Changing times mean changing Daily Reporter

I was 12 when I decided I wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

In those heady, post-Watergate days, my youthful imagination was fired by the idea that the watchdog role of a newspaper reporter was one of the highest callings out there. If not reporters, who would ensure that government kept on the straight and narrow? Who would let sunshine in?

Through the past 30-plus years, I've never regreted that choice, made so long ago. I still don't.

You've all read and seen the news reports of the challenges facing our industry now. Buffeted, as we are, by the twin winds of a changing audience and a worldwide economic slump, these are the most challenging days ever for newspapers.

That's meant major changes for the way news organizations operate. We need to realize that our audience increasingly wants its news fast, quick, concise and to the point. They also want it on the go, day or night, and at their fingertips.

Here in Spencer, that means repackaging our local news into a four-day-a-week format, getting our breaking news online, adding video and commentary and seeking a "conversation" wth our community through blogs and reader input.

We're going to see great changes in the way newspapers distribute their information in the next few years. No one yet has come up with a roadmap for that journey to a new media model, although lots of really great minds are working on it.

The newsgathering we do, however, will always be a vital, vital part of our democratic process.

Richard Doak, retired Des Moines Register editor, lecturer at Iowa State University and adjunt at Simpson College in Indianola, recently talked, in an editorial in the Des Moines Register, about the importance of newspapers in our society.

"If newspapers go away, who or what is going to make sure that a reporter attends every Board of Regents meeting? Every city council meeting? Every county board of supervisors meeting? And lots of park board, school board and zoning commission meetings?

Who's going to check the police blotters and court filings every day? Who's going to report on the dull stuff by tracking budgets? Who's going to haunt the halls of government, cultivating the relationships with public employees who might become tipsters or whistle-blowers?

Nobody, that's who.

If newspapers disappear, the flow of information to citizens about their governments is going to change fundamentally. In a newspaperless future, the only information generally available to citizens might be that which the government chooses to tell them.

The world has become saturated with new media, but it is the oldest of the old media, newspapers, that remain virtually the only enterprises that actually go out and dig up news. The other media tend to be mere conduits that pass on news, or echo chambers of commentary about news that was originally reported in newspapers."

This time of change is tough. There's a reason they call them "growing pains."

I'm excited to see where the next months and years take us. I'm confident we as an industry and locally our staff can rise to the challenges in front of us.

And I'm asking for your input and guidance along the way.