Editor's Notes

From the Tracy Press/ Friday, 06 July 2007

Everywhere I look these days, the news looks bad. Stock values in newspapers have dropped. Ad revenues are down. Paid newspaper circulation is in the tank.

Sitting here in Tracy, I know better than to be smug about the massive newspaper mergers and layoffs in the Bay Area and beyond. While I’d like to rest on the laurels of delivering 19,000 hand-folded newspapers five mornings a week in my hometown, I know I can’t.

Why?

The message is clear: Newspapers need to adapt to the new media.

I feel like I’ve been adapting to some sort of new media my entire life, beginning with television.
At my first real job, just as I was cutting my teeth writing headlines, we got the word that all smoking in the newsroom was to be banned, because — clear the throat here — the computers would arrive by the end of summer.

I can’t remember whether it was the smoking part or the computers that got people more riled in 1979. But grumbling about change has been the rule at every newspaper job I’ve had in the past 25 years.

And now it’s this newest of the new media, brought to us by our friendly computer technology, that appears to be threatening the old newspaper game.

But wait. The Tracy Press knows something about the game. And if we need to adapt, or even reinvent ourselves, we can.

Remember when we went from being a three-days-a-week paper to five, six, seven and back to five days When we added color When we threw out our film, closed the darkroom and got digital cameras When we changed the size of our paper from broadsheet to tabloid When we stopped billing for subscriptions

Now we blog. We allow online comments and forums. We have a MySpace account. We’re putting breaking news on our Web site. And we’re talking about video.

All of that has nothing to do with newsprint and everything to do with some pretty exciting new media.

Things are changing, sure. But the good thing is that people are still reading — even more than before — and they care about what’s going on, especially in their own corner of the world.

We have amazing customer loyalty and bright, committed people who work for us as employees and as volunteers. We also know how to hold government accountable and, in my not-so-humble opinion, how to gather news and information better than anybody in town.

If nothing else, the Tracy Press has generations of committed readers and 109 years of brand recognition.

I think we’ll be able to keep the community engaged going into the future — if not with daily deadlines on paper and ink, then continuously, with pixels on screens.

Maybe the news — and new media — isn’t so bad.