As an adolescent, Paul Steinmetz was one, of surely many, California students aspiring to move forward and take the college route. With the usual family drive and expectations he attended a local community college to discover a News Writing course which changed his mindset around completely.
Eventually Steinmetz managed to transfer schools and graduate from San Francisco State. On the prowl looking for any available reporting positions he was willing to accept the midnight shift at a local news service. Steinmetz gradually climbed his way into the days lastly ending up in Connecticut holding a career with the Danbury News Times for 24 years as a reporter and later editor.
"Newspapers have not figured out how to make the transformation," Steinmetz said in reference to the national move to on-line news and reporting.
In previous years newspapers earned enormous amounts of profit-for-product unlike other businesses, for example grocery stores. When local grocery stores earned 3%-5% profit newspapers gained 20%-30% profit. The substantiality of profit being from local businesses, particularly car dealers. Before the time of the widely used internet there was no certain way to reach vast numbers of customers besides local papers.
With the presence of the internet businesses refer to websites of their own in order to contact the customer directly, and for a mere fraction of the price. With the drop in advertisements in the papers the major concern became in boosting the profit margin rather than the actual writing. Newspapers are cutting employees and enhancing the workload for an even more stressful environment.
Paul Steinmetz was fired after 24 years of dedication to the Danbury News Times, and is glad for the oppertunity it gave him at his current position of Director of University Relations with Western Connecticut State University.
Regarding the new news atmosphere Steinmetz advises the News Writing class that the first question to be asking is, "How am I going to get on-line?"
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