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Flash! Newspapers are dying!

If you consider that “old news,” you are in the minority. According to a 2018 Pew Research study, a majority of U.S. adults (71 percent) believe their local news media are doing well financially.

I guess they haven’t noticed how the price of a daily newspaper has been going up while the number of pages has been going down. That’s probably because that same study found only 14 percent pay for their news anyway.

(Where do they get their news? TV? Facebook? They don’t get any news?)

Yes, it’s true. Fewer people – many fewer – get a daily newspaper anymore.

Just check the numbers.

And thanks to an obscure 1912 law, newspapers are forced to disclose their true paid circulation numbers in their own pages every fall (usually early October): they must reveal, among other things, the actual number of newspapers they print and the number they sell, which is always different. Newspapers bury this little nugget of information in tiny print in the classified ads, surrounded by lots of legalese. But they publish it.

Even if you’ve never paid attention to newspaper circulation numbers – and most people haven’t – these will surprise you.

 

Before I get to the Kingsport Times News’ subscription numbers through the years, let me amaze you with the circulation numbers of a newspaper I wrote for in the 1990s, the New York Daily News.

The Daily News is best known for a 1975 headline during New York City’s financial crisis:

Ford to City: Drop Dead

Two weeks earlier the Daily News had published its annual circulation numbers. The newspaper sold an average of 2,887,608 copies a day. That’s almost three million copies! It was the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the country.

When I started writing for the paper 14 years later, circulation had slipped considerably to 1,422,837 copies, a decline of almost a million and a half copies a day. But it was still the largest circulation daily in the country.

The latest circulation number I can find for the Daily News is from 2019. A total of 194,504 print copies were sold each day.

In roughly 25 years circulation has dropped over 90 percent.

Modern publishers would note that comparing today’s print circulation to yesteryear’s numbers is like comparing apples and grapes. Today’s papers have much smaller print numbers – partly by design - but those are dwarfed by the number of digital readers. And that’s true. It is a different era for newspapers.

 

Now to the Kingsport Times News:

The Kingsport Times was founded in 1916 as a weekly by Cy Lyle, who already published the weekly Johnson City Comet. Weeklies were not required to publish circulation numbers under the 1912 Congressional act but Lyle self-reported a circulation of 1,000 copies sold weekly to the trade publication Ayer’s Newspaper Directory.  

The circulation for 1917, the first full year of publication, was self-reported to Ayer’s as 1,500 copies a week. Ayer’s noted Kingsport’s population was 6,000.

In 1921 the population number changed to exactly 5,692. The census had been published that year. And the Kingsport Times circulation had taken a tumble, down to 1,000.

The Kingsport Times became a daily on Oct. 1, 1924. So in October 1925 the newspaper published its first “official” “legal” Statement of Ownership.

The Kingsport Times had sold 3,106 copies a day that year.

The next year, 1926, circulation had increased slightly, to 3,312.

But as the Depression approached that number of readers began to fall, down to 2,421 by 1928.

By 1929, a scant few weeks before Wall Street crashed and the Depression enveloped the country, the Kingsport Times listed its circulation as 2,416.

That was the bottom. From 1930 until, well, fairly recently, the Times-News circulation increased almost every year.

 

1930 – 2,692

1935 – 4,720

1940 - 8,095

 

I wondered if circulation dipped during World War II when so many local men and women were serving in the military. Those readers must have been replaced by the influx of defense workers at Eastman and Holston Defense because circulation held steady (even rising one year) during the war years.

 

1942 – 10,626

1943 – 11,610

1944 – 12,659

1945 – 11,644

 

The post-war boom helped boost newspaper circulation, too.

The year I was born, 1947, circulation had skyrocketed to 16,695. That’s a jump of 5,000 readers in just two years! That’s the biggest two-year increase in the newspaper’s history.

 

Circulation continued increasing into the twenty-first century:

1950 - 19,405

1955 - 21,047

1965 - 26,536

1975 – 37,638

1985 - 47,158

1992 - 45,944

 

Then came the internet and other changes:

2004 – 41,734

2010 – 38,511

2020 - 19,438

2022 – 16,917 (Sept. 28, 2022 issue)

 

The last time the Times News print circulation was as low as 16,000 was the year I was born.

So in 76 years the Kingsport Times News went from 16,000 to a peak of almost 50,000 and now back to 16,000.

