wedge blog

Is this a party or a wake?

Six months ago I cancelled our daily delivery of the Great Falls Tribune. I’d been reading the Trib all my life and I’ve been the subject and author of a few stories over the years. I’m writing because, as a subscriber who has been missing for six months and an advertiser that’s been missing for three years, The Tribune never once noticed I was gone.

I understand it’s not totally the newspaper’s fault. The industry is suffering, the economy is lousy, technology is in transition, the home page on my computer is an Internet daily. It used to take me a half hour every morning to read the paper, then it took fifteen minutes, not long after that, ten. A dropped sentence at the bottom of a column became more common, catching a grammatical error used to be challenging; it became embarrassing.

The slow decline of the paper is akin to watching a loved one suffer. I remember my father losing all that weight before he passed away. The paper, though occasionally bloated with ads, is starved for content that resonates with me. In an odd parallel, I began to see the same person dying two or three times on the obituary page (Printing errors? Editorial issues? Paddles?) Sometimes in a senior moment of my own, I’d think “Do I know that guy? His name is familiar.”Then I’d realize I read the same obituary a day or two before.

Instead of opening the paper, I began to check headlines and obituaries online. I’m not even conscious of the sneaky Netflix ad anymore, and I understand the obituary links don’t raise the dead, but they do raise a little revenue for the Tribune.

As the Tribune’s content became less relevant, my internal equation began to weigh in favor of saving trees. I began to feel guilty, even knowing that newspapers use a high percentage of recycled waste. The Sunday New York Times:worth the trees. The Tuesday Great Falls Tribune: well, maybe not.

I have friends and acquaintances who work for newspapers. They are all more talented and experienced than I am: we knew this day would come, but I didn’t realize how much the Tribune…didn’t care.

My husband’s team loyalties and investment strategies are broad. The Tribune’s sports and financial sections are weak (unless you cheer for Dutton or the Bison). Last summer I watched my man read an editorial page, shake the paper and then shake his head. “Why do we get the paper?” he asked sadly.

To cancel, I dialed a toll-free phone number and spoke to a stranger. She never asked why, didn’t offer us a Sunday-only delivery (I suggested it), and never mentioned the Tribune online.

It’s not just the content—it’s the delivery.

Over the years we’ve hoped the neighbors didn’t notice us tiptoeing from our covered porch to the sidewalk to retrieve a snowy or soggy paper ten feet from our door, and there have been times (understandably) when news was literally scattered to the wind. Sometimes the Trib would be hidden totally under our grimy sisal doormat, or it would arrive too late for early risers.

Occasionally the Tribune would not arrive at all, and we’d have to call Gannett instead of calling our friends a few blocks away. “Please press TWO…”

As a former advertiser, I’ve wondered why, after years of buying big ads, when my latest ad rep quit, no one bothered to call. I liked my old rep. Whenever I asked him how he was, he’d reply, “Fine as frog’s hair.” Ironically, as far as I know, there’s no hair on frogs.

In the last thirty months or so, I’ve learned my demographic isn’t reading the paper anyway. As a jeweler, most of my locals are young engaged couples who get their news online. Precious metals investors seem to find me, and after 17 years in business, referral is booming. Ironically, the slower economy has created more comparison shoppers, which is great for my business model.

Out of continuity, fear of lost revenue, and loyalty to the ‘frog’s hair fellow’, I’d have spent thousands with the Trib. Now it’s just too late.

I log on to the free online paper, get the Sunday edition and I read the rest at the Peak. I hit the gym often, I don’t miss much. It takes five to ten minutes most days, and I never wrest a copy from anyone under fifty.

At forums about the future of media, no one under 35 is wringing his hands: these fellows are too busy downloading, uploading and texting. The guys at Gannett have one fist fumbling with digital media, while the other looks like it’s throwing in the towel on the Great Falls Tribune.

This editorial was published in the Great Falls Tribune on Sunday, May 8, 2005, just after a census report showed we’d declined a bit in our population base. Now that I have a ‘blog’ I thought it might be fun to re-publish it online. In the next few days I’ll fill you in on the effects this story had on the community, the Tribune, and how many people yelled at me.

It’s also a chance to see what’s changed…Read it for yourself and let me know what you think.

If you were blindfolded and dropped into the center of a midsize U.S. city, would you know where you were?

