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Wednesday afternoon, I had the opportunity to assist in presenting before the Brooke County Area Chamber of Commerce for a discussion about the benefits of media, with a particular focus on what we can do for the business community.
It’s not something I’m used to. In fact, I typically dread public speaking (and, quite frankly, spent most of the morning feeling nausious), but it was a good experience with a good conversation about the pros and cons when it comes to the various mixture of local media available in our region.
It also gave me some time to reflect on the ever-changing landscape of the news world.
The Weirton Daily Times began publishing as a daily newspaper in June 1928. That’s 98 years chronicling the history of the Weirton area.
The Herald-Star, meanwhile, goes back much further, to the 1897 merger of the Western Herald and the Steubenville Star. The Herald began its publication history in 1806, establishing a 220-year lineage.
For decades, these publications have printed the news of the day, providing our local residents information on the actions of their elected officials, information about community events, school activities, local fundraisers, the scores of local sports teams; the good and the bad of everyday life.
I recently observed 25 years as a professional journalist, and while many people will still call me young at 47 years old, the reality is I’m very much a grizzled veteran at this point in my career where, more and more, we are seeing people step into the world of journalism for a handful of years before moving on to something else.
I also consider the amount of transformation which has taken place in those 25 years.
The modes of communication have changed dramatically, and we’ve all found ourselves trying to adjust while we continue the mission of reporting on the news of our area.
More and more, the traditional aspects of our media, whether print, television or radio, are moving online.
The first online presence The Weirton Daily Times had was launched in either 2002 or 2003. At the time, we, essentially, uploaded an image of that day’s front page to what would eventually become weirtondailytimes.com. The same was true for ther other Ogden Newspapers publications in the region. People would go to the website, see the main headlines and maybe read a few paragraphs, with the hope they would pick up their delivered copy later that day, or go out and purhcase one, and read the full edition.
Not long after, a fully functional website would be unveiled. First with a few, select articles to whet the appetite of our readers, and then copies of every local article published that day. Around the same time, many of the social media platforms we know (and either love or loathe) today became available to the public. MySpace around 2003, with Twitter and Facebook going public around 2006.
Eventually, news organizations began to realize the potential benefits of using those platforms to reach readers, with an audience not just localized to their geographic area, but worldwide.
At our newspapers, we’ve experimented at various times, with video components to complement our traditional product line. Some of you may remember we once offered three online programs - uploaded to YouTube and then linked to the websites. The Star Sports Cast had a focus on local high school sports, while Bucco Banter discussed the season of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Ohio Valley This Week featured a wrapup of some of the local news of the week. They each lasted a few years, well before the idea of podcasts became mainstream, and probably not something expected from a newspaper.
More recently, there has been a push to include video elements directly related to our reporting. So, you may see those ocasionally when viewing some of our online reports. Social media continues to play a role, of course.
Many of our traditional media are in flux and transition as new technologies arise and new habits form. There is an increasing multi-media mix no matter what we may think of as the regular format. Whatever the methodology, we are continuing the necessary work, with our names and faces known and seen in the communities we serve, asking questions, covering the events, and letting you know what’s going on, whether at city hall or down the street.
(Howell, a resident of Colliers, is part of the news staff of The Weirton Daily Times. He can be contacted at chowell@weirtondailytimes.com or followed on Twitter/X @CHowellWDT)