The next official Statement of Ownership circulation numbers are due in a couple of weeks.

I’m hoping they will start going back up.

 

 

A dime would once buy a cup of coffee and a morning newspaper:

 

The price of a daily newspaper has gone only one direction over the years: up. The price of the Kingsport Times News over the years:

1916 – two cents a copy

1920 – three cents

1940 – still three cents

1942 – five cents

1968 - ten cents

1975 – 15 cents

1982 – 25 cents

1988 – 35 cents

2023 - $1

 

Who owned the Times-News?

Many well-known local folks were listed among the newspaper’s owners in 1950:

 

2. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding one per cent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as those of each individual member, must be given.) Kingsport Publishing Co., Inc., C. P. Edwards, Jr., First National Bank and Val Edwards, Co-Trustees, E. W. Tipton, E. W. Tipton, Jr., Joe N. Tipton, George T. Tipton, Mrs. Catherine T. Brown, Howard Long, S. P, Platt, Richard Brockman, Mrs. Dorothy N. Edwards, Val Edwards, A. D. Brockman, S. E. McAmis, Mrs. Vera J. White, James Brockman, Shirley Joyce Brockman, J. W. West, all of Kingsport, Tennessee.

 

Other cities, other newspapers, all available at Kingsport newsstands in the fifties and sixties.

 

In 1967 when the late Troy Brown started working at Wallace News on Broad Street in Kingsport, Troy told me the newsstand stocked a dozen or so out-of-town newspapers. (Troy retired from Wallace in 2016.)

Here are a few of those papers and their 1967 circulation numbers along with their most recent circulation figures (in parentheses):

New York Times - 1,419,329 in 1967 (740,000 print subscribers in 2022)

Washington Post - 702,679 (159,040 – 2023)

Atlanta Journal-Constitution – 252,439 (52,803 – 2022)

Nashville Tennessean – 233,121 (19,270 – 2022)

Knoxville News-Sentinel – 167,792 (19,430 - 2022)

Memphis Commercial-Appeal – 331,672 (13,523 – 2022)

Asheville Citizen-Times – 47,330 (7,058 - 2022)

Hey, Hey Paula!

 

Ray, of Paul and Paula, is dead at 82

Ray Hildebrand, who was Paul of the sixties pop duo Paul and Paula, passed away last week in Kansas.

Paul and Paula were the stage names of Hildebrand and a college friend, Jill Jackson, who recorded the song that would make them famous in 1963. The real Paula was a girlfriend of Ray’s college buddy, Russell Berry. Ray, who wrote the song at his friend’s request, actually aimed it at his own ex-girlfriend Judy Hendricks. (It worked. He and Judy got back together and got married. She survives him.)

The initial recording on a small Texas label was titled “Hey Paula” by Ray and Jill. But when Mercury Records bought the rights, they changed the duo’s name to Paul and Paula.

The first time "Hey Paula" appeared on the record charts, in January 1963.

Cut to Kingsport, Tennessee in 1963. There was a girl in my Latin class named Paula, Paula Bennett, the only girl I knew at the time named Paula.  

And to this day, I never hear that song without thinking of Paula Bennett. It’s an easy association. She was a friend then, she’s a friend now. I’ve always begun letters, emails and phone calls to her with “Hey, hey Paula,” the first line of the song. Very clever, I know.

Girl-name songs aren’t as popular as they once were. I can name a dozen girl-name songs from my youth without even trying: “Barbara Ann,” “Gloria,” “Denise,” “Sherry,” “Donna,” “Peggy Sue,” “Suzy Q,” “Hello, Mary Lou,” “Linda,” “Michelle,” “Oh Carol” and “Sheila.” Girl name songs were still popular in the eighties and nineties with “Rosanna,” “Roxanne” and others.

But I had to search hard in a list of recent hits to come up with three and they are a stretch: “Stacy’s Mom,” “Jenny from the Block” and “Angel.”

In fact I found more songs with “me” in the title (17) than with a girl’s name.

But I wondered, as I listened to Paul promise, “Paula, I can’t wait no more for you,” how did Paula Bennett felt about that song? What was it like to hear your name on the radio all the time? Even in a lyric with a double negative?

So I asked her. Paula, now Paula Bennett-Paddick, lives now in western North Carolina.

