May 12, 2009
Newspapers: Death by Greed or Content?
The newspaper industry hasn’t bottomed out yet, but it will. Experts have pointed to various causes of the demise – the Internet, printing presses, cable news, editorial leanings and the list goes on. But most newspapers are like everybody else – they’re in business to make money. So why isn’t anyone talking about the probability that some unsound fiscal decisions have been made?
Newspapers - will they become as vintage as manual typewriters?
The largest newspaper chains – Gannett, Scripps Howard and McClatchy – are publicly traded. That means it’s all about the shareholders. It’s about generating enough revenue (mostly through ads) to pay for the people and the presses. It’s about incurring more debt and slashing payrolls to meet shareholder expectations, even though newspaper stocks have plummeted in recent years from dollars to pennies per share.
Candidly, the quality of content also has declined, another reason lacking in discussion (of course, why would editors report on that?). The over-recycling of news, along with dependence on wire services, weakens a daily venue that’s supposed to represent its community. Reporters are being asked to do more with less, so much of the content is like day-old bread.
Having begun my career as a reporter, the situation saddens me. I started out writing (using carbon copy paper) city council stories on a black manual Underwood Typewriter that was already vintage when I used it. Even though my boss drank vodka and orange juice from a thermos and chain smoked all day, I wouldn’t trade my journalism days for anything.
Having also worked for a NYSE-traded company, I know you can’t please your customers, your employees and your shareholders at the same time all the time. So, in regard to cause of death, what came first? A movement toward a decreasingly credible and traditional resource reflective of the community, or mismanagement at the highest level to please shareholders at any cost? Regardless, there are no winners here.
Great perspectives as always! While newspapers were busy printing recycled news consumers could get from other sources, I have heard that one of the major downfalls in their revenue has been the loss in classified ad revenue. Little wonder when you can get free listings on the local Craigslist forums, which I frequent often as both a buyer and seller (we’re not all serial killers!)… vs. the $75 I was being charged by the local paper last fall for a few lines to advertise my little yard sale. How could they not see they were pricing us all off the page with rates that left us little hope we could break even on a sale? Of course consumers began to ditch their classified ad pages–we had no choice. It will be interesting to see where this industry shakeup eventually lands. Perhaps they will finally come full circle and start focusing on good journalism again.
susan — yes, exactly
i worked for newspaper/wire on and off for a decade, and they started slashing their own throats in the ’80s by cutting quality, staff and content and making themselves irrelevant. they had a choice then: retain their business and their readers by improving, or cut costs and they chose the latter instead of the former — the internet just made the death spriral go faster
i think talkingpointsmemo.com is a light toward the future: serious and informed reporting mixed with a strong point of view; i read it every day
What Gannett has done to The Tennessean in Nashville over the last 20 years is a case study in playing to the lowest common denominator and losing the audience your advertisers really want to reach – imo, people who want to read substantive stories about their city and its people rather than fluff or poorly written, inadequate reporting – as a result.
I never thought I would see the day when I didn’t take the local newspaper, but my family stopped The Tennessean five years ago because we were spending less than 5 minutes with it before it went into the recycling bin. Choices of front page news stories were laughable; in-depth coverage of real issues almost non-existent.
In the last several years, Nashville Metro’s public schools have made a national list of systems that are “dropout factories” and they’re currently under state management because of students’ poor academic performance. Seventy percent of the kids who attend Nashville’s public schools qualify for free or reduced lunches. Parents who only speak Spanish or who are functionally illiterate present a real challenge for teachers, who need parents to work with them to support their children’s education. Ultimately, Metro’s school superintendent was ousted. Over the past couple of years, coverage in the newspaper focused a lot more on the fight over the institution of “Standard School Attire” and didn’t even do a good job with that. A good paper might have illuminated some of the challenges teachers and the school system faces in terms of parents who can’t speak English, parents who aren’t literate, single parents who work more than one job, how many students are in a classroom, etc. – as well as the fact that one solution the state of Tennessee has taken to the problem is to LOWER the standards of student achievement, a very bad idea.
Illuminating the implications of society’s problems with careful coverage over time is one of the things newspaper journalism has always done best – much better than sound-bite TV news programs. But that sort of attention costs money and requires experience. Most Tennessean reporters are young, inexperienced and don’t have much editorial guidance if any, and Gannett doesn’t seem interested in making the kind of investment in Nashville that real news reporting requires.
It’s a shame, because we need a good paper. Every city does.
And dare I say the effort to be inclusive elevates C-section stories to the front page.
“Death by Greed or Content?” Reminds me of the question “did the dinosaurs fall into exstinction in one fell swoop at the hands of a collosal meteor deciding to drop into the Yucatan Peninsula for some fun and sun, or did the impact on the global environment and ecology do them in over the next hundreds or thousands of years? In the case of the large newspapers an argument can be made that the cataclismic event was the invention of the computer, internet, cable tv and personal wireless data devices, and the resulting change in “environment” that resulted in the long slow slide was the need to reduce cost, and with it quality, to maintain a price point at which customers might actually pay for mediocrity and a few store coupons so that stockholders could be kept at bay.
If the dinosaur analogy seems a bit too ancient for you, and you would like to examine the demise of a dinosaur in our own time, then perhaps you may wish to grab your favorite instant wireless web based information technolgy device and check out what has happened to GM and how it got there.