Package different, essentials stay the same

The first newscast I ever delivered on the radio was 18 minutes long, including the commercials. I started reading at 7:37 a.m. after Paul Harvey News and Comment, and I filled the time until the 7:55 a.m. ABC newscast.

Nowadays, a radio newscast runs about three minutes, if the station carries news at all. I remember playing audio clips that ran 30-40 seconds. Today’s sound bites are in the neighborhood of 10.

The first comic book I ever bought cost me 10 cents and was 32 pages long, including the ads. Twenty years earlier, that dime would have bought 64 pages; 10 years earlier, it was 48. The last one I saw for sale was still 32 pages but it was priced around $3.99, and the pages were narrower than they’d been in 1961.

When I started my first job at a supermarket, we stocked the shelves with 3-pound cans of coffee. Now those cans hold about 2 pounds and a fraction. Remember half-gallon packs of ice cream? They’re a quart and a half these days.

Stuff changes. It gets shorter, more expensive, smaller or all of the above. The reasons are almost always economic: The businesses raise the price to cover their rising costs, or they reduce the size of the product so they can hold the price steady.

When DC Comics raised the price of their books to 12 cents, they ran a full-page text ad to explain why. I still remember appreciating that explanation.

This newspaper isn’t what it was even a few years ago. The Shawano Leader is a weekly. It shares about half of its content with the Oconto County Times Herald and Wittenberg-Birnamwood Enterprise-News; the other half is unique to each community.

The reasons are economic, of course. The semi-merged papers began as an emergency reaction to the pandemic-related business lockdowns. Advertisers ordered to close their doors had no need to buy ads. Our choices were to go smaller or go away.

Businesses are reopening and rebuilding, and so are we, but some of those advertisers are struggling to recover and others did not survive. So it’s hard to say when or if the papers will become separate entities again. We consider ourselves fortunate to be among the survivors, especially since the newspaper business had already been shrinking for more than a decade.

We’ve adapted, too, of course. The local news and sports you used to see in your daily paper is now posted online at www.newmedia-wi.com every day. The local news and sports you used to wait to see in the weekly papers is now available every day.

The staff is smaller than it was, partly because of economics and partly because it’s not easy to find help in these times. We’re working on that. Know any good reporters looking for a change? Send them our way.

What hasn’t changed is the commitment of the people who are still here turning out the news and sports for you. These are our communities, and we’re here to tell their stories — the triumphs and the tragedies and the beauty and the warts and all.

The package is different, but there’s still stuff here that you won’t find anywhere else.

Boy, do we appreciate that you’ve stuck with us through all of what the past year — years — have brought. Thank you for every news tip, ad, subscription or single-copy purchase. Thank you for talking with friends about the stories you see here. Heck, thank you for complaining, because complaints mean you care enough to let us know what we can do better.

I hope I’ve helped you understand why we’re smaller and don’t cost a dime anymore. I hope I’ve reassured you that our mission hasn’t changed. I hope you’ll stick around and help us tell our community’s amazing story together.

Warren Bluhm is the editor-in-chief for NEW Media. Readers can contact him at wbluhm@newmedia-wi.com.