“How could I not like a song with my name prominently featured?  It made me feel special, especially with a cute guy crooning, ‘I want to marry you.’ All love and tenderness. It was fun being teased and it did make me feel popular as long as the song lasted on the top ten.  However, we all know fame is fleeting.”

That’s right. “Hey Paula” was number one on the charts for the first three weeks of February 1963. But by summer the teen idols were singing about Denise and Judy.  Paula’s days on the radio, except as a moldy oldie, were over. 

And she says she didn’t see much chance of anyone writing a song with her middle name, Edwina. “I think I'll leave the earth before that happens.”

Boy songwriters have always written about the girls in their lives. But the other way around, not so much. There are a handful of songs with boy’s names: “Johnny Angel,” “Eddie, My Love,” “Jimmie Mack,” and a few others.

But there was never a Vince song. Okay, there was Don McLean‘s “Vincent” but that’s about a tortured fellow who cuts off his own ear. And who wants to be associated with that?

OTHER NAMES, OTHER TUNES

After my original 2004 column about Paula and “Hey Paula,” I heard from other girls named in songs.

Susan Z. Barnes said, “The 70's group the Buckinghams did a song ‘Susan’ which is my name. You did mention ‘Suzy Q’ and ‘Wake Up Little Susie.’  I always enjoyed those songs, but my name wasn't Suzy or Susie, it has always been Susan. I remember the first time I heard ‘Susan,’ I thought, ‘Finally, I made it.’”

Sherry Fouch said she liked having her name in a song. “I have a name that was not once, but twice the name of a song. You mentioned one in your article, ‘Sherry.’ And it was spelled correctly I might add. The second time my name graced a song was by Steve Perry, ‘Oh Sherri.’ Not spelled correctly by my standards, by why quibble over details.  Every time I hear these songs, I always stop and sing along. It makes me smile.”

Sara McClanahan Selby also had the name spelling issue. “My first name is Sara with no ‘h,’ which I have always thought to be the uncommon way to spell it. I was a teenager in the late 70's and early 80's and in that time period there was not one, but three songs with my name in the title: ‘Sara’ by Fleetwood Mac, ‘Sara’ by Jefferson Starship and ‘Sara Smile’ by Hall and Oates.  I always thought that it was neat, but a bit odd that not only did the songs have my name, but the correct spelling as well!”

Sue Parham recalled the experience of being serenaded in the Everly Brothers’ 1957 hit “Wake Up Little Suzie.” “I was in grad school and as I would go over for breakfast a fellow student would sing to me, ‘Wake up little Suzie, wake up!’  I was not an early riser and it was hard for me to get up for breakfast.  To make it even worse we had work duties - sometimes that was to serve breakfast. Oh, that was really hard for me! Then he would go through the breakfast line and see me serving and for sure he'd sing ‘Wake up little Suzie, wake up!’  Of course I still get the Suzie-Q songs, even from some of my fellow classmates at D-B when I am back in Kingsport.” Sue now lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Laura White, whose name was used in Ray Peterson’s 1960 hit “Tell Laura I Love Her,” remembered the first time she heard someone singing it.  “It was one of my girlfriends, and we were riding our bikes around the Greenfields area where I lived and had been talking about boyfriends. Then she started signing, ‘Tell Laura I love her.’  I thought she was teasing me by pretending to be a boyfriend. It was kind of strange then when I heard it on the radio.  Of course, during the time it was popular, people would tease me and sing the first line.  It was fun for a while, but then it got a little old after a while.” 

Being named in a song isn’t always a pleasant experience. Nikki Cristy told me, “Unfortunately, the only song with my name featured prominently was ‘Darling Nikki.’ Although I like Prince, I didn't like the reputation that ‘Nikki’ had in the song.”

For those unfamiliar with the song, Prince calls Darling Nikki a “sex fiend.”

 The Real Paula

As for the real Paula from the song: Her name was Paula Rowlette and on Thursday March 21, 1963, the Kingsport News’ People of the News column reported, “Paula Rowlette, subject of the hit song ‘Hey Paula,’ will be married Saturday in Fort Worth, Texas to Russell Berry who urged a friend to write the song after a spat.”

“Hey, Paula” worked twice – for Ray Hildebrand and also for his friend Russell Berry.

Paula Rowlette Berry died in 2021. Her obituary didn’t mention that a long time ago she was the famous inspiration for a song.

She is survived by Russell Berry.