The Times and Democrat Visit

T&D Tour
Justin Hill
April 11, 2019

Pressing The Issue of Newspapers

By: Justin Hill

Our copy editing class had the opportunity to go visit The Times and Democrat which is a local Orangeburg S.C newspaper. We were given a tour of the facilities by Lee Harter who gave us an depth look on how the newspaper operates. "Where do you get your news?" asked Harter. Students quickly shouted out social media. "Does anybody else get their news anywhere else besides social media?" It's a rarity that people even watch television anymore.

 Inside a room, students were shown the printing press in which the Times and Democrat newspapers were made. "We generally crank the press up around midnight" said Harter. This is to ensure that the days paper will be ready for distribution in a timely manner.











"Newspapers are dying!" Wait what? yes Harter said "Newspapers are dying" and he gave a great explanation as to why. "Newspapers have always been measured on paid circulations. Paid circulation keeps going down for multiple reasons. Millennials don't read print. If you do read the newspaper you are going to read it online." Harter said their team is still trying to figure out the right business model.

After talking about the printing press, students were then told about their website, social  media and the traffic that it accumulates. "Our Twitter traffic is unbelievably small compared to Facebook." A lot of older people aren't on twitter. They are mainly on Facebook thus resulting in the heavy Facebook page viewers.

In terms of Copy Editing, Harter stated that "It is incredibly hard to read a story for content while you are also over here reading it for sentence structure, and grammar, and all these other things that you are watching. Copy editors are people that refine a story. Harter made it clear that stories should be wrote so that people will be interested in reading the material.