Sep
12
A lot of papers going under? That was a worry almost 40 years ago for Houstoun Waring, editor of the weekly Littleton (Colo.) Independent. The 1945 Nieman Fellow was so discouraged about the state of the business that he wrote a column, reprinted in the March 1964 issue of Nieman Reports, listing 13 reasons not to start a paper. Some are a little outdated—“8. A new newspaper must wait from two to fourteen months to get its name in the telephone book”—but a few still resonate, especially the fact that “a new paper must cultivate a field that is already being farmed.”
