Actually, our audience has never been greater

The end is nigh. Again.

The same harpies that began circling newspapers with the advent of radio peck at the medium now, with the evolution of the Internet from novelty to natural, everyday tool.

Yet the ol' buggy trundles along, through the years, decades, centuries. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press with movable type 569 years ago still eclipses the World Wide Web, however noteworthy the progression of how we disseminate information.

My profession has been in transition, and reportedly in peril, since I came out of the woods and into a tiny newsroom in Quincy, Calif., as cub reporter in 1985. Floppy disks really were floppy then.

People pasted waxed strips of words, fingers sometimes bleeding from cutting those strips, to make the pages that wound up as plates on the press. Color photographs were a monthlong project.

Supposedly hidebound, newspaper work has meant nothing so much as constant change throughout my career.

If anything, the pace will pick up from here. From trying to avoid nicking myself with a knife in paste-up to figuring out how to get a color cell phone camera image online faster, we've come a long way in a pretty short time.

We don't even need paper for the newspapers to keep doing what they do better than anyone else: Keep their communities informed with a level of detail unmatched by any other news organization, and be available at the audience's convenience rather than the other way around.

If anything, the Internet will give us more of an advantage. We can use our news staff size advantage to beat radio and television where they used to have the edge in timely reports, especially with breaking news.

Now we can be there first. We can put together the most comprehensive report.

And we can get it to you by text, audio and video.

We can post all the still photos we shot at the scene or the game or event instead of the one or two that make it to print. And we can accept your text, photos and videos for, er, publication too. It is a brave new world developing fast.

The problem for the print press is the same for TV and radio and Web-only sites. The audience has so much to choose among. Specialty publications and sites. Cable television. Satellite and Internet radio.

Everyone stands to lose, basically. News has become the house divided, and divided again, and again.

Google succeeds as a unifier, while being a parasite with just enough symbiotic help to news outlets that we all preen for the top of the searches for the information we provide.

Google and the other search engines let us handle the heaviest investment - gathering information - and then they put in front of a wider audience. Very clever. There's just enough in it for us to cooperate while we all compete for audience share and advertising.

The small community papers, such as The Record-Courier, may have it the best of all. Our print circulation remains at a near record high even through the throes of the current downturn, and our Web site viewership is soaring. Our overall reach has never been greater.

More people read the paper, one way or another, than ever before. That doesn't exactly feel like the end to me.

The key for the hometown papers is to stay close to their communities. By definition then, a paper close to its community will see its fortunes rise and fall in synch with that community. We're all in it together.

The end may surely be nigh, this time. But somehow I doubt it.

n Don Rogers, publisher of The Record-Courier, can be reached at 782-5121, ext. 208, or drogers@recordcourier.com.