Column: Some good additions at the Star-Revue

The longer this paper hangs around, the older this publisher gets. This aging is interesting as it lets me see changes in society firsthand (normally you read about these things in history books).

For the past 15 years I have been telling anyone listening my belief that a newspaper you could pick up was an important part of having a democracy. Not to mention TV news written for a country full of curious viewers, not just a diced and sliced audience of people with their minds already made up.

News is basically information about the world that we don’t always get to see first hand. It is information that is gathered for us and helps us make sense of things. It explains the world around us and gives us ammunition to make choices about what to eat, where to live and who to vote for.

In the world that I was born into, news was consumed in a finite amount of places. We bought one or two newspapers we liked, New York had about five when I was little, and then went through each one page by page, stopping at items that caught our attention. While it’s true we would gravitate to what interested us, during the process we would be exposed to news and views we’d never heard about.

For example, as a kid I would go right to the sports section and read about the previous day’s Met game, but along the way I might stop at an article about Telstar or lasers, and all of a sudden my world would get bigger.

Over on the television side, most of the country self-divided into either Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, or Walter K. Smith, for the nightly news. We still had liberals, progressives and conservatives, but at the end of the day, it seemed most pulled together and worked for the greater good (leaving out contentious issues like civil rights and abortion).

By viewing news meant to appeal to a broad swath of population, we seemed to end up with leaders who at the end of the day were respected, if not always agreed with.

Today we live in a world where one half of the country believes that the other half is the enemy, no matter which half is in charge. I have some friends who will never have a civil discussion about Trump, and others who believe that Zohran is the devil incarnate.

Instead of picking up a newspaper, filled with a wide range of local, national and international news that is professionally written and edited, we are fed a steady diet of news stories from a zillion different publications or blogs or tweets chosen by an algorithm that feeds us stuff that only reinforces our pre-ordained ideas as who the devil is.

However….
That’s just how I see it. And I’m OLD!

Over the years my staff has become younger and younger, and I know that my ideas become more and more old-fashioned. And the one thing that I do see is that my ever younger staff is no less bright and thoughtful than my peers were in our younger days.

With all that in mind, I’m very pleased to announce that this is the year that the Star-Revue fully embraces the world of digital communications. As you can see from the ad on the next page, we are starting by introducing e-mail newsletters. Among other things, it will give us an opportunity to talk to you between issues, and provide room for our writers to stretch out a bit.

Speaking of writers, I’m very excited about staff additions we’ve made over the past year or so. We were going strong before the pandemic, but I now realize how much 2020 changed things. I love it that our staff is growing again.

However, that takes money. We’ve been lucky to keep going because of to the support of the many local advertisers that are part of the Star-Revue family, but the fact is that most advertising has gone to the digital world. I was floored to read how much money is being made by Facebook reels, for example. Billions, starting from zero just five years ago.

Having newsletters and a better website and maybe even podcasts and Instagram presence will create a better deal for our advertisers, which means the whole community will benefit.

For starters I’m asking you to consider signing up for our free newsletters by sending me a request at [email protected].

Unlike some other newsletter publisher, I promise not to sell your information to anybody. That’s not why we’re doing this.

Actually, that’s another column. The way privacy has basically shrunk to nothing in my own short lifetime.

Happy New Year! – George Fiala