FUTURE OF NEWSPAPER BUSINESS MAY BE IN LOCAL SCHOOLS

One paper's comprehensive literacy program is a keen model

Much grumbling has been received by this office insofar as our views of the newspaper business are concerned.

It seems that we are perceived as slightly more pessimistic than the rest of the industry. Well, have we got optimism for you: Inside, you'll find Correspondent Julius Duscha's uplifting report on the Reading by 9 program that was instituted by The Sun of Baltimore.

This program – which combines journalism with community outreach, and also has newspaper employees as volunteers – attempts to address the sadly low reading level in area schools.

Duscha takes this fine program and turns it like a jewel so that you can see all its facets. Though there have been some concerns about how journalism is affected when reporters and editors become volunteers in the very schools that reporters and editors need to cover, The Sun has tiptoed through that mine field successfully – very successfully.

The basic thrust of Reading by 9 is this: There are problems in our community, and merely reporting upon those problems has not solved them. As a large, successful company, The Sun not only has a right, it has an obligation to work on something as fundamental as literacy.

Frankly, I cannot see why every newspaper in America doesn't make literacy its primary community-outreach program. I could get all mushy about how literacy improves lives, makes a better community and a better citizenry – or I could be pragmatic and cynical: The more literate people there are, the more likely you'll sell more papers.

Certainly the computer companies understand this, which is why they sell computers at reduced prices – or simply give them away – so as to make schoolchildren computer-literate. Why shouldn't newspapers devote similar resources to common literacy?

Can't quite stomach nine-year-olds? Well, I have another thought: high school mentoring.

The No. 1 complaint of newspaper managers is finding qualified workers and retaining them. The problem is that most kids in high school don't look at newspapering as a potential career. The creative types look to TV news or entertainment as places to make their life's work. For the production, marketing or finance-oriented high schoolers, they look almost anywhere but newspapers.

If your newspaper were to make a concerted effort to mentor a class of high school students in your community, just think of the benefits – not just to the community, not just to the paper, but to the children themselves.

Within our lifetimes, we've seen the reduction of two-parent homes to where it now stands at 20 percent. High school-age kids function in life basically without adult supervision. And while a mentor isn't there to provide day-to-day discipline, a mentor does provide a look at the "real world" that the single parent or the teacher just cannot.

I don't mentor personally, but mine is a mentoring household. My partner has worked with teens for the last three years and though it's sometimes difficult to see whether their lives have been improved, I get almost daily reports that there is a tremendous satisfaction in the process.

Don't want to get involved in a broad-stroked mentoring program? As the finances of public high schools deteriorate, the first level of funding that falls by the wayside are extracurricular activities – which frequently includes the school paper.

I can't see any conflict-of-interest in a newspaper "adopting" a high school paper and working with the educators and students in teaching skills and producing a newspaper. An entire curriculum could be built around just bringing newspaper executives and line workers into a high school to talk about what it's like to work on a real paper. A newspaper that had a finely evolved literacy, mentoring or school paper outreach program would be a powerhouse, not only in the community today but into the 21st century.

And the complaint that newspapers don't print enough good news could be offset by papers making good news.

-- David M. Cole

Inside ...

• Ups and downs mark this batch of third quarter earnings
• Baltimore's Sun defined a problem, and now it seeks to solve it
• FAS-FAX presents a sobering picture of declines
• Help wanteds make up the current multimedia fashion
• Chicago primed to lose its local news service
• Election night shows the Web is not ready for prime time
• Persons

From NEWSINC., Nov. 9, 1998, Copyright © 1998, The Cole Group. All Rights Reserved.