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The Herald editor speaks to Winthrop University students

 

This past week at Winthrop University was Mass Communications week. On Monday the editor from the Herald in Myrtle Beach, SC came to talk about his career and experiences. His name is Charles Perry and he is a Winthrop alumni. At the start of the event, he talked about his experiences with journalism in crime and government, but that he much more prefers working in a local community, rather than a large corporation. He said that it is not only much more personal but that with the low economy big businesses are letting more and more people off.  On a local newspaper, there are more opportunities to report something rather than trying to beat people to a story that several hundred other reporters have already covered.

 Someone in the audience asked Perry how user generated content sites effect the journalist industry, to which he responded that those sites can be beneficial to journalists if they worked along with them. If people tweet something they heard, then link it to the article, it would definitely give the news company more reputation. Perry talks about how the job market for journalism is tough to get into, but in order to get noticed you have to be unique. Be unique in your writing, in your photography, in your tweets, and get yourself out there using all different kinds of mediums. He said one of the big challenges for local newspapers is to not accept everything they hear from larger news corporations as gospel, but to question things and give accountability to people. 

One of the members from the audience stated that she was from Myrtle Beach and had never heard of The Herald, but had only heard of the Sun News. He responded by saying that his newspaper is very young in relation to other papers, not even 18 years old. He accepts that his paper has a challenge in getting the word out about it, and also warns that is one of the problems of local newspapers. There are rival ones that are often accepted as the default news source of the area. His paper just has to market itself more, which is what anyone has to do if they want to start any type of company.

 On another note, he talks about how everything is going digital, and how he sincerely hopes that print will still be alive at least somewhat in the future. With the new social networking sites, the availability of internet now, and the speed at which things are spread across the internet, it is very likely that print will become almost obsolete eventually, because they will not be able to keep up with rate that news spread online. Hopefully, there may still be a place for print in the future, however small a place it is. As Charles Perry left, a lot of the Mass Communications students were reassured by his words on local papers. Hearing that community news is not so bad after all alleviates a lot of the pressure put on journalists to report for the biggest and most successful papers.

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