Okay, you get it now: Newspapers everywhere are running on fumes: The Christian Science Monitor is down to one issue per week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News have closed shop; the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times are in bankruptcy and the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle must either significantly cut costs or shut down.
Readers Richard Tofel’s new biography, “Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism,” by will find many interesting parallels and, perhaps, lessons, on how to build a newspaper when technology radically changes the way readers consume news and how to survive troubled economic times.
Kilgore, once a WSJ columnist, Washington bureau chief and general manager, guided what was once an unknown newspaper to become the leading financial newspaper that it is today. Between 1929 to 1966, Kilgore helped reshape the WSJ at a time when radio became a major news source for many American and through the Great Depression, to emerge stronger than ever.
Kilgore understood readers wanted more than just news, which they could get from radio. What they also wanted to know is how the news affected their lives.
“It doesn’t have to have happened yesterday to be news,” Tofel quotes Kilgore.
Recent posts on TEE
- Newspapers still can’t put the past behind them
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer sees daily page views drop 20 percent after online-only switch
- Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be paper journos
- The Internet overtakes newspapers as top source of national and international news for Americans
I wish I could claim credit for the headline, but that comes from Stephen Colbert.
