The death of newspaper...

Let me go ahead and say, up front, that there is no denying the fact the newspaper industry is struggling — some say valiantly, others may say feebly — to somehow merge with what has become a predominantly digital and electronic world.

Some papers have fallen, such as the once-mighty Rocky Mountain News, Baltimore Examiner and Cincinnati Post, with doors locked and once busied newsrooms silenced. Others have managed to endure, such as the New York Times, but at a heavy cost paid through mortgages and layoffs.

Advertising dollars have dwindled during the past three to four years, as automotive companies have shifted away from print and begun to rely more on the internet, sites like Craig's List have siphoned away money from newspaper classifieds and Monster has cornered the market on job hunting.

In the meantime, radio and television news agencies have stepped-up their games, some actually providing better news coverage and others simply electing to loosen the strings on journalistic ethics and run with stories based solely on rumors and heresy. Either way, they are trying to give their audiences what they want.

And that very notion becomes the heart of a debate that continues to rage through the newspaper industry and community today ... what does the customer want, and what can we do to make that happen?

I've listened to this argument rage on, from the high rise offices of some of the nation's largest newspapers to the small newsrooms of America's community newspapers, even right here at the Big Spring Herald. I've watched regimes come and go, each with a different idea of how to answer that all-encompassing riddle and I've even tried my hand a time or two at tossing out a new idea.

Unfortunately, with such a global problem, even the shiniest of ideas seem like nothing more than a toy at the bottom of a box of cereal, a gimmick marketed to someone who was already about 98 percent sure they wanted to buy your product.

The newspaper industry isn't just fighting other news media outlets — television, internet, radio, satellite radio — for your attention, either. As the popularity of social networking continues to rise, many Americans say they get a majority of their news from places like Twitter and Facebook, many of the times delivered not by reporters or journalists, but by everyday citizens.

And while I'm normally the first to reach out an embrace technology and social networking, this is where I'm forced to take exception.

This rise of lightning-fast news has come at a cost ... a very, very dear cost, in this writer's opinion. It has removed a great deal of the responsibility from reporting, forcing ethics and a need to get the story right the first time take a back seat to being the organization that breaks the story.

And that, my friends, is nothing short of tragic.

It has traded in the knowledge and experience of our newsrooms — where writers and reporters have debated and struggled for hundreds of years with the best way to report the unbiased facts — for the convenience of status updates and the flash of in-your-face video clips.

That's why we, at the Herald, do our best to not only get the stories people in the Crossroads community care about, but to also get it right the first time. That's something I'm still proud of after all these years, and it's an idea I'll continue to pour into my work in the years to come.

It's not hard to see this idea in motion. Go back to mid-March, when several local and national media outlets claimed the human remains found at the local airpark were almost certainly those of missing Colorado City teen Hailey Dunn.

There were area residents — even a former Herald employee, but we won't name names — who were just as guilty, maybe even more so, fanning the flames with rumors and heresy about the condition and appearance of the remains, saying it just had to be Dunn.

At the same time, the Herald published several articles warning readers not to jump to conclusions, that there was no evidence to support those claims and the best thing to do was to wait for investigators to do their jobs.

Of course, as we all know now, the remains were identified as belonging to an elderly male who, as of yet, has not been identified.

I only bring this up because it serves as a perfect example of why the experience and savvy of a real newsroom is still very much needed in America — and the Crossroads — today, and that's not a need I expect is going anywhere, anytime soon.

We at the Herald are far from perfect, and I have a few of my favorite silver-haired minxes who just love to call me up and chastise me when we bust a headline with a typo or make some other innocuous mistake. I suspect we'll even make some mistakes that aren't so harmless.

However, I just want you, the customers and readers of the Big Spring Herald to know we will continue to do our best to adapt to the digital and electronic age, these times that are changing so rapidly, but not at the cost of our integrity. That's a promise from me to you.