Tables turned

On Monday I got the chance to be on the other side of an interviewer’s questions.

This May will mark 29 years working in community newspapers in Wisconsin, 28 of those years have been here at The Star News. In that time, I have interviewed literally hundreds of people from student athletes and elementary school students to governors and U.S. Senators.

To say that I am much more comfortable on my side of my notepad would be something of an understatement. That’s why it was interesting to have the tables turned this week.

On Monday, Publisher Kris O’Leary (who also is president of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association) and I were being interviewed by Kate Archer Kent a journalist and host of The Morning Show on the Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio. The interview was done live with Kris and I in our offices here in central Wisconsin and the interviewer in her studio in Madison. Last week one of the producers for the show had done a pre-interview with us over Zoom to get the groundwork so that during the live show, the host could ask the smart questions and get to the meat of the topic.

It was an interesting experience and made me nostalgic for my days of working at my campus radio station. While I doubt anyone is using splicing tape or a reel-to-reel to do audio editing anymore, the interview made me reminisce on the hours I would spend in the studio, even if everything is done digitally and hundreds of miles apart.

We were on the show talking about a package of three bills proposed by Rep. Jimmy Anderson, of Fitchburg. The bills are co-sponsored by Rep. Jodi Emerson of Eau Claire and Sen. Mark Spreitzer, of Beloit and include a tax credit for up to half the cost of a newspaper subscription, a fellowship program for journalists in underserved areas, and proposal to set up a grant program for news access projects. The bills were among the many hundred introduced each year which serve primarily to get a discussion going even if there is little chance of them being passed in their current forms.

The bills were being proposed because of the major changes going on in the newspaper industry. The traditional business model for newspapers has been to offer cheap prices to readers and relying on revenue from selling advertising to make salaries and pay the bills. Technological, business and societal changes have caused the need to retool that traditional business model and in the process there has been a flood of newspapers across the country closing or consolidating. This has been even more strongly felt among regional daily newspapers which are a shadow of what they were in past decades.

Yet, to borrow a line from Mark Twain, news of our death is greatly exaggerated. According to the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s review of the proposed bills, 622,000 people subscribe to legal publication newspapers in the state each year. Averaging both weeklies and dailies, each subscription receives about 1.7 newspapers which works out to about 1.1 million newspapers in the hands of subscribers each week, not counting the number who buy it at the grocery store or their local gas stations.

These numbers only scratch the surface when you factor in that each issue of the paper is often read by multiple people. Even taking a conservative estimate of the number of readers per paper, the number of people seeking out and reading newspapers in the state each week climbs to close to 3 million, which isn’t a bad number given the state’s population of 5.89 million people.

For those who weren’t listening to Wisconsin Public Radio at 7 a.m. on Monday morning, you can check out the April 8 episode on the WPR website at www.wpr.org/ shows/morning-show.

I am sure there will continue to be discussions for time to come. *** This Saturday marks 28 years that my wife and I have been married. I am not quite sure where the time has gone.

Like any couple we have had our share of challenges over the years, but I truly could not imagine my life without Kim in it. While the amount of gray and white hair in my beard tags me as being an old dude, it seems like only yesterday that Kim agreed to be my bride and I am thankful every day that she did.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.