News shrinks, editor despairs

Newspapers are shrinking. A reader holding a newspaper wide open used to boast a wingspan of 54 inches, but it's closed in to 50 inches for about 41 percent of 529 U.S. newspapers, according to a Newspaper Association of America survey. You've seen it if your hometown paper is the Kokomo Tribune, Chicago Tribune or Evansville Courier & Press. You'll see it in the IDS within a couple years if the trend forces all papers to conform based on standard advertisement dimensions.\nSo are readers' arms getting shorter? No, but the change will probably mean less spilled coffee and fewer exchanges of piercing glares during trips on public transportation. News executives save money on paper and ink that they can spend on better newsgathering. Market research shows that readers prefer the convenient size. \nBut this trend gives me a touch of that sinking feeling I got when my first dog died. Eventually people will be used to smaller newspapers and no longer recollect a more cumbersome reading experience.\nA newspaper is not a Palm Pilot. It's supposed to be clumsy and messy. There's nothing like the pungent odor of a fresh Sunday paper or the gray tinge on your hands after you've wrestled through it. Nothing like the memory of when you were a kid and you could barely hold the thing all the way open, but it gave you a sensation of how huge the world really is.\nTruly, the newspaper is the last cowboy. It's rough around the edges. We make mistakes a-plenty; we already put a Creative Learning Center Class in the $5,000 price range when it should have been around $50 (curse that missing decimal).\n Some mornings I feel like I'm plucking a phoenix out of the ashes when I pick up the IDS on my way to class. The intense amount of thought and effort expended by the staff every day amazes me. If the mural of mullets that hangs over the campus desk is any evidence of the creative energy poured into its pages…well, I digress. \nA newspaper conveys a flavor unique to its community and readers. It's their faces, their thoughts, what they're doing and what they're thinking.\nIn a country where a street in Atlanta can look like one in Seattle, the newspaper is one last relic of local authenticity.\nDoes a four-inch decrease in center-spread width really make a difference? I don't ultimately counter the change. While Web journalists are scratching their heads over how to extract profit from cyber versions of the news, their print counterparts are tightening their belts. It's reality. But not a reality that allows naysayers to cite the trend as evidence of newspapers disappearing like a flock of carrier pigeons dispatched to the North Pole. Newspapers are not dying, circulation statistics bear out readership hikes since Sept. 11 as well as in the last year. Times are hard for papers, but they're abysmal for crops of dot.com's that threatened to eclipse newspapers as a means of communication.\nI know my misgivings are sentimental. The last cowboy will live on, in all his splendor. Fifty-three percent of 529 papers that have shrunk or plan to shrink will still be thrust open by wide-eyed kids. The pages will still crinkle for them, but they may find the world is a bit smaller.