“The Fine Print”, by M.H. Schrader

Wherefore Art Thou, Journal?

(Published 26 February 1997 in the Neighborhood Journal. Posted in toto with Note 7 October 2002.)

NOTE -- Joe Starr was a reactionary Republican columnist in the Neighborhood Journal who I very rarely agreed with.

In Journalism School, you have a choice: you can either go into print journalism or broadcast journalism. It’s an either - or situation, however; a “properly” trained journalism should not do both, as print and broadcasting are vastly differently (or so they say).

Luckily, I never went to journalism school. Because of that, I was not educated enough to realize that one person can’t dabble in print AND broadcasting. And so I did.

I’ve had the privilege to “work” in print, radio, and video. This column is my newspaper contribution. I’ve also been on the radio, as a newscaster/writer/producer and as a jock. When I was living farther north, I wrote, directed, edited, etc. a weekly show for the local public access channel.

Of the three media, radio is definitely the easiest. Working in radio really boils down to spouting off your opinions into a little microphone and praying to the Almighty that the phones will not light up and the FCC will not yank the station’s license.

Nowadays, when people listen to the radio, they are doing other things, too, and so their attention is “diverted.” So a radio personality, armed with this information, can easily play the odds and stretch the caution “envelope” (a la Howard Stern), as radio lacks the permanence of the other two media. The information dispersed on the radio is saved in the listeners’ memories, which, as millennia of experimentation has shown, is not a very good place to store information, as it kind of gets corrupted somewhere along the way. And, the less the listener is paying attention to the radio, the more questionable the memory will be.

And also working in the favor of the radio personality is the size of the audience. As there are many different radio stations, there are many different choices, and so the chance of one personality on only one station reaching a large percentage of the population of any given market is small. At some of the stations I worked at I often wondered if anybody was listening, and then would proceed to throw something out over the airwaves to see if anyone was out there.

Television, on the other hand, is rehearsed, edited, sanitized, etc. (With the exception of the rare live show.) It also has a hardcopy on which information is stored which is not subject to the recollection of the viewers, i.e. videotape. (And some videotapes have proven to be quite damning.)

Television also requires vast amount of time. To make one 15 minute show generally took me 5 or 6 hours of shooting, editing, dubbing, etc. And, while it is fun being a TV “star” per se, when your show airs on public access television, the probability that more than 10 people will watch it are slim and none. After all, how many people really watch Public Access TV? It’s just a channel that you have to go through to get from ESPN to TNT. (And if you don’t have cable, you don’t get it at all.)

The newspaper, to me at least, reaches the most people. Yes, percentage wise more people watch TV than read the paper, but newspapers give much more bang for the buck. A small town newspaper such as the Journal can cover news that TV and radio stations won’t. And, newspapers cover a much broader demographics than either of the other two media. Let’s face it, there are probably not any radio stations that both me and my dad would listen to, and not many TV shows that we both like. But, we both can sit down with the newspaper; he can read his part, and I can read mine.

So, I guess you could say that deep down, I am a newspaper man. Newspapers have a sense of permanence. I have newspaper articles that date back to the Carter Administration that I periodically read. (Try and remember verbatim something said on the radio twenty years ago; I know I can’t.) As a columnist, then, I am producing something that realistically could be reread for a very long time. My future grandchildren could be reading my stack of newspapers 50 years from now and become Joe Starr fans!

Because I am a newspaper man, my day makes or breaks on whether I get my newspaper. At one time, when I lived up north, I received seven newspapers: one bi-weekly, two dailies, and four Sunday papers. Now I receive two newpapers, of which the Journal is one.

This paper is published every Wednesday, and I have come to expect it in my mailbox every Friday. Even when my column was not in this paper for those two months, I still looked forward to receiving the paper. After all, I like to keep informed.

It seems that since the beginning of the new year, I don’t receive the Journal until Saturday. And, as Mrs. Schrader can tell you, I get a little grumpy waiting for the mailman to come late Saturday afternoon.

This weekend, I did not get my paper. Perhaps all the mail has been delayed because of the holiday; it doesn’t matter. All I know is that it is now Monday morning, and I still haven’t received my Journal.

Which is, of course, quite unacceptable. Why should it take three or more days to send mail 30 miles? Something is not quite right. Maybe the planets are lined up wrong, I don’t know.

All I know is that I didn’t get my Journal this week. And I am not happy.

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All contents & “The Fine Print” © 2002 by Michael Schrader.