‘Future Shock?’ Hey, Tell Us About It

Forty years ago this summer, as Geneva Patch editor Rick Nagel and I were preparing to enter the eighth grade at Coultrap Middle School, a Fortune Magazine columnist named Alvin Toffler published a book titled Future Shock, in which he asserted that by the beginning of the 21st century, not only would the world be continuing to move briskly into a post-industrial, computer-based information society, but that the pace of this technological change would accelerate—swiftly and relentlessly. Toffler's blunt warning was basically that workers would have no choice but to deal with this much-accelerated pace of change—or be left in the dust, perhaps literally unemployable.

Five years later, in 1975, Rick and I both graduated from Geneva High and headed downstate to the University of Illinois—to study to become print journalists anyway.

It's certainly not that Toffler was being dismissed by his contemporaries as a crackpot—anything but. By the time Rick and I were deep into our practical training at the U of I's journalism school in 1977 and '78, nearly every educated person had either read Future Shock in its entirety or in extensive excerpts, and Toffler's theories were being given increasing credence.

In our own new profession of newspapering, we saw his thesis coming to full fruition (we thought!) in the swift demise, just that decade, of the 100-year-old Linotype machine in favor of electronic typesetting. We realized that as young editors in the 1980s, we wouldn't be hustling into pressrooms making on-deadline changes to be placed on the press in the form of newly-cast lines of hot lead as had our predecessors of just a decade before; instead they would be remakes of smooth aluminum offset printing plates onto which our "pasted-up" pages of electronically-generated type had been photographically scanned.

By the time I worked the copydesk in spring 1979 at The Daily Illini, I was editing reporters' copy and drafting headlines, not with a blue pencil on typewritten sheets, but rather on screen, on one of 10 "video-display terminals" that the publisher had just purchased—for $10,000 apiece.

(If you just did a coffee spit-take all over your laptop, I'll give you a moment now to mop up.)

Anyway, we felt so cutting-edge. Our more visionary journalism instructors told us fanciful tales that spring of how ("probably toward the latter half of your careers," I recall Prof. Gene Gilmore saying) we'd be assembling entire newspaper pages, in their exact appearance, right on our computer screens! The shorthand term for that, WYSIWYG (for What You See Is What You Get), seemed so exotic and futuristic.

Wow, Rick and I thought, as we sat next to each other in Assembly Hall that May to receive our bachelor's degrees, Alvin Toffler sure was right—but we also naively thought he and his thesis were probably finished revolutionizing our line of work, at least for our careers.

As it turned out, our industry's revolution hadn't even gotten started.

For one thing, the technology progressed on the equipment we worked on rather faster than our professors predicted: Both Rick and I (who happen to have been born eight days apart in July 1957) were hustling to learn how to assemble full pages on screen, not "toward the latter half of our careers" but instead by our 30th birthdays in 1987. (Rick had taken my spot at The Republican by that time; I had gone in search of a few more dollars, and nights off, working at a construction trade magazine in Chicago.)

But the hardware and software we worked on was piddling stuff compared with what hit a bit less than a decade later; the swift development of an entity that would revolutionize the planet—but seemingly few industries more radically than the news business: the Internet.

As American newspapers—large dailies and community weeklies alike—scrambled to establish an Internet presence during roughly the 1995-97 period, nearly all of their publishers made a business decision that seemed logical enough at the time, but which in retrospect was a truly disastrous strategic error. Their thinking was basically this: We have this very expensive newsgathering and production apparatus in place, and we're making a modest profit on it—not great, but decent. This new Internet technology costs very little additional to operate—so hell, let's just offer it free as an extra service. We can charge our advertisers a few bucks more to run ads on the Web edition as well; it's value-added. And we'll go from there.

What very few publishers foresaw was that, a decade into the new century, that "extra add-on" of their Internet presence had in most cases become the primary venue to which most people would go for their news—nearly everyone under age 35. And, because of decisions made a dozen years before, everyone had become accustomed to getting it for free; they weren't inclined to pay to subscribe. Moreover, advertisers, while certainly now needing an Internet presence, generally didn't feel they needed the newspapers to provide it.

All of which is why the great majority of newspapers in this country are at or close to the brink of financial ruin. It's why editorial staffs are being slashed in a desperate attempt at survival.

And it is why, I must add delicately, my great friend Rick Nagel became "available" for the first time in his career, when he was cut from a management position at Sun-Times Media earlier this year.

Now, those who are unsympathetic to us ink-stained wretches might respond: "Hey, too bad, but it's the same thing that happened to blacksmith shops when the auto industry exploded into being around 1915, too. Business moves on."

Fair enough. Except that, unlike blacksmith shops, when small-town newspapers die, a major component of the American democratic balance starts to die with them. All over America, city council and school board meetings are going under-reported or un-reported altogether; public budgets are going unexamined; public officials, being human beings, perhaps are starting to do whatever they can get away with.

Enter the concept of Patch, created in February 2009, financially underwritten by one of the very first worldwide Internet pioneers, AOL. The concept is disarmingly simple: We can do quality community journalism, using the economies of national scale and the inherent economies of the Internet. We will create a network of many hundreds of good, tightly and locally focused small-town newspapers—just without the ink and paper.

If Patch is to succeed in any given community, the key is to get the best available professional journalist in that community to serve as its editor.

To Geneva's great good fortune, Geneva Patch has gotten exactly that in Rick Nagel. (Fortunately, as noted above, he was available.)

When I joined The Geneva Republican in May 1979, it was a venerated institution of more than 130 years. It was the community's paper of record—and roughly 90% of Geneva's households wrote a check every year for an annual subscription. (Show me a single newspaper in America that can claim anything close today. You can't.)  I like to think I helped to improve it slightly during the six years I worked for it from 1979-85.  But I can tell you for certain that in the 15 years he worked on it, from 1985-2000, Rick Nagel improved it greatly.

I truly believe that just in its second week, Rick is well on his way to making Geneva Patch this community's premier news outlet. For Geneva, Illinois, AOL and Patch could have gotten no one more connected, more experienced or more talented.

Or, more dedicated. He's been working at this thing seven days a week since June.

Which is the only downside of this whole story, from my point of view.  Rick and I have enjoyed playing golf together for 35 years.

And I begin to fear that we may never do so again.

Editor's note: I guarantee that Kurt and I will play golf again, very soon. :)