• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, August 4, 2024

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has joined the parade of daily newspapers cutting back its print schedule. 

“Beginning Oct. 7, “the Star-Telegram will reduce print publication to three days a week,” writes Steve Coffman, the president and editor of the Star-Telegram. “Print subscribers will receive Wednesday, Friday and Sunday editions of the newspaper, and they will be delivered through the U.S. mail. (That means the Sunday edition will actually arrive on Saturday). The paper will also be available at select retail locations.”

This is not earth-shattering news: McClatchy and Gannett both have been reducing their print editions throughout the country for a couple of years, although in McClatchy’s case it has “tested variations of this plan in some of its smaller markets across the country to prove it out,” Coffman says.  

He admits, “We no longer have the economies of scale that supported the printing and carrier delivery of a paper six days a week

Of course, there are risks for print newspapers and the advertisers within them. In effect, McClatchy and Gannett are entrapping their 20-century products in the 19th- and 18th-century postal system, with its ever-increasing prices and unreliability.  

This is hardly a win-win for anybody.  

What makes Coffman’s column unusual is that he seems nostalgic for the old days, although he admits there were problems. 

 “I wrote stories using an electric typewriter when I started in the news business in the mid-1980s,” he said. “It was tedious work without the ‘backspace’ and ‘delete’ keys that make life easier for us on computer keyboards.”  

Good point, and here’s one more editorial benefit of the digital revolution: If you had a typo in a print product, you were stuck with it for a day, a week or even a month. Today, you can correct it in real time. 

What’s surprising about this is that it took so long. As far back as 1966, Newsweek Magazine published an article titled “Goodbye to Gutenberg,” which all but predicted the online information age.  

“Pipe dream: As the enthusiasts see it, the answer to (the information explosion) is a vast information network capable of storing, retrieving and moving all kinds of data at high speeds all over the country or even the world,” the story said, while stating that stories would be automatically justified and processed in a computer.  

“Books and newspapers will no longer exist," Marshall McLuhan told Newsweek. “Publishing will become an active serving of the human mind. Instead of a book, people will get a research package done to suit their own needs.”

Coffman admits that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has “far more digital subscribers than print subscribers. The Star-Telegram’s future — in terms of delivering strong local journalism and in securing a sustainable business model to support that journalism — is in the digital realm.” 

Newsweek made this prediction back in the distant year of 1966: “If publishing and journalism do not buy automation, it seems, automation will buy them.” Boy, did that turn out to be true.