There is a new book out, Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll, which seeks to remind readers of the tenets that governed journalism in days of yore. These can easily be summed up as the “five Ws and H,” which stands for “Who,” “What,” “Where,” “When,” “Why,” and “How.”
The book’s author is Mary Llewellyn McNeil, who was a student of Carroll’s at Wake Forest University in the 1970s.
Carroll’s journalistic career started in 1929 at the United Press, and ended in 1974 with his post as the editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. In between, he served as a news editor for the Washington Bureau of The New York Times (1955-1963). He was born in Milwaukee in 1906 and died in Winston-Salem in 2002.
Now, reading excerpts from the numerous reviews of McNeil’s book, one notices that they were almost exclusively written by journalists of the caliber of columnist George F. Will, Pulitzer Prize director Jon Sawyer, and former Washington publisher Donald Graham. But none are forthcoming from the new guard. This may be because few of today’s news people actually remember who Wallace Carroll was or because they simply don’t want to recall a time when print media was flourishing.
One has the impression that today’s publishers don’t think, for example, that print circulation is important, preferring instead to compete with the deluge of digital media out there. The fact that anyone can wake up one morning and decide to come up with a digital journal but only a few can actually create a print publication seems to be lost.
But the life blood of print media is circulation. It needs circulation, like cable TV channels need carriage. And in order to increase circulation, creativity, inventiveness, and new business models are needed, including leveraging digital media. For many people, that’s simply too many things to think about. It’s much easier to just put the damn things online and count the clicks.
Pictured above: Wallace Carroll, the cover of the recent book about him
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