Whap! Whap!

I spent 30 years working in newspapers. I had lofty ideals, big dreams, helped usher in incredible technological innovation … and ultimately left the industry in much worse shape than when I found it.

OK. I can’t take all the credit for the industry’s problems. I had plenty of help from my fellow Baby Boomers.
In fact, in some ways my career might be a microcosm of the broader failure of leadership in our generation.

When I entered the field in the 1970s, the future looked bright for print journalists. It’s true that the industry already was showing signs of a serious illness. A number of big city papers were failing, but it was easy to attribute that to the stagflation that had hold of the economy and the crime wave that had hold of the big cities. People were moving to the suburbs, and as they did suburban dailies cropped up to replace the shuttered metros.

So we knew we were a little sick, but we were confident that it was nothing more than the cyclical kind of sickness newspapers always had faced. I knew that my generation, with our passions inflamed by Woodward and Bernstein, would ignite a resurgence the likes of which the country had never seen.

I didn’t notice the clues that the symptoms of more serious illness. I didn’t notice that many of fellow Boomers didn’t love papers the way I did. Circulation numbers were up, so who cared if household penetration numbers were headed south. As my cohort settled into family life, the numbers would go back up. I just knew it, and so did my colleagues.

Unfortunately, the problem never cured itself. Eventually we realized that, and set off in a million different directions to find solutions. Shorter stories, color graphics, humanized leads. None of it worked. We were dying a slow death, along with the other institutions of our parents: fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, lifelong careers at the same company …

We just never found a way to make the institution our own. There were radical ideas along the way, but when it came down to implementing them, we were too terrified to try. Too terrified that we might fail and lose our precious jobs in disgrace. Eventually there came a time when some of my colleagues acknowledged the pending end of papers, but we were comforted in the belief that it wouldn’t happen in our career lifetime. We will be safe. But boy, that next generation is going to have one hell of a mess on its hands.

So we tinkered and tweaked, but mostly just hung on to survive until retirement. Pensions went out with our parents, but Social Security and Medicare would still be there. OK, so again, we could see those institutions were threatened along with all the other relics of our parents’ generation, but they’ll still be around for our lifetime. We will be safe. But boy, that next generation is going to have one hell of a mess on its hands.

Baby Boomers invented much of the technology that we now know will replace newspapers, but we never truly understood its impact. I remember a colleague at The Freedom Forum in the early 1990s who dismissed the internet as a threat. The Sunday edition of any metro contained more information than the entire internet, he said. “How so?” I asked. Easy, he said; some individual Illustrator documents contain 20 megabytes of data. Even more surprising than his answer were the nods of agreement from some other participants. Our understanding has evolved, albeit slowly, but for the most part we remain clueless about how to implement technology in any meaningful way.

Ultimately I don’t think technology deserves as much blame as it gets for newspapers’ woes. Reactionary politics deserves a lot of the credit as well. When an editor writes about declining readership, a few angry readers respond immediately with “If you weren’t so liberal, you wouldn’t be losing readers.” So the editors respond by balancing their endorsement of conservative Republican policies on the editorial page with op-ed columnists who are even more conservative. The result? Fewer readers, not more. More complaints of liberal bias from the remaining hard-core readers, not fewer.

We see the same trend in broader society: the more conservative our political institutions become, the more voter turnout falls. Newspaper pundits blame the apathy on liberal politicians and demand candidates move farther to the right. And the cycle continues. I don’t pretend to know if this conventional wisdom is contributing to the industry’s problems, but I know it has not fixed them.

So what happened to the idealism of our youth? What happened to our fervor to change society? With all of our bravado of youth sucked from us, we clung more tightly to the tools of our parents than to those of our own invention. With all of talk of change and revolution, Baby Boomer publishers are reacting to the growing crisis in the industry almost entirely with cost-cutting measures, often at the expense of innovation.

Quite by accident, the publishers might end up with both cost-cutting and innovation. As frightened executives ax high-salaried Boomers in favor of low-paid young people they think they have cut expenses and eliminated a layer of potential competition for their ever-shakier positions. Of course those young people understand the changing role of media far better than their new bosses ever will.

We Baby Boomers inherited newspapers at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, then broke for an endless series of mid-morning meetings to strategize and synergize, wore ourselves out and went home right after lunch. It will be late afternoon for newspapers by the time the young hires get their chance to run things. Let’s hope there’s enough time left before sunset.

It’s OK, however. The executives clinging to their jobs now realize Social Security and Medicare might be fading and that even their 401(k)s are not big enough to maintain their standard of living. They have a way to fix that, however: Keep endorsing conservative politicians who will keep slashing taxes and driving up the deficits our children will inherit. That way they will be safe. But boy, that next generation is going to have one hell of a mess on its hands.

About the author: Ken Bilderback spent the last 24 years of his career at The Columbian in Vancouver, WA, in many different roles, including news editor, newsroom technology coordinator (or something like that) and finally as new media manager, launching columbian.com in 1994. The newspaper industry breathed a collective sigh of relief when he retired to a little slice of Freeburb paradise to raise chickens and build barns.