We had our first letter to the editors today, via e-mail. The fact of it more than the content poses an interesting question we hadn't thought to answer yet, but let's consider the content first, anyway.
A reader e-mailed to say she enjoyed this week's issue of the American Fork Weekly Gazette, and that two articles in particular made her laugh. She said we should write for Eddie Murphy. We're a very serious publication, and, even if we weren't, I don't think Eddie Murphy would be my first choice of comedian -- I'll have to ask the other half of the Editorial Board if he prefers Murphy -- but we appreciate the compliment.
One of the articles was intentionally a little playful, though also intended to be informative. It seemed that it might be better to demonstrate American Fork City's online, searchable Municipal Code, insofar as possible in print, than just to mention that it's now available and throw in a link. This led to an exploration of the possible delinquency of a fictional canine named Rover. Someone laughed? Yeah, we deserve that. We even like that.
The other article was trying to be serious, but the aforementioned reader managed to laugh at it anyway. This was the article about the breakfast workshop on business writing. What tickled was the juxtaposition near the end of tight City budgets and American Fork Mayor James H. Hadfield's work in the kitchen at the event. I wonder, if the writer or the editor had noticed that the juxtaposition might tickle a little, would we have acted to eliminate the possibility of slight mirth in a relatively serious story? Maybe not; it's not as if it were a story about something really grim, like a plane crash or a massive earthquake. A little mirth might be okay.
Such is the life of writers and editors, for whom every sentence, every phrase, every word is somehow a decision or three or ten.
That's already more attention than people laughing at our articles deserves, at least this week. The point here is actually the larger question: Do we publish letters to the editor or not? I've been to all the Editorial Board meetings (two), and I'm pretty sure we never discussed it. I guess we will now.
If such letters suddenly start appearing, I guess you'll know (a) we decided that we publish them, and (b) people are actually writing them.
. . . Unless we want to make them up and then publish them. No, no, we're the wrong sort of publication for that. (I suspect a much older e-mail publication, the Dilbert Newsletter, of doing that. And does The Onion have letters? Please note, the American Fork Weekly Gazette may be a publication for the whole family, written by people who could write for a superstar comedian if they weren't so clean-cut and serious about the news, but The Onion, for all its virtues, isn't quite a family publication. Fair warning, you know?)
So . . . letters to the editor. I guess you could write one and see if we publish it. There's a link over yonder for e-mailing the Editorial Board.
Would you invest in a telegraph if your town sat next to a Pony Express station and had no telegraph pole?
Before the transcontinental railroad, a ship could cross the Pacific Ocean faster than the Pony Express could travel from the West to the East Coast. So in 1848 the news of gold in California reached Hong Kong before it reached Boston. Thousands of Chinese risk takers set sail for what they called the Golden Mountain. They populated California.
The Pony Express has long been replaced by the telegraph, radio, TV, and the personal computer. But as someone who follows the evolution of the news business, I often wonder whether the 21st century's version of the Pony Express won't be the PC but the cellphone. According to Morgan Stanley, more users will access the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.
The mobile phone's explosive growth might be the reason why news entrepreneurs like me think of skipping the flashy Web page altogether and focus on mobile apps or mobile-friendly websites to deliver news content. Today two-thirds of the world's population has a mobile phone subscription -- four billion people -- and there will be five billion wireless subscribers worldwide by the end of this year, according to some estimates.
If you were launching a news publication today, how much effort would you put into mobile delivery, knowing that in the US over a quarter adults now read news on their cellphones?
"Mobile will soon have more reach than TV, radio or the Internet," a Google executive said this week. "We're looking at mobile across the entire world as a global play."
Maybe the real questions for delivering news in a local market is, where do your customers access the news, and what kind of news are you producing? Headlines are ideal for cellphones, where speed of delivery is key. But detailed stories are mostly read on paper or a screen that is larger than four inches in size. In American Fork, where the number of iPhone or iPad users will never break any record, it might be best to stick with what people have -- email. Because email is ubiquitous, reaching even the cell phone, you can reach your readers at the place they access most: their Inboxes, wherever they are.
In case you haven't already noticed -- and let's face it, you probably haven't -- American Fork Gazette stories are now syndicated. You can see them on the Deseret News American Fork page. We're already moving up in the world!
What do you think of the plight of the newspaper industry? Advertisement and subscription revenues are down; the readership has moved from the traditional format to the free, digital one; and online ads haven't generated enough money to make newspaper websites profitable. Internet users spent less than two minutes a day on news sites in 2009, but close to six hours a month on Facebook. (See my recent editorial here).
