WE NEED THE ASBURY PARK PRESS IN CENTRAL NEW JERSEY!
By Gordon Bishop (12/18/07)
New Jersey's daily newspapers are struggling to survive because of the explosive impact of the Internet, which reports news and endless information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I know that as a lifetime journalist who has worked at The Star-Ledger, The North Jersey Herald News and various regional magazines for more than 37 years.
My ilk is known as “the ink press communicators.” Daily newspapers like The Star-Ledger and the Jersey Shore Asbury Park Press are competing against television, radio, magazines and thousands of news sources on the global network.
My 39-year-old daughter doesn’t read a daily newspaper. She lives in Sea Bright. As a professional photographer, she does advertise in the local weekly, The Hub, based in Red Bank. She gets more “bang for the buck” than paying for the higher Ad rates in the more expensive advertising dailies.
My forecast is that weeklies will survive at the grassroots level, while the regional dailies continue to lose circulation and, thus, advertising. A shrinking advertising base forced Gannet Newspapers to downsize its daily paper in Ocean County (The Observer-Reporter) to a weekly paper. The Ocean daily had 40,000 subscribers. Gannett Newspaper Chain hasn’t seen a profit in 7 years.
That saddens me because my wife and I have been reading the Asbury Park Press since we moved from Bergen County to Monmouth County’s Eatontown in February 1971, and for the last two years, in neighboring Ocean Township at a new gated community called “Cedar Village” for the 55 and older.
I really can’t eat breakfast (Cheerios, coffee and an oatmeal cookie) without reading The Press laid out on the kitchen table. My wife reads the women’s news – and, of course, the ads designed for women. My wife loves the shop!
Over the last 37 years, The Press has been very kind to me by reviewing my books (a dozen over the years) and a musical I wrote with my daughter’s music teacher at Memorial School in Eatontown. During most of those years, I was working at The Star-Ledger as its Environmental Editor and Columnist (on the OP-ED page).
I personally want to thank Donald Lass (The Press’ co-owner) and, more recently, Skip Hidlay, the new Editor, for recognizing my work as an author and journalist. Hey, we’re in this together. It’s do or die for the newspaper industry, with two exceptions in our metro region – The New York Daily News and The New York Post, both smaller-sized “Tabloids.”
It’s not easy watching your life-long profession sliding into print oblivion.
The reason I want The Asbury Park Press to survive is because of the great investigative work it does for us, the working taxpayers and voters.
Have you been following The Press’ top-notch investigation into the closing of Fort Monmouth, which employs some 5,000 people and is spread out over 1,200 acres in Eatontown, Oceanport and Shrewsbury?
This series should win the Pulitzer Prize in “Investigative Reporting for 2007.
While the federal government is trying to shut down Fort Monmouth, The Press found countless errors in the government’s decision-making process to get rid of the fort, which is an integral source of high-tech communications in fighting the Global War on Terror.
President Bush and the U.S. Congress will certainly lose the terrorism war if Fort Monmouth closes its gates forever.
Insane? You bet it is!
So keep up your patriotic “Save the Fort” series on Page One, you Press people, and save America in the process.
God Bless America (and The Asbury Park Press).
Gordon Bishop
(Gordon Bishop is a “Who’s Who in the World” award-winning author, historian, syndicated columnist and New Jersey’s first “Journalist-of-the-Year” – 1986/New Jersey Press Association.)
(Printer friendly version) Email: Gordon Bishop
