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Sunday, September 19, 1999
News Media Respond to Technology, Each Other
Journal Staff Report
The demise of newspapers has been predicted many times as new competitors have emerged: radio, television network news, instantaneous live reporting on cable news stations and lately the Internet.
But newspapers have survived every premature death knell.
They have refocused their content, changed their technology, redesigned their appearance and sought new ways of reaching an audience through the World Wide Web.
Today, 19 daily newspapers and 32 weeklies are members of the New Mexico Press Association. In an industry that's increasingly dominated by chains, the Albuquerque Journal remains an independently owned newspaper. And Albuquerque is one of the few cities in the United States where two competing newspapers have both won a Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in journalism, during the 1990s.
When the century began, most of today's news media had not been invented. But there were newspapers up and down the Rio Grande and wire services that delivered news from around the world. The Albuquerque Journal-Democrat provided a front page crammed with news stories -- even though they often were only a paragraph long with little relevance to Albuquerque.
"The little town of Massena in the southwest part of this (Iowa) county was nearly wiped out by fire of incendiary origin this morning. The loss is about $20,000," the front page of the Journal-Democrat told readers in a two-sentence story during the first week of January 1900.
In the 1930s, a groundbreaking agreement between daily newspapers in Albuquerque established a practice that helped many U.S. newspapers survive in the decades that followed. The Journal and Tribune reached a joint-operating agreement, finalized in February 1933. Under the agreement -- which continues today and has been duplicated at other papers scattered across the United States -- the newspapers decided to share facilities but retain separate ownership, identities and news staffs. The agreement allowed the newspapers to remain independent while providing efficiencies that made them stronger businesses.
It helped as broadcasting became an ever-stronger competitor. Art Schreiber, a longtime radio personality in New Mexico, recalls the development of that industry.
KQEO was one of the state's first radio stations. That's when radio was live and raw, said Schreiber, who has worked for KQEO and other stations in Albuquerque.
In radio, "the first big change was with the audiotape. Then radio stations went to their own news departments, and radio really changed," Schreiber said. Now, "it's not live radio so much anymore -- just programmed music. ... Radio has had to compete with TV, and that has turned it into a money machine. It's cheaper to feed in the programmed stuff than to have a disc jockey spinning records."
Television news, from the beginning, was "a picture-dominated medium," said Richard Schaefer, associate professor of communications and journalism at the University of New Mexico. Pictures were more important than the news value of stories, he said.
That's still true in many cases, he said, but now there are far more pictures available and people have become more savvy about creating those pictures, Schaefer said.
Meanwhile, TV news professionals "have become newsmakers in their own right -- they have achieved celebrity status" because of our day-to-day "visual contact" with them, he said.
Newspapers have "changed the way they present themselves," said Schaefer. "They've made the way they look more appealing, because they know people have a choice when it comes to how they want their news to get to them."
Big changes in newspaper technology were seen in the past several decades. As recently as the early 1970s, the Journal depended on a "hot type" printing process that dated from the Industrial Revolution. Now, most of the Journal's news and advertising is produced on computers, then manipulated digitally to create full-sized newspaper pages.
And the newspaper has an Internet site, www.abqjournal.com, that offers a wide variety of news, advertising and other information, including the ability to electronically search Journal archives.
"We're in another media revolution, and this one is in cyberspace," said Schaefer. This time, he said, Americans are not only receiving information in a new way, they are creating it themselves for distribution on the Internet.
"I think for the media and journalists, this is a time of flux," he said. "They're dealing with a clutter of information. It's time to separate the misinformation from the information on the Internet."
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