Douglas E. Jessmer

Apparently, not at CBS, anyway. Maybe they think viewers don’t remember who Uncle Walter is, or was. But the onetime “Tiffany Network” buried a special program commemorating his birthday on a Friday night, when no one would see it.

So says David Blum in The New York Sun.

At one time, he was “the most trusted man in America,” and now, the best anyone can do is make him the voiceover leading into Katie Couric’s news show. Granted, since he’s left the anchor chair, his political views have been made public (and he’s a committed leftist), but he’s a throwback to when television news was more substance than style. (Ask anyone my age who he is, and you’ll probably get a blank look — same for Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and John Chancellor at NBC, Harry Reasoner at ABC, hell, maybe even Murrow….)

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Well, that’s what they’ve called me — a veteran — over at Join The Media Circus, a publication of The First Post. (Funny, Poynter’s across the county from me, and they haven’t called yet… heh.)

After checking out my journalistic DD Form 214, I was asked by one of The First Post’s reporters to elaborate on a statement I made either here on the blog or on a VisualEditors.com discussion thread (I’ll be dipped if I can remember where). What I said was that newspapers are too busy eating the seed corn to focus on their futures — that by playing so much to their tried-and-true, older demographics, they’re missing the opportunity to connect with readers of the future, thereby dooming themselves to utter failure and irrelevance.

But I said it in many more words than that, of course, and you’ll see ‘em all when you look closer. Please feel free to comment upon what I said, the expert and veteran (am I that long in the tooth? Hey, you kids get off my lawn!) that I am.

My concern is that newspapers — printed ones, not Internet editions — aren’t trying to be relevant to younger readers. It’s that simple. “Oh, the old fogies will read the print papers, the young ‘uns will go online” doesn’t cut it for me. So newspapers (take two cities I’ve recently toiled in, Pittsburgh and Detroit, among others) invested billions of dollars in new presses just to shutter them in the next decade? Either the suits are really stupid (which I doubt) or they’re just dragging their feet to change, to meet the reality of the age in which we live.

I also expressed concern that the tabloid papers some broadsheets have spawned will at some point cannibalize their parents.

We CAN make printed newspapers relevant, and they CAN survive. But we have to shake off all the old-think and the herd mentality to do so. And while I’m at it, newspapers — notoriously cheap when it comes to capital and manpower — must be willing to invest in quality newsgathering, editing and reproduction. That’s just the beginning.

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It doesn’t look good.

Even with the one positive number — St. Pete’s Sunday boost of about 8,000 copies —  there’s an overall drop in Tampa Bay Sunday circ of more than 3,000 papers. The figures are among statewide semiannual data released by the Newspaper Association of America. The Times says:

Florida leads the nation in percentage of residents over the age of 65, a demographic that’s dominant among newspaper readers. So when newspaper circulation drops in the Sunshine State - as it did for 13 of the state’s 16 largest daily papers - the industry’s got a problem.

In southeast Florida, the drop was the worst, the absolute worst being The Miami Herald’s Sunday plummet of nearly 40,000.

With the drops being so inconsistent, it doesn’t seem like it’s because “people aren’t reading newspapers anymore.” One question remains unanswered: Why?

Also: What’s these papers’ Web readership looking like, and does it offset (or help offset) the circulation drops?

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Commissioners of the FCC were in Tampa this week for a public hearing regarding media consolidation, as you may or may not have heard (Here’s the St. Petersburg Times link).

It didn’t take long for Monday’s public hearing on media ownership issues by the Federal Communications Commission to boil down to a single question:

Does media “convergence” - pooling the news-gathering resources of commonly owned news outlets, particularly as practiced by Tampa Tribune, WFLA-Ch. 8 and TBO.com owner Media General - serve the public good or subvert it?

Easy answer, if you ask me. Convergence isn’t a threat. Lateral ownership of clusters of radio and TV stations, however, is, at least when it involves ownership of more than, say, two stations in a given market.
Take a look, and discuss.

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