Another View: Death of print is death of a community

This guest column is an apology of sorts. An apology for the small part I may have played in the death of newspapers – a concern that Associate Publisher Bill Sullivan addressed here in his recent column headlined "Here's a simple way to help your local newspaper." Sullivan was concerned that a local high school teacher built a lesson around the notion that newspapers are today irrelevant. His column hit home with me. For the last 35 years, I have advised all of the journalism programs at Casa Roble High School – where we have not printed a hard copy newspaper since 2006. Don't get me wrong. I love print. I love the smell of fresh ink. I love snapping a tabloid tight. I love a long form feature and the slow measure of time it takes to read one. But for the last 15 years, I came to believe I would be doing my scholastic journalism students a disservice to prepare them for a future in journalism where print matters less and less. It takes only a quick look at the sadly scaled back version of the Sacramento Bee to see that scholastic journalists have little future there. (And let's be honest—who has the Bee delivered anymore?) It wasn't always so. I was slow to buy in. I remember attending a scholastic journalism conference in the late 90s where one presenter predicted that newspapers were not long for this world. He said that the newspapers we knew would all disappear in the cyber universe of this thing called the internet. We snickered. No one could really live without a Bee porched on their front stoop every morning – or give up their leisurely Sunday New York Times. But by 2006, I was on board. Because the times had changed – like the convention speaker said they would. It became important that my students become multimedia experts – even if I didn't have any tech skills to help them (and still don't). They needed to learn to combine text, images, sound, videos and graphics to tell an interesting story. They needed to know the line between broadcast journalism and print journalism had blurred. And mostly, they needed to know their readership had moved on. Just like the local teacher whom Bill Sullivan referenced, I saw the writing on the wall. I read five newspapers a day myself – none of them hard copy. And best of all – I had an iPhone in my own pocket, complete with news alerts, weather reports and top videos of the day. Print was dead – at least it was at Casa Roble. But at what cost? Turns out it was the loss of community – exactly what Sullivan argued in his column. Indeed high school newspapers are the ultimate community newspaper. It's the one community that everyone reading this column remembers vividly – even if you hated high school, like me. It's a community you connected to – even if you refused to connect. Whether or not a hard copy newspaper provides my students a valid education in journalism is an open question – but when 1,300 students walked through our Senior Square, each holding a copy of the latest edition of the Casa Chronicle, they were connected. Whether they approved of the student profiled in Campus Life or not. Whether they attended the basketball game featured in Sports or not. Whether they kept the paper in their Jansport to show mom, or tossed it on the floor of the EF cafeteria with an eye roll – they were connected. And that's what newspapers like The Folsom Telegraph and its other regional newspapers in Placer County do. Connect us. To a community. Our community. Senior Reporter Rachel Zirin makes it her business to know Folsom, authoring several pieces a week for The Telegraph that may feature a local community member or look for the latest word on the street. Sports Editor Matt Long fills three pages a week on local high school sports – the grist on any community newspaper. Even Bill Sullivan gets his hands dirty, taking photos or writing last minute stories for the Gold Country Media flagship publication that was named a top five community paper by the California News Publishers Association. (Bet you didn't know that!) Relevant news? I suppose we could argue. But it is relevant to Zirin, Long and Sullivan, who work hard to cover Folsom (and who, I'm betting, have a high school journalism teacher somewhere who would love to see their bylines). It is relevant to the subjects of their profiling and reporting. And most importantly, it is relevant to us – the members of this community. Because we won't read these stories in the Times. Or Politico. Or even the Bee. Here we are connected. And to all students I discouraged from connecting to this community, I apologize. Dan Austin is an area high school journalism instructor and a resident of Granite Bay.