Growing Up One of My Favorite Daily

¶ … growing up one of my favorite daily activities was the pleasure of reading the daily newspaper. The daily newspaper was my primary source of information regarding the local community, my favorite athletic teams, entertainment news, and, of course, the comics. At the time, in the days before the proliferation of the internet, I never envisioned that the daily newspaper that I had known since I was a small child would ever stop appearing at my front door. Yet, just a few years later, the reality that this might occur is not only possible it is highly probable.

The recent years have not been kind to the newspapers (Perez-Pena, 2008). Even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are experiencing decreasing readership and lessening advertisement interest. Cities that had once eagerly supported three or four different daily newspapers are now struggling to support one. In many moderately sized communities the daily newspaper has already become history. Papers once owned by such notable journalists as William Randolph Hearst, Horace Greeley, and Joseph Pulitzer are largely gone.

Strange as it may seem, however, this is not the first time that the newspaper industry has suffered through a period of decline. During the depression years, the industry suffered through a similar period. The classic example is the City of New York which once entertained upwards of twelve daily newspapers. In the early twentieth century, however, the New York daily papers began to fall like dominoes and one of the papers that was facing possible extinction was the fabled Wall Street Journal. The Journal had built its reputation on quality journalism but, because of its narrow niche readership, those involved in the financial arena, it could not successfully compete with newspaper giants such as the New York Times. Along came the foresighted Barney Kilgore who through some revolutionary approaches turned a struggling newspaper with a total circulation of 30,000 into a newspaper giant whose circulation numbers eventually reached nearly two million (Tofel, 2009). Kilgore's success was based on his altering the paper's content, incorporating the idea of a daily news summary on the front page, and popularizing the practice of beginning feature stories with an anecdote. Additionally, he converted the Journal from being basically a New York publication into a newspaper that not only covered national news but was also nationally distributed as well. The result was phenomenal and the Journal began to enjoy increased readership and some of the best advertising rates of any publication.

Some may consider that the example of the Wall Street Journal is an isolated event and has no bearing on the industry in general but such argument fails to understand why Kilgore's approach was so successful. There was nothing particularly unique or novel about Kilgore's tactics. Kilgore's argued that the Wall Street Journal needed to do something that made it distinctive. It had to stop being like every other newspaper and adopt business and journalist practices that made it different than anyone else. By abandoning its financial news coverage only and taking on a more national approach, the Journal broadened its base. But broadening its base was not enough, Kilgore also changed its format and delivered the news on a national basis but did so from a financial point-of-view. No one else anywhere was able to offer the same product that the Wall Street Journal could and Kilgore converted this into journalistic gold. In order to make the new Journal a success, Kilgore made it worthy of the reader's time.

In making the Wall Street Journal into a financial and industry success story, Kilgore had to make difficult decisions. He changed the way that the stories were written; he streamlined the paper's operation; and he began offering stories that no other paper would or could. In the process he angered a great number of people but his newspaper prospered.