Newspapers holding steady in Nevada

Remember when Twitter was huge?

Yes, that was a couple of months ago. The cover of Time magazine said Twitter "will change the way we live." Then I read this week that Twitter was dead.

Long live the Next Big Thing, whatever that may be.

I've been reading for several years now about how newspapers are dead. Some of those obituaries were true, and some were premature.

Maybe you don't even know what Twitter is, and that's OK. The way things change at breakneck speed these days, if you spend a weekend camping out of range of wifi you run the risk of missing an entire social trend.

I like to look at things with a bit of historical perspective. That means I sometimes miss the hottest gossip, and I'm a bit late on the hip new catchphrase (as you can tell). But a bit of perspective is usually valuable.

Over the past century and a half, Nevada has had somewhere on the order of 450 newspapers. We're down to 43 now - a number that held steady this year even though one newspaper was folded, because another new one started.

Remember when the Comstock had 17 newspapers? Neither do I. It was before our time.

Did you know at one point in 1864 that Virginia City and Gold Hill had six competing daily newspapers? I didn't, until I looked it up.

"It was easier to start a newspaper in a hamlet than it was to find a doctor living there," wrote journalism professor Jake Highton in his book "Nevada Newspaper Days."

And what was in those newspapers - hard-hitting, investigative stories? Unbiased political reports? World news and events?

Hah.

Typically, as Highton noted, they carried "verses. essays, homilies, squibs and advice to the lovelorn." That Mark Twain guy - whose reporting mainly consisted of making up stuff he thought was funny - would not be considered much of a journalist today.

Yet his writing lives on. If I want, I can buy it for 99 cents to read on my Kindle.

To say that newspapers are dead is to miss the point. Newspapers are changing. Maybe they won't be called newspapers anymore. Maybe they won't be delivered to your doorstep. Maybe they'll all be free, or maybe you'll have to pay to read them online.

Or maybe they'll go on more or less like they are for another 100 years while a few thousand Twitters, Facebooks and MySpaces live and die. Remember when AOL was the only way for ordinary people to get to the Internet? It had 30 million customers, but that was 10 years ago.

People sometimes compare the newspaper industry to the typewriter industry. When computers came along, with "word processing," there was no longer any need for a typewriter.

I used to have two typewriters - one at home, one at work. Now I look around and I have at least six keyboards, not counting the touch pad on my phone. You have to look at what they do, not what they are.

And what newspapers do is deliver news - and advertising, crossword puzzles, the weather forecast, public notices, ball scores, coupons and usually some advice to the lovelorn - in more ways and much faster than ever.

Another thing newspapers do: Keep an eye on government. That role, like so much else in this tough economy, has diminished with cutbacks and layoffs. Still, no one else devotes the time and resources to fulfilling the responsibility that comes with the guarantee in the First Amendment of a free press.

That's not a trend. That's commitment.

Barry Smith is executive director of the Nevada Press Association.