Letter from the Editor

            A college buddy and I worked nights on end getting ready for the first issue of our weekly newspaper 25 years ago this fall. We were able to quit our jobs and chase this dream because our wives were most supportive (and employed). It was a new venture and 80 hour weeks were not uncommon. Sometimes, our kids were sleeping on the couch while we pasted up that week’s edition.

            After we put out a few issues in the town which had no newspaper, a reader left a grocery sack on my desk with homemade cookies. On the side of the bag was a simple note: “Thanks for giving us a newspaper. I feel like we’re a real town again.”

            No one, especially those in my line of work, ever wants to see a newspaper close. Big daily newspapers have trimmed editorial staff members and cut back on distribution areas. It’s a cyclical thing and I’ve been through many of them but newspaper closings are rare. My first job out of college was at a daily newspaper that closed in 1981 while I was on its staff.

            The announcement this week of the closing of one of our sister newspapers, The Sun, in Midwest City, is a sad reflection on some things happening in our industry. (The Transcript served as The Sun’s printer).

            The closing of the weekly newspaper gives me a platform to remind readers and viewers of the value of newspapers online and offline.

            Mark Thomas, executive vice president of the state press association, once told my OU journalism students that towns need three things to survive: A bank, a school system and a newspaper. Without one of those legs, towns are more likely to wither and die.

            When a small town in southwestern Oklahoma was without a newspaper for a few years, Thomas recalls that people were born, people died, the baseball team won a state championship, three homecoming queens were crowned, the city council got into a fight and a new mayor was elected. But no one was there to record any of that in the town’s history.

            At one time, Midwest City had a daily newspaper, The Oklahoma Journal. The publisher was a developer who had a political beef with The Daily Oklahoman and started his own paper in 1964. The last issue was published in 1980.

            The Journal had a circulation at one time of about 40,000 and might have made it had it concentrated on Midwest City, a booming suburb adjacent to Tinker Air Force Base.

            Some of those outside the industry say it’s just a natural evolution to see newspapers close since technology makes news on the Web and on television easier to view. The fallacy there is 80 percent of all news originates with a newspaper.

             There are very few online sites that do anything resembling original  news reporting. Most are aggregators who sweep newspaper sites and post stories as if they were done by their own staff. If newspapers fail, those sites will have no raw material to steal. They can turn to bloggers (who also steal) but most audiences want some level of journalistic vetting, integrity and objectivity.

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