When I was a kid every evening I would wait dutifully watching for my father to drive into the garage after another long day at the family jewelry store so that I could read the Boston Traveler (now after lots of iterations, buyouts and mergers, morphed into The Boston Herald, now run by my friend Pat Purcell). Between arrival of my father and a prompt 6:30 PM dinner, I would manage to scour the news, read about Boston events and most importantly read "the funnies".
Even today with a 20% drop in readership for The Boston Globe over the past five years, and even the highly touted (and boring) NY Times suffering a 10% drop, I still cling to two "real" newspapers a day although I now get the Journal only online pumped down to my Amazon Kindle everyday. The times, they are a changin'...
That having been said, I still read the daily paper editons of The Boston Globe and The Rutland Herald and my weekly copies of Mass High Tech and The Boston Business Journal (an absolute necessity in my business) continuing my intricate work-life balance between working in Boston and living in Vermont.
Both The Boston Globe and The Rutland Herald are very good newspapers, both Pulitizer prize winning, both trying to give coverage to international, national, and most importantly their own definitions of the local news. Interestingly enough, in a world of homogenous news coverage where every newsfeed steals from one another while they all attempt to simulate the soundbites of CNN and Fox, there's really not too much difference between the front pages of either The Boston Globe or The Rutland Herald.
Not so true for my other local Vermont newspaper, The Manchester Journal...
As the readers of the monthly The Competitive Edge newsletter know, I live in a village of 647 people, and the "big city" is Manchester, 15 miles away with a population around 2,400 where every Thursday, The Manchester Journal, is published free of charge and full of all the news that is fit and unfit to print. Founded in 1861, The Manchester Journal publishes a four section paper, with local news, business events and even in an era of Craig's and Angie's lists, a healthy collection of classifieds.
While my friends at The Boston Globe yesterday had front page headlines of...
Clinton and Obama Unity
Obesity
Zimbabwe
Double dipping retierees
The Olympics
The Manchester Journal's front page detailed...
Summer festival approved by Selectmen
Dog license change OK'd
Hunters still leery of proposed deer plan
Doctor leaving medical facility
Actually very interesting news, and although I wasn't much interested in reading anything about dog licenses (although I did), I did learn that my own internist, Dr. Jim, has left town "for professional reasons", which will have me checking my medical records later today and scrambling to find a new doc in a two doc town.
The bottom line of this is that even in our crazy, multi-tasked, multi media, message-bombarded world, there's still a very valid (and relaxing) place for newspapers although readership is sinking like a stone, and the newspaper readership among my students at MIT and at Tufts doesn't even register a percentage point. Personally, I still look forward to reading the newspaper everyday along with the quirky weekly edition of the Manchester Journal. If 3 or 5 years from now, that reading experience is all on my Kindle then I'm also cool with that. Like everything in business and maybe in life, it's vital to innovate, adapt and morph with the times...
...thoughts from the Vermont office of The Competitive Edge.
