THE BULL
Holiday time is over, which this year lent us the ability to have maybe a few extra days off during Christmas and New Years Day, but the reality hits, at least in my mind, when January hits. This year, after my 17th change of the calendar since moving to Clay County.
There’s no doubt that since coming to the Clay County News a lot has changed with news media. We have online news outlets that have started, picking up so many good journalists from the failing daily newspapers in the state.
I’m not going to lie, Warren Buffett and his Berkshire-Hathaway organization have had plenty to do with the downfall of the daily newspaper business. By in large, the changes that I have seen in the business I’ve been in since way back in the day that I worked for my parents in the Shelton and Gibbon newspapers, as a high school student, and after my college years, the climbing mountain of how news is delivered has become overwhelming to the community newspaper business.
Social media has created a mantra of sorts that what appears on social media is “the gospel” of news consumption. It’s just the way people get their information...whether or not it’s true.
I’m not saying that social media is what has totally led to the shortfall of what I do for a living, but it’s also had a very strong hand in leading us to where we all live today, me included!
I’m one of very few that have lived through numerous “cycles of newspapering” in my 61 years of life.
I’ve lived with my parents working unimaginable hours when they changed over from the old linotype (hot lead) era of putting a paper on the street. I’ve seen the run of migrating to the “offset era” of newspapers, which meant you spent hours and hours in a darkroom developing pictures, type for stories, and laying out pages on a light table with hot wax sticking galleys of type on a layout page. Then, eventually putting out a newspaper on a computer screen, as we do it today.
Newspapering isn’t what it used to be, but it still holds a strong value to how information is released.
Social media gives you “nuggets of information.” It doesn’t share the whole story. It features, for the most part, a score and a few videos or pictures of game or event action. As long as I’m still in this business, details of scoring, defensive stats, and how a team wins or even loses a game, match, or event still matters...at least to me it does.
Some may say that it’s “wasted space,” so to speak, and while it’s great to see color images of events, or games online, the story goes much deeper than a few pictures or videos. It records history for the long haul.
So, as we begin 2026, it is once again, for the 17th year, time to cinch up the saddle, do what we do and try to provide you all the “rest of the story,” which social media does not provide.
Call me old world, and that is fine if you do, you can even call me old, but there is still great value in providing the whole story.
I know that several papers have cut back on coverage of things, and that’s what they choose.
I’ve never been in this business for awards, or even a “pat on the back,” but as “old world as I am,” I won’t cutback on the value that I feel small town/county newspapers bring to the table each week, even if the information is 7-10 days after the fact that events happened.
