Thanks for the front-row seat

I was honored and ambivalent at the same time earlier this month to accept the highest honor awarded by the 136-year-old Washington Newspaper Publishers Association (WNPA) at a time when, more than ever, I’m still trying to figure this business out.

Because it’s much more than a business; community newspapering is an institution and a calling that from the early days of America has been recognized as a big part of what makes this country work.

Newspapers were “the power which impels the circulation of political life,” philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 of the press in America where “there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper.”

Tocqueville visited the United States back then as a French aristocrat and scholar trying to better understand the revolution called democracy that was sweeping through Europe, where society seemed to be dealing with it less well than we were.

Newspapers, he observed, were central to America’s success not because of its journalists but because of the power they created for their communities simply by their very existence.

The press, he wrote, “affords a means of intercourse between parties which hear, and which address each other without ever having been in immediate contact.”

In other words, the press has always acted as a kind of sounding board in the middle of the town square, even for those who don’t attend the rally, making “the power of the periodical press … only second to that of the people.”

That power is now challenged by social media in all its evolving forms, which I hope in the long run will be a good thing even if currently it somewhat falsely gives the impression that anyone can tell the world anything instantly.

It certainly can feel that way if you post something online and your friends acknowledge it, but even if a newspaper’s role leans more at times toward aggregator than creator of news, the role is still relevant. You know without ever giving it much thought that if information makes it into print, someone thought it was important enough. Not so much with sharing over social media.

Whether that’s enough to allow the continued survival of the remaining three-fourths of the nation’s newspapers that have not gone out of business since 2005 remains to be seen.

I said as much in accepting the Miles Turnbull Master Editor/Publisher Award at the WNPA annual convention in Kennewick Oct. 7.

Miles used to run the Leavenworth Echo when I started in this business 35 years ago. As Miles would have said, I’m just honored to have had a job that let a regular guy have a front row seat at the community’s stage.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher