in the day,” when traditional newspapers had monopolies on local news, everyone read them. And equally importantly, everyone knew who wrote them.
I can still hear my father sitting at the kitchen table, complaining to my mother about how irritating Ben Beagle (a humorous columnist for the Roanoke Times for many years) was.
My dad would usually conclude by saying “what do you expect, he’s from Radford originally you know.”
And I remember how upset I would get over the columns and reporting of Bill Brill, long time sports editor and writer for the same paper. It irked most of the New River Valley that Bill refused to put on orange and maroon tinted glasses and be “first cheerleader” for the Hokies.
My dad, while not the Tech fan I was in those years, would often say “well, he went to Duke you know,” explaining everything.
My point is that, in that era, those who reported and opined on their community were known, out in the open.
We attached names and faces to their bylines. We knew who to take exception with if we didn’t like what they wrote, we knew who to write to the editor about, we knew who to sue if we were defamed. This placed limits on outrageousness.
As a First Amendment guy, part of me says the more the merrier, how can you have too much news? Too many venues in which to express opinions?
But another part of me misses the accountability. We need local newspapers. And on the national level, I wish we could bring back Walter Cronkite. He would tell us the “real news.”
And things wouldn’t be so darn confusing.
Evans “Buddy” King grew up in Christiansburg and graduated from CHS in 1971. He lives in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he practices law with the firm of Steptoe and Johnson PLLC. He can be reached at Evans.King@steptoe-johnson.com.