As the new president of the UPA I want to tell you how excited I am to be serving and how much I appreciate your support during the winter convention.

I also want to convey how concerned I am about our industry.

We are going through a very big period of change, both because of the Web and because of the way people's attitudes are changing about newspapers. There was a time when we were the most respected media; the one that most people relied on for honest, in-depth and truthful news coverage. Many still do, but as I watch our industry I see more and more studies and hear from readers that from their perception, we are neither of those anymore.

What has changed? Is it what we have all done, or is it the lengths to which some in our industry have gone over the years to sell papers? Is it the Internet that is making us less relevant or is the fact that our nation seems so divided in so many ways that we are not just revered like we used to be?

In some ways I think it is a combination of these things. The Web has been able to not only provide news and information people read, but it also provides video, sound and still photography. Many of our papers are doing that on their web sites as well. But it seems no matter what we do, no matter how much we insist and demonstrate that we are now full media companies with our websites, social networking and mobile device availability, we are still thought of as only what readers find on newsprint at the stand or on the door step.

What about the tendency of using sensationalism to sell papers? Let’s face it, there always has been papers that sold themselves by stretching the truth. Those kinds of publications have been around since the early days of newspapers. But it seems more and more mainstream papers have also jumped on that bandwagon at times. That has hurt us and our credibility.

What about the division in the country over everything from health care to gun control? I listened to a state legislator one morning at the Utah State Capitol a couple of months ago talk about how the media in the state is always liberal, always left leaning. At the time he was addressing me directly. I told him yes that some journalism schools turn out students that seem to be left leaning, but that most papers work to stay in the middle and want to present the facts, letting people make up their own minds as to what is going on. I know that’s what we try to do in our paper.

Often I think when we get accused of being too liberal, its an easy way for those who don’t like what we report to discredit us. On the other hand when we don’t report fairly on both sides of a story, we find ourselves in a very weak position to argue differently.

At the turn of the 19th century one of the biggest businesses in the country was the manufacture of wagons, with many large corporations, including Studebaker, building them. In fact Studebaker was one of the biggest manufacturers of wagons in the country, reportedly building one of every two wagons that brought the pioneers to the west from the eastern seaboard. Within a few years after 1900, the wagon manufacturing business did everything but collapse because of the advent of the automobile. Studebaker changed their business model and went into building cars and trucks; they lasted until the 1960’s before they finally folded up. In their waning years the big three and imports crushed them under their tires. While they built some pretty good cars they could never quite reach the spot they once held in the transportation industry after the change.

I guess the question is, will we end up like Studebaker? Will we get crushed under the weight of the Internet, while all the time trying to make a transition to what is basically a new industry to us in so many ways?

We need to figure this out, and we need to figure it out soon. Forces beyond our control (in government and private industry) are nibbling away at our business. We must find if working with aggregators is good for us or not. We need to work on legislation to be sure that the public knows what is going on in their communities, state and nation, through all means possible, not just through the new shiny toy that is on the block that week. We need to find ways to make advertising on the Web work and work to both to our advertisers advantage and to ours. There is a lot to do, and no one can figure it out on their own. In some cases some of us may need to sacrifice something to keep everyone else's head above water.

UPA is a group effort. No president or board can do it all for the membership. Everyone must be involved. We must find the right model to ride into the future, otherwise it could be the end of the assembly line for us too.