Sometimes it's hard, because cities characters are muddied by growth. Any decent size city has a similar landscape of national franchises: you could travel the nation in any direction eating only at McDonald's and sleeping only at Holiday Inns (hey, it might not be fun, but it's possible). Memories of one city melt into another, and many are forgettable.

Not in Montana. Each of our cities has that unique personality.

We have Billings, the big city wanna-be of Montana. Its downtown is crisp and boxy with a little graffiti in dimly lit alleys and on the sides of rail cars. Billings is the undisputed fossil fuel capital of Montana, the big fish.

Butte is the plucky little sister -- the kid who takes a black eye in stride (just look at the pit). Butte just picks itself up, wipes its eye with a well-worn sleeve, and claims it can take what the world dishes out.

Ever since I went to school down there, Missoula has been referred to as “Harvard on the Clark Fork”. She's the girl with the horn-rimmed glasses and a bag of granola in her purse. Every family has one -- you know, the person who can spell Sartre, reminds us about greenhouse gases and reflects a social conscience even when it's annoying.

Bozeman is in flux. She used to be the unabashed cowgirl, but she's traded in her real chaps and manure-scented cowboy boots for the Ralph Lauren Version of the Cowboy West. The change is somewhat awkward but inevitable as people from outside bring their upscale ideas of attire and property values.

Kalispell and Whitefish will, in my lifetime, become one urban area. Right now in any Montana city, you can drive for 15 minutes and be away from civilization. I predict that drive time will double or triple in the Flathead Valley.

You can't mistake Helena’s Last chance Gulch for any city center in America. Helena's cultural assets are not as overt as Missoula's. She's the polite political wife, who knows that social change must originate in the House, have at least three readings, and be accompanied by lunch at Jorgensen's.

That leaves us.

Sadly, Great Falls fills the role of the ugly stepsister of Montana cities. You want the smart one, date Missoula. You want the rowdy one, see Butte. The up-and-comer? Billings. The sister with clout, Helena. The popular girls? Try the Valley girls from Kalispell or Bozeman.

In the Electric City, we don't have an easily perceived persona, except perhaps Malmstrom Air Force Base. We’re the ag trade center, and we’re trying to capitalize on our associations with Charlie Russell and Lewis and Clark.

We do have great assets here, but let's not be too quick to compromise them for a one night stand. Let's not court environmentally unfriendly development that preclude clean alternatives. Let's not give tax advantages to companies that hire minimum-wage employees. Instead, let's decide what's great about Great Falls and do what we can to show our assets to their best advantage and grant our favors to the best suitors we can attract.

I suggest our own version of “Extreme Makeover”. Let’s help attract good dates and solid future relationships. First let’s do something about Tenth Avenue South. I don’t understand why we spent money making Central Avenue harder to navigate and easier to vandalize, while at the same time I try to avoid showing newcomers Tenth Avenue South.

Our town has lost potential professionals looking to relocate here in the ten minutes it takes to drive from the airport down Tenth. I’m tempted to set up flowerpots in the medians myself.

I would suggest that as a community we establish an identity that is easily perceived and understood and communicate this to visitors and suitors: we can’t do this without doing something about the blight of Tenth Avenue South. Our sister cities have for the most part good (or at least understandable) first impressions: we do not.

The Great Falls Tribune can be a standard bearer for a makeover. Let’s push our assets and let the Tribune do, what a classic ‘tribune’ is supposed to do: spread the word. The Tribune itself is one of our best assets. It’s Montana’s best daily by far. Let’s start by asking the Tribune to cancel its skewed “Greatest of Great Falls” contest and replace it by helping to assemble 100 reasons why Great Falls is a great place to live. From this list perhaps we can form an identity, and use it as a litmus test to see which potential development may be a true asset.

Our hundred reasons can be assembled by everyone from school kids to business executives to retirees, and used for promotion and reference lest we forget that we are the ambassadors for our own future.

At critical votes in local government the list can be removed from pockets, unfolded and flailed so our elected officials remember what’s consistent with our assets and what looks—or smells—bad.

I’ve lived in Great Falls pretty much all my life. It’s a great place to live and raise kids, but now my kids are growing up and moving away. I’d sure like to learn them home. When they come to town, I’d like to offer them more than Tenth Avenue South, and a shrinking population base.