Today is National Newspaper Columnists Day declared so by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists .April 18th was chosen because it is the day in 1945 when famed World War Two columnist/journalist Ernie Pyle was killed by gunfire while riding in jeep on the island of Okinawa.
Pyle was known to admire the infantry man and referred to them as "the guys that wars can't be won without." After Pyle urged in a column in 1944 that soldiers should get “fight pay” just as airmen got “flight pay” the US Congress passed what came to be known as the Ernie Pyle bill authorizing $10.00 more per month for combat infantrymen.
OpEdNews on line’s Bob Patterson writes each year of National Colunmists Day to keep Pyle’s memory alive, relevant and not just a footnote.
One way to combat the deterioration of journalism in the United States is to promote the work of the greats and to encourage people to make the effort to learn about them, and read their work. This year we will also urge our regular readers to perhaps look up online some of the columnists honing their skills in various college newspapers.How many national or local papers made note of this observance today? What platform or combination of them might a future Ernie Pyle be found using? What about the Washington Post’s columnist George Will and his recent climate change nonsense ? Given the current state of agony in the newspaper world and doubt about the future a little introspection may not be wasted.
Observing the current readiness of newspaper publishers to blame the internet for all their troubles former journalist/editor turned blogger Alan Mutter writes …....
......As Google and many other savvy online publishers learned how to capitalize on the openness and interactivity of the Internet, newspaper publishers stubbornly spent the last 1½ decades trying to sustain their once-enviable print business model in the face of overwhelming evidence that everything was changing: technology, consumer patterns and advertiser behavior.
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