SacBee

Well it's been a week since the passing of my father. And while I don't want to explore that particular event here, it gives me time to open one particular aspect of what he has given me, the experience of the local paper. In this case it's the fish wrap we call the Sacramento Bee. The Bee has been around my parents house from the time my family moved to NorCal in 1976. The newspaper has been a part of my entire life. Now with the evolution of the new media, it's time to dig at the open wound of the old media's "elephant in the room".

The paper, the ink, the font, the predictability, and the way it felt in your fingers, gave comfort to the information hungry masses from the time scribes wrote on parchment in caves on the dead sea to the  meadows on the foot of Mt. Fuji. Now, times seem to be pushing the paper to the fringe of an old bird cage. As their customer aged and young people embraced the newest technology print media in general has failed to rope in and make devotees of old business models. You can't show a eye popping 3D graphic on a static, non-imaginative piece of newsprint. Maybe because the print technology has been around for so long it's like trying to stop a supertanker on a dime? For a couple of years the Bee had a tag line that read, "Life Captured Daily". To those of us who saw the writing on the wall, we edited that phrase to read, "Fluff Captured Daily". What they missed was that bringing news to the people as fast as possible was not something that they could do given the boundaries they must live in. That became the realm of the Internet. Instant delivery of breaking news and events from all over the world now appear within seconds of real time. In addition to just raw images, accounts and video created by average Joes, every other media outlet was shifting it's resources to carve out a slice of the Convergent Media pie. TV stations post stories earlier than most, they're doing the traffic in the morning with impressive video and graphics. I no longed need to read the paper for information, I can get anything I need from the AP wire. That's all they're putting in the paper anyway. And don't get me started on their website!

What can they do to survive and bring me back? Well, don't think of yourself and a knower of all. You must learn to adapt to readers while at the same time write things that young people will read. Personally I would love for them the do more investigative reporting. They are the 4th pillar of government aren't they? Put more video and audio on your website, become the TV station on the web. Everybody is kicking your ass with that kind of stuff, and as the saying goes, "if you can't beat em, join them".

Glenn A. Stilwell
It's a GAS Productions
www.itsagasproductions.com
glenn@itsagasproductions.com