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A GLIMPSE INTO OUR FUTURE:
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We were pioneer bloggers
and didn't even know it
of TheColumnists.com
Ron Miller and I came up with the idea for TheColumnists.com when we retired from the San Jose Mercury News nine years ago. At that point we didn’t know what blogging was really all about. I still don’t.
But whatever it was, it was catching on. Over the years the blogging idea became something of a revolution. Hundreds of thousands of writers, or would-be writers, have joined the vast club all over the world, some reaching the nirvana of recognition and advertising support, most just blogging along.
TheColumnists.com rapidly extended its offering from the two Mercury News columnists to columnists from other newspapers and other media. Thanks to editor Ron’s diligence, the site continues. It gets read, though Ron tells me our greatest popularity is in China, where the words “TheColumnists” translates as “dirty, filthy pictures.”
We are also read increasingly in the U.S. and elsewhere and that is a delight. But where is all this going?
Actually, I might ask, in regard to my past employment, where are newspapers going. Since leaving the Mercury News, that newspaper, up-and-coming in the journalism world when I joined it 20 years earlier, has been dropping staffers and pages and circulation. There have been numerable buyouts to cut the staff and even the publishers have found their jobs transient.
The Mercury News is by no means alone. The newspaper world has become precarious. Even the very top papers have found it necessary to cut back. Of course, in such conditions, it is odd that the very product that newspapers sell on the newsstand is offered at no charge on the web. But I guess that gives the papers greater circulation which is now being added in with the ABC (circulation) figures.
Yes, for this old-timer the business looks troubled and odd and clearly it is moving in directions which have as yet not been well understood. Is the Internet going to be the death of newspapers? Well, we were asking that question when we left the Mercury News. Newspapers are still around. So we shall have to wait and see.,
And what about blogs? They keep multiplying to their own drummer, springing writers with interesting new slants to appeal to readers. Many blogs are written by established writers with well-established audiences seeking an unfettered addendum to their professional careers. And then there are the others, mere public e-mails searching for attention. It makes for a great big pot of content. A taste here and a taste there and you may find something delicious.
As for me, I do know that being a newspaper columnist provided a bit of notoriety in the San Francisco Bay Area that TheColumnists site has yet to replicate. Of course, it also gave me a salary. Newspapering was always a fun thing for me. I liked picking up a paper and checking the lead headline. This was the big news of the day, or somebody’s idea of a killer feature. The paper’s choice was important and I still do not pass a newsstand without checking the page one headline. (After one of my pieces landed on page one, I became “Front page Frymer” to my buddies, but it was a thrill not easily replicated.)
A newspaper was also a fun place to work, its own little community of hot shots seeking to prove their mettle. Whether its excitement was valid or not, it was a scene in which I felt comfortable. I am saddened by the apparent slippage today. It would be dreadful if the new economics and competition eliminated that career path for future reporters, editors and columnists.
Actually, that has already happened to a great many. I do not know what the journalism schools are telling their students, but I do not think they are urging careers in blogging.
So, indeed the world of information has changed perceptively since this site was established. The television world now seems to sprout full-time advertising shows on half its channels and then there is the so-called reality programming without scripts. I would not have guessed that that would catch on, but it has and has become a staple of TV broadcasting.
So where do we go from here?
As usual, the customers, the purveyors of this new media, will determine that. For the moment, I am troubled what makes up so many newspapers and what is on my TV. For the moment, blogging is filling a news and opinion void. But what’s next?
Well, I guess “dirty, filthy pictures” always have an audience. Whatever comes and goes, that may be the only thing that doesn’t change.
©2007 by Murry Frymer. The Murry Frymer caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The cartoons are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Nov. 26, 2007.
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