It's time again for Utah StoryCorps, everyday people sharing their stories at the story core recording booth in Logan.
BROCK MARCHANT: My name is Brock Marchant, here with Charles McCollum.
CHARLES MCCOLLUM: I go by Charlie.
BROCK MARCHANT: Where you were an editor at the local paper here covering Cache County, you had a very unique perspective on the development of a small town newspaper and how that industry looks. First off, what do you remember about your first day starting work at the Herald Journal?
CHARLES MCCOLLUM: I came from Colorado. There was a lot of suspicion about an outsider. And after about 15 years, I wrote a column one day about the death of Merlin Olsen and people started warming up to me.
BROCK MARCHANT: The newspaper industry has changed. But what are some of the biggest changes?
CHARLES MCCOLLUM: One of the huge ones: we went from having youth carriers filling their paper bags in the afternoon, getting on their bicycles, and delivering the paper, making a little money — that really connected small town papers with the community. Through those 20-30 years, all papers this size moved away to motor routes. That kind of changed the perception of papers.
Newspapers were in their heyday, I would say, in the late 90s. They were making a lot of money off of classified ads, 15 pages of want ads, things for sale, personal ads, and the internet came along and websites started offering free classified ads. And just overnight, all that revenue went out the window.
We were hanging on pretty well until the recession hit in 2009. And so I'd say our staff of 22 was down to 18 or so when the recession hit. And then in the next 10 years, we had several series of layoffs, eventually getting us down to six or seven.
The small town newspaper industry is a shell of what it once was. But, when they saw that we were struggling, our loyal readers started feeling sorry for us. And I started getting a lot of expressions of support — "Keep it up, we need you."
But small papers will disappear, And there'll be these other things cropping up: little neighborhood newsletters, things like that. But the actual small town daily, I think, is going to be extinct.
Here's what was really frightening when I left six months ago: a new wave of criticism of the media, fake news, all that stuff. I teach a class and maybe one out of 100 students wants to actually work for a newspaper. You, Brock, happened to be one of them. Why weren't you scared away?
BROCK MARCHANT: I knew the importance of it. And so I pursued it, and I think it will one day exist more locally again.
Shifting gears one more time: you've retired from the local paper. What does that feel like?
CHARLES MCCOLLUM: For all these years, I'd be going around town; I ride my bicycle a lot. Everything I saw could potentially be a story. It's really rewarding and fun to tell stories of people. Even just little — we always had a weekly column of odds and ends. If I saw something curious, I'd throw it in there. It was called Friday Finishers. It lasted for a couple of decades. I worked hard writing those.
And so now I see all these things. Yesterday, I took a picture of a kid walking down the street with a confederate flag shirt. I would have found a place for that in the paper. Now, I can't pass that on.
We all have our news antennas out and I can't put mine back in. But they've been disarmed. So it's strange. It is like being a ghost.
Support for Logan StoryCorps comes from Cache County and from USU Credit Union, a division of Goldenwest.
