CARLTON FLETCHER: Calling on the community in a time of need

“Reaching out, reaching out for a helping hand.”

— Queen

As someone who loves this profession and this newspaper, I was excited to learn that Mike Gebhart had taken steps necessary to become majority owner of The Albany Herald and other papers in the family of publications that were in the Southern Community Newspapers Inc. group.

As the name implies, “community” is a key component of all the papers, but especially in Albany, where the Herald has been a vital part of the region for around 130 years. And Gebhart knows this community. He came to the Herald in 2004 and put his imprint on an establishment that had been a fixture in southwest Georgia for a number of previous generations of readers. He came at a time when the newspaper industry was in the beginning stages of a sea change that would eventually threaten its very existence.

Newspapers the nation over, their relevance questioned suddenly by a world rapt over instant information available via social media and 24-hour cable news networks, started to fall like dominoes. Those that survived had to change their focus on the fly, find ways to engage a new kind of audience and advertising base.

When Scot Morrissey was brought on as the Herald’s president and as an SCNI vice president, the Albany paper and other SCNI properties began the move to a combined print/digital product that focused on the better elements of traditional journalism and the new media that technology had wrought. Now the information is going where the people are, to their computers and mobile phones. while still faithfully delivering a print newspaper six days a week.

The impact of this modern news-gathering technology — and the relevance of both The Albany Herald and AlbanyHerald.com — can best be illustrated by the response to the newspaper/website during the coronavirus pandemic. In each of the past two months, AlbanyHerald.com has attracted more than 3 million unique page views by members of a concerned community and region.

That’s relevance to the nth degree.

But the pandemic has done more than entice a sheltering-in-place southwest Georgia population to check out latest updates regularly. With the region holding the distinction as one of the nation’s hot spots for the deadly COVID-19 virus, businesses in the region have ground to a virtual standstill. And with its customer base of local and loyal businesses shuttered as an emergency means of stopping the spread of the virus, advertising revenue has been dramatically impacted.

So Gebhart, Morrissey and officials at the seven SCNI papers have taken the unique tack of asking for public support to keep the publications operating until the new abnormal we are experiencing returns to a semblance of the normal the region was experiencing before the virus outbreak.

Persons interested in supporting the newspaper can do one of two things: Those who don’t have a subscription are encouraged to subscribe today, and those who perhaps are subscribers have the opportunity to make a donation if they are so inclined. Or people can do both.

Certainly our entire community and region are suffering through this pandemic, and while individuals and some businesses have enjoyed financial help from the federal and state governments, many have fought to survive using all means at their disposal. Yet at a time when media outlets like The Albany Herald are needed most to keep the public informed, they are being forced to do so with depleted resources. Despite budgets cut to the bone and heart-wrenching employee layoffs made to keep the printing presses rolling, the Herald and its sister papers and websites will keep doing what they do.

Those of us who believe in this profession and its importance to the community will continue, until they tell us we can’t, to bring you the news that we feel is important to you. And if we’re down to a last man standing, we’ll do it with every resource at our disposal. If you feel led to help us continue, please do so. But rest assured, we will move forward with an eye on, as Gebhart said, “Striving to survive and then we will thrive.”