Mission to Mears

The "retreaded," not retired, Walter Mears offered up some first-hand history of the newspaper and wire service as well as some poignant predictions for the industry's future.

Mears explained to our class that the early wire service, mostly a medium of exchange and creature of the American newspaper industry, soon found itself faced with the dilemma of "adapt or die" with the explosion of television and broadcast news.

These new mediums meant that stories from the wire would not always be the first time that the public would hear about certain news items, introducing an impending competition that it simply couldn't afford to ignore.

So adapt it did, and since then, the Associated Press has been responsible for most of its own reporting, striving to produce copy that extends beyond just the lead and gives something more to readers than what they could already know.

Currently, 50 percent of all stories found in any newspaper are from AP, but that's not the true success of the organization, Mears said.

While our nation's newspapers now struggle for survival due to an inability to properly adapt to the new digital age, AP has realized the digitization of news, created new products in response and priced them accordingly.

This proves to be a double-edged sword for newspapers, as not only did they not figure out a way to make money from the new digital mediums, but as a result, they are forced to pay the steep prices of the wire to fill half of their daily issues.

And now, these print organizations are succumbing to bankruptcy one after another, unable to reconcile incoming revenue against mounds of debt, often originating from these wire fees.

Amidst all this gloom and doom, Mears does have hope for the news industry, but he places the responsibility of its ultimate survival on our generation.

"As long as there are people willing to inform rather than argue, they can survive," Mears said.

He added that to do this, aspiring news journalists must adapt to be more entrepreneurial, use multiple media tools and be prepared not to work for a formal news organization, but rather sell their work out to those that want it.

Overall, Mears is confident that the basic structure of news organizations (in some way) will remain because we will find that we cannot function without them.

"If you lose the umpire, then you wind up with argument instead of information," alluding to our nation's current media diet of entertainers and echo chambers.

But more than that, any apathetic demeanor toward keeping these watchdogs serves as an "invitation to all the modern-day robber barons to keep doing what they've been doing that got us into this mess," Mears said.

In other words, if the umpire isn't looking, the players will steal the bases and the game, until they're called out and held responsible for their actions.

Cheating ruins the game for everyone--as we have seen--and I consider it a duty and a privilege to serve as a future umpire.