A Dramatic News Shift

Bundles of the Mount Mercy Times on the McAuley Hall loading dock, 8 a.m., May 3, 2023.

How long will there be “paper” newspapers? When will the final print edition of whatever the final publication is smack the porch of the last subscriber?

The hand has been writing on the wall for a while. And, yes, I still get my morning paper, and I still like having the pages there with me at breakfast to flip through, to read what catches my eye. I get The Gazette, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, newspaper. I also am a digital subscriber to The New York Times.

I like my NY Times, and try to dip into it daily. But I most often look at it on my phone screen, and the words are teeny tiny there—readable, but though the phone is always with me and the pages of the Gazette are not, it is still not as conveniently consumable as ink on paper. I’m sure I consume many more stories in the Gazette than in the Times.

But I have issues with my paper Gazette, too. As their subscriber base narrows, their delivery service is getting iffier. We went from having a carrier who put the paper on our front stoop to “driveway delivery,” which means, it seems, a biplane tosses out papers in our neighborhood that randomly land in the vicinity of subscribers. Finding the paper is a daily morning hunt, and Monday it wasn’t there at all—an occurrence that has become way too common since the biplane was launched.

And one winter day, after a snowfall, I ended up chewing up the Sunday Gazette with a snowblower because I didn’t see it buried under the blanket of white. On rainy days, given the haphazard nature of the paper drop, it’s an even bet whether we have a readable newspaper or a soggy brick of mushy newsprint.

It gets irritating paying for a product whose delivery is getting dicey. My wife and I have discussed whether to continue getting the paper, since we’re not always “getting” the paper. Digital would be an option, but I hate to give up reading a paper newspaper.

When I was growing up, my family usually got three daily newspapers, at least in Iowa. I wasn’t very literate when we lived in California (we moved just before I turned 8), so I can’t say what the sitch was there. 

By the way, Word doesn’t like shortening “situation” to “sitch,” but Word clearly is not a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan—I am, so that’s the sitch.

Anyway, in Clinton, it was The Quad City Times, The Des Moines Register and The Clinton Herald. In Muscatine, it was the first two (QCT and Register), and The Muscatine Journal.

The local papers were afternoon publications, the area “big city” paper, and the newspaper Iowa used to depend upon when the sports page was Peach colored, were both morning papers. None of them were dropped from biplanes. As I became interested in journalism as a career, two of them became part of my experience—my undergraduate internship was at The Muscatine Journal, and I had a part-time gig as a sportswriter for The Quad City Times when I was a senior in college.

The world changes. Web-fed rotary presses were invented before the Civil War, making mass newspapers possible. Today, that industry makes less sense, which is why it’s scrambling so hard to acquire cents.

And so, we come to today. A big day that I have decidedly mixed feelings about.

My wife set the alarm for 5:30 a.m., a brutally early time to a night owl like me. I had to arise early to get to the Mount Mercy University campus before an early class.

I had the glamorous job of moving the pile of newspapers that are dropped off at a loading dock to the newspaper’s library office, where a student doing work study will later distribute those dead trees around campus.

Papers on cart in MMU Times office. Collector's item soon to be available around campus.

Meanwhile, she will collect all of the fortnight-old copies of the previous edition—well, not “all,” since some get picked up, but a disturbingly large percentage of the previous paper will end up in recycling bins rather than before the eyeballs of our intended audience.

Old fogeys like me love the paper newspapers. Young flappers, like MMU students, apparently, aren’t so enamored by dried ink on dead trees.

The Mount Mercy Times maintains its own web site but, frankly, doesn’t do a great job of it. Partly, that’s because the print product occupies so much energy and time, and partly because the few readers we do have aren’t motivated to seek out a secondary experience online that is not as good as the fish wrap in the news rack.

Nonetheless, the world is changing. Newspapers are an industry that is contracting. Not that the need or desire for information is gone—but that desire is less fulfilled by felling Canadian forests for paper.

We have crossed the Rubicon. Recognizing the media trends in the world and on college campuses, I asked the governing body of the MMU Times, the ill-named “Board of Student Publications,” (there is more than one student publication at MMU, but only the Times is regulated by the board) to review the status of the newspaper this spring, to answer the question: Does it make sense to go all-in as an online news source and leave the paper behind?

The paper. Get yours later today on campus.

In examining the question, the board surveyed the MMU community. The voluntary responses showed that many people love the paper newspaper and will dearly miss it. But I don’t think it was enough to justify printing and recycling most of a press run.

I was asked to inquire of other colleges what their experiences are, and I queried the Iowa College Media Association. In general, many colleges are committed to maintain a paper newspaper, but only for now. At many places, the frequency of publication and number of pages is in noticeable decline. And at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, the switch to all online was more than a decade ago.

The board asked me what I wanted. I want the world to go back as it was. I want people to get more of their information from newspapers. I want the college student generation to appreciate and deeply be into reading. What I want, however, doesn’t change what is. Given reality, I don’t know for sure what I should want, but I said it was time that the Times get with the times. We know we’re going online as some point—let’s do it now.

I hope I didn’t make a horrible mistake. Maintaining a vibrant student “newspaper” without any paper will be a challenge. Yet, the staff of the paper will no longer be treating our online presences as an afterthought; instead, it will be the thought.

Who’d have thought it? An old paper fan pushed for the shift to online. What an odd sitch. It feels right to me, sort of. And a little sad, at the same time. I’m not always good at change even if I think it can be a healthy thing.

So, today, I picked up the final paper. Delivered it to the newsroom. And sighed.

Let’s hope what comes next can be vibrant and lively. I don’t want MMU to turn into what too many communities have become these days—news deserts. The news is there, but nobody is covering it.

May we be an oasis of journalism instead. Even if that journalism will now be all electrons dancing in cyberspace and on people’s phone screens.

Dated May 4, 2023--the final MMU Times paper edition.