Connections: Good Press
Perhaps you were among those who saw the feature about The Star in The New York Times on Memorial Day. Such positive publicity, and the subsequent rally of support from readers and the advertisers upon whom we depend, is no small thing. It’s not every day that reporters and publishers get a pat on the back and, for this, we are truly grateful.
To me, the takeaway wasn’t that Jim Rutenberg — who is now writing a weekly column on media in The Times’s Business Section — wanted to let a larger market know that The Star is a quality paper worth reading, or even that a really old, small-town, family-run newspaper could survive well after the forecast demise-date of print-newspaper journalism. What really struck home was his point that a small-town paper like ours, with deep roots in the community, can be of unique service to that community in ways no other form of journalism yet can.
On one matter, however, I am not sure I entirely see things as Mr. Rutenberg does. He wrote that The Star had thrived despite the advent of telephone, radio, movies, television, glitzy magazines, and the Internet — but, he warned, “Like its big-city brethren, it faces its worst, and possibly last, threat from the web.”
We don’t see it that way.
It’s true that how people are alerted to what’s happening around them is light-years removed from how it was done even 10 years ago. This was brought home to me by The New York Times story itself: Many acquaintances, and my husband, read the story first on their iPhones, or even via Facebook, the day before it appeared in the paper.
But who is producing the content that is passed around with such lightning speed?
Quite often — and especially in the case of local hard-news reporting, as opposed to pop-culture features, gossip, or human-interest stories — that content comes directly from the old local sources: newspapers like ours.
Mr. Rutenberg painted a picture of The Star as a traditional organization by contrasting it with a new magazine out of Montauk called Whalebone. He wrote that Whalebone had the “stylishly beachy sensibility of its surfer millennial founders,” and went on to quote its founders’ description of it as “subversive media,” rather than a publication. The free glossy magazine runs advertising “seamlessly, and openly, in the editorial content,” Mr. Rutenberg wrote.
In the years that Ev Rattray and I edited The Star, we kept the standards alive that had been instilled at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Core to those principles was a value that I believe is timeless: holding a hard and fast line between content and advertising. Blurring the lines between the two might possibly be all well and good when it comes to lifestyle articles — well, no, in my view it never is, but someone else might argue so — but there is never a place for “sponsored” reporting when it comes to serious news about government, corruption, crime, education, or, really, anything of substance.
I was there when The Star transitioned from manual typewriters to big desktop computers, and prided myself on catching on to word-processing (via an olde tyme program called XyWrite) early and without a hitch. It’s now the role of The Star’s editor, David Rattray, to keep pace with the changes in the ways texts and photographs are spread via social media, and to uphold the tenets of serious journalism. We’ve had our share of viral stories, too.
In the article, Mr. Rutenberg quoted David’s acknowledgement that unexpected and perhaps revolutionary changes were possible as the delivery systems for journalism continue to evolve: “I can only see out about 18 months,” David said.
“Regardless of what happens after that,” Mr. Rutenberg wrote at the end of the piece, “this much is true now: The Star still shines for all; after 131 years, it endures. Its new media cousins should be so fortunate.”
And to that, I’d like to add a P.S.: Watch for The Star’s own glossy magazine, which is about to be launched. You have our promise that no one paid to be included in a story.