Posted: Thursday, May 26, 2011 11:17 am | Updated: 11:27 am, Thu May 26, 2011.
The hotel shuttle bus picked me up outside Phoenix's Sky Harbor in the early evening. No one else was in the shuttle, so I jumped in the front seat passenger seat so I could better talk with the driver - an eye-opening experience.
The driver was in his mid-50s and balding, with a pleasant smile on his face. He stuck out his right hand to shake mine. "Welcome to Phoenix. Just ask me anything. I can tell you pretty much anything you want to know about the city or the state," he said.
"Are you a native?" I asked.
"No - but about the next best thing," he said. "I was a reporter and sports writer for over 30 years until I got laid off last year."
Without any prodding, he told me the newspaper business in Phoenix had gone from bad to worse, and he - any many other veteran journalists - lost their jobs working for the Freedom-owned daily in Mesa.
"My severance paid my bills for a while, then just ran out," he said. "Arizona's economy is among the worst in the nation. There simply aren't very many jobs. I am a long way from being able to collect Social Security. The best I could do was get this job driving a shuttle bus - and it's just part-time."
I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was visiting Phoenix on business. I was scheduled to present a program - "Survival Guide for Community Newspapers" - at the Arizona Newspaper Association convention.
After he dropped me off at the hotel, I worked on my presentation. It is filled with statistics about the need for newspapers to move more quickly to digital solutions:
• In 1935 newspapers enjoyed a 45 percent share of all U.S. advertising, but now the share is below 15 percent.
• A recent Pew study showed that - for the first time -- more people read news online than in printed newspapers.
• Internet revenue - just 15 years after the World Wide Web was created - had passed print advertising.
• That households with high-speed Internet access spend one-quarter the time reading newspapers than they spent when they had dial-up access.
• That the trend of declining daily newspaper circulation predated the advent of the Internet by at least 20 years.
• That the old business model that made publishers rich and employed thousands of reporters, editors and others is decaying, and likely not coming back.
• That more than 20,000 journalists had lost their jobs in the last three years.
• I quote Tom Feltenstein: "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance a lot less."
My slides were just statistics, and Joseph Stalin once said that "one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic."
My PowerPoint was filled with "statistics." The shuttle bus driver's story was much more.
"Newspapers used to be a great business to be in," he said. "I don't quite know what happened."
He did almost all the talking in the short ride to the hotel. I didn't tell him what I do, or why I was in town. My statistics paled in comparison to his story.