Legendary newspapers have shut down, including the Rocky Mountain News. Others have completely abandoned the paper format. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is now SeattlePi.com. The Christian Science Monitor is no longer on the newsstand, but completely on the Web. US News and World Report publishes one paper copy a month; the rest is digital. The Salt Lake Tribune's parent company filed for bankruptcy protection last month, and media giant Gannett has laid off hundreds of reporters. The New York Times announced it would start charging for online content in 2011, but not in the same way as the Wall Street Journal.
This is a historic transition, with pioneer-like business try-outs, much like when newspapers were haphazardly started in the Old West. Did you know that Utah territory at one time had a newspaper death rate of 90 percent? Six newspapers were started and shut down in American Fork alone before the Citizen, founded in 1903, became American Fork's main source of information for over a century.
What kind of model will eventually work for the news business? Will it be something new, like the iPad?
Henry Ford once said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
What are your thoughts?
We're building a new electronic news service just for American Fork. You'll want to subscribe, but we thought you also might like to watch.
Several weeks ago, after long reflection, I decided that other projects needed the time I have been spending on American Fork politics and government and other local topics at LocalCommentary.com, particularly at my blog. After that, but before my verbose, multipart announcement and explanation of that decision at my blog, a completely new project popped up.
One Daniel Riewe (a pen name, pronounced as "Reeve"), a relatively new resident of American Fork and a Delta Airlines pilot, e-mailed me to tell me he enjoyed my blog and wondered if I might be interested in something he was starting in his spare time (not his cockpit time!). Noting the absence of a local newspaper, after the American Fork Citizen's demise, and considering also the understandable limitations of American Fork coverage in other cities' newspapers (the Daily Herald, the Deseret News, and the Salt Lake Tribune) -- he decided to charge into the breach. He didn't know then that I was already partially retreating from the breach and wishing someone else would step in.
The project is The American Fork Weekly Gazette -- a name with some local history we'll review one of these days. I'd call it a newspaper, but there's no paper involved. It's an all-electronic news service. At its heart, it's a weekly e-mail message with stories related to American Fork. So far, Daniel has written almost all of them, but he talked me into writing one a few weeks ago. There's also a Web site, where you'll find the same current stories, a good archive of past stories, and a link for subscribing to the weekly e-mail delivery.
Daniel and I exchanged some e-mails, then met for a long lunch or two and discussed the possibilities. Now he and I are the Editorial Board. We really are just getting started. For now, at least, we don't see this as a profit-making venture, but as a useful civic activity. Part of its appeal to me is that it is picking up part of the role I decided to drop at LocalCommentary.com -- news and information about American Fork -- and already doing it better in some ways. And it doesn't rely entirely on me, which is a major advantage for almost any venture. I'll probably do some more writing from time to time, but mostly I'm doing other things, such as setting up this blog, which at least for a while will be hosted at LocalCommentary.com. I don't know whether the sort of American Fork-related commentary and analysis I just stopped doing at my blog will ever appear in the Gazette; if some does, I don't expect to be writing it.
Now, about this blog. This is not where we're publishing the news stories. Here the story is not the news itself. It's the project of building and running a local news service. We've never done this precise thing before, and we think that some glimpses behind the scenes might be interesting to more than ourselves. And you've probably already guessed another motive: we think blogging about the experience might pull in some subscribers to the Gazette and also help us recruit some talented American Forkers to help with various parts of the project. If you're a writer, photographer, Web guru, or journalism student; if you're interested in American Fork; and if you think you might like to help a little or a lot . . .
I'll bet we can find something useful for you to do. There aren't many tangible benefits, except that you've been wanting to get more involved in the community, and this is one way to do it. And among the myriad ways people find to get their names and work in print, helping out at the American Fork Weekly Gazette is a fairly positive choice. It's a lot less likely to get you incarcerated than, say, stealing a Volvo.
At the very least, we're betting than you'll want to subscribe. You can do that here. Right now, we e-mail the Gazette to you on Friday afternoons. Down the road, the day of the week could change, or we could move to two mailings a week, or something different.
If you like what you see -- both the reality and the potential -- the next thing you might to do is help us "go viral." In other words, tell your friends, so they can subscribe, too, and so they can tell their friends.
If you find that you want to do more than that, use one of the links to the right to contact either member of the Editorial Board.
Daniel and I will be blogging here periodically about our adventures. Let us know if you find it interesting, or if you have specific questions or suggestions.
