30 years ago Dallas was ahead of its time

I remember back in the late 1970s when I was working for the Dallas Morning News, the paper's executives were concerned about circulation, as they the paper's executives are today. Back then there were two daily newspapers in Dallas and the population was booming -- folks were migrating in droves, especially from the so-called Rust Belt in the Midwest. The problem was that the paper's circulation, while increasing, was not in any way, shape or form keeping pace with the population increase -- not by a long shot. So the Morning News contracted with this highly respected polling outfit -- Yankelovich, Skelly, and White -- to find out why. What the pollsters uncovered staggered all of us: it turned out that more than two-thirds of the Dallas population got all their news from television. Even the pollsters were surprised: At the time, YS&W called Dallas "the most wired city in America."

I mention this only because another highly respected polling outfit -- the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press -- released the results of a survey yesterday that said the majority of residents of an American city would not miss their daily newspaper if it went out of business. Why? Because, the survey noted, 66 percent of those polled regularly get their news from television. What surprised me the most about this latest survey is that more people (34 percent) said they get their news regularly from radio than the Internet (31 percent). I'm willing to bet those numbers will be reversed before long. (For those that added those three just mentioned figures and found they exceeded 100 percent, the respondents were asked to name all their sources for news, not just the one used the most.)

In the new survey, more than one out of every four persons polled (26 percent) said they would not miss their local newspaper at all if it folded. For some reason, I think that figure might be higher if just Dallas residents were surveyed. Which leads me to the obvious conclusion: In this area, Dallas may still be ahead of its time.