For most readers, the time between last week’s edition and the one you read now has been about seven days. Feel free to compare those dates now. However, the DMC publisher and I crammed about three weeks of working vacation into three and a half days on the road.
When you spend much of your time sifting through what’s growing in the rows of others, it often leaves you little time to spend hoeing your own. We operate a weekly news publication, but as professionals, we need continuing education, as a business we need innovation, and as human beings, we need a break.
There are 52 weeks in a year, and a new edition of the DMC arrives on newsstands and in mailboxes on each of them. Not a lot of time left for education and innovation, and certainly not enough for a vacation, so we depend heavily on the theories of Albert Einstein, squeezing every drop from the relative moment.
Statistics show that people are happier in the workplace when they work for someone they like and respect. Since my publisher was my wife long before she was my “Boss,” it helps that our work relationship is built upon mutual love and respect.
Not to mention as business partners we also share mutual accountability should we fail.
Obviously, based on the outcome of this year’s Texas Press Association Awards, we’re not failing. At least, not at reporting. What we — and just about every other newspaper, regardless of their admission of it — are facing is declining revenues. I’ve written in the past about the transactional exchange between the public and the press, and how the advent of the internet changed that method of transaction.
What began as mechanics in the 1400s with Gutenberg's printing press became a digital landscape that leveled the playing field regarding the dissemination of information, be it good or bad. Either way, like Howard Stern, it garnered attention and where the eyeballs went, the advertisers followed.
As a result, just about every printed publication from Washington DC to the DMC took some big hits and went down to the mat, and we didn’t get up very fast. Some haven’t gotten up, and others never will. All of us are dizzy on wobbly legs, and the tech world has been carrying the belt ever since.
Whether you are inside or outside the circle of journalism, it doesn't take deep powers of observation to see the effects of a weakened press.
However, receiving such honors from our peers at the Georgia and Texas press associations was unexpected, yet the dynamic of the convention was surreal.
As a publishing team, Patricia and I have been absent from more conventions than we have attended since jumping into the business in 2015.
However, the newspaper business is a lot like a small town. Some people are from there, and some people move there, and that story has been shared from “Peyton Place” to the “Harper Valley P.T.A.
Yet as a result, we have had the opportunity to become passive observers of a community whose job it is to be passive observers. For years, we have listened to what might unfairly be referred to as gloomand- doom conversations about the future newspapers. Yet this year, there was pulsing discussion about not newspapers, but how newspaper publications can and should contribute to the democratic narrative. At least, some of them are. There are legacy newspapers that seem as reluctant to act as they have been since the mid-90s and continue to stay wrapped in the same blanket denial that has kept them warm for the past decade and a half of steady declines.
Yet, I could no more predict the outcome of those publications than I can the DMC’s future. However, I know the publisher and editor of this newspaper have routinely defied the laws of tradition when it comes to this business, although we think of it as “experimental adaptation”.
When the experiments work, we get plaques with our names on them.
When they don’t, we get social media posts and emails with our names on them. Too bad the award isn’t a cash prize, and we get a kickback for the extra traffic when the internet gets angry with us.
Feel free to write your donation checks now, although we have no intention of relinquishing our forprofit status, nor are we inclined to rest much in the next 52 weeks. So, keep reading, following, liking, and subscribing because we’re not even sure what will do next. Although, we do like to win.