Lord, I hope those newspaper survive

Former BJ staffer Dick McBane, now retired in Geogia, quit reading the Atlanta Journal-Consititution for a little weekly that suits his needs better. Read on:

I'm coming up on five years in Georgia now, and stopped taking the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about six months ago. Instead, we are taking the Gwinnett Daily Post. Gwinnett County is a large county, both in population and geography, and the Daily Post is, in my opinion, a very good "little" paper; comprehensive in its local coverage which is what the county needs. It also has better coverage of the state government than the AJC had. Plus, it has some excellent local columnists.

The latter is the reason for this note. Darrell Huckaby, one of the local columnists, had one in today's paper about the survival of newspapers. You can see it on line at www.gwinnettdailypost.com. Maybe grist for the blog.

Or, maybe it's just that I started in this business almost 60 years ago (fall 1949) when I was a high school freshman and went to work at the Garrettsville Journal; truly, a life-time gone by.
Dick

Here are the first graphs from Huckaby’s column headlined:

Lord, I hope these newspapers survive
By Darrell Huckaby
A fellow asked me an interesting question the other day, although honesty compels me to admit that the circumstances were a bit bizarre. He was my proctologist and he was doing what proctologists do when he popped the question, so to speak. I was caught a bit off-guard, given the situation, and am not sure I gave him a particularly coherent answer. His question did give me great pause, however, and after careful reflection I have come up with a more succinct answer than I was able to offer up at the time.

The answer is, Lord, I hope not.

The question, by the way, was, do you think newspapers will have disappeared in five years?

I grew up with a newspaper. We didn't have a lot in that little four-room mill village house in which I was raised, but we had a copy of the Atlanta Constitution on our front porch every day of my life, and I mean every day.

My daddy taught me how to read from the pages of that newspaper - which claimed to be "The South's Standard," at the time. Our next door neighbor, James Vining, took the Journal, which claimed to "cover Dixie like the dew." Those two papers are combined now, of course, and barely cover the area inside I-285. Times do change.

But I loved reading the newspaper. I developed the habit, as I said, early on and throughout high school, college and into adulthood, I made it a point to start every day by poring over the paper. I might skip breakfast or forget to brush my teeth, but I was going to read the paper.

The Constitution, of course, had Ralph McGill, who came under fire during the Civil Rights movement for having the audacity to suggest that people of color deserved equal opportunity in the Jim Crow South. My daddy insisted that everything Ralph McGill wrote made good sense, so I looked for his column, which ran down the left side of the front page, every day - as soon as I finished the sports page and the funnies.

Click on the headline to read all of Hucaby’s column