D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2009
Stopping the Presses
From New Mexico to New York City, the American newspaper is under siege.
The notice came in the mail, not entirely unexpected, the latest nick in the death by a thousand cuts of the American newspaper. Although the Albuquerque Journal "is proud to have provided news and information to your local area for years," it was about to stop doing so. (So much for pride, I guess.) As of Feb. 1, home delivery of the Journal in the Silver City area would cease. (Las Cruces delivery will continue, at least for now.) We were, however, encouraged to sign up for the eJournal, an online edition of the paper that is not nearly as convenient for reading at the breakfast table nor as useful for wadding up to clean the fireplace glass.
I say "not entirely unexpected," because the long tradition of "statewide" newspapers has long been eroding. In Iowa, the Des Moines Register, which used to compete with us when I was a columnist for the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, no longer delivers its "dead-tree edition" to Dubuque, on the far eastern side of the state, much less maintain a bureau there. The Minneapolis-based Star-Tribune, with which I competed as features editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press across the Mississippi River, retrenched some time back, cutting delivery to the hinterlands of Minnesota. Two years ago, New York-based Avista Capital Partners bought the Star-Tribune. Last month, the newspaper filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Merely retreating geographically is mild compared to the drastic steps other dailies are taking to survive. A year ago, The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., another paper familiar from my past, ceased print production except for two days of the week and moved publication largely to the Internet. The Gannett-owned Detroit Free Press will eliminate home delivery in its own city except for three days a week, beginning March 30. Information-hungry Detroiters will have to buy a greatly shrunken paper on the newsstand or turn to the Web. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, owned by Hearst, was put on the block in mid-January with a warning that unless a buyer is found in 60 days, the newspaper could go Web-only or fold altogether.
Right here in Silver City, in 2008 the independently owned Daily Press began outsourcing its printing and cut back from six to five days a week.
Of course, every business day brings word of a new round of layoffs at this newspaper or that. In that sense, the family-owned Albuqerque Journal is fortunate, with only a handful of newsroom layoffs and buyouts last month. Gannett, the nation's biggest newspaper chain, unveiled a jaw-dropping plan in January under which all 31,000 of its US employees would be required to take a week off (a "furlough") without pay within the first quarter of this year.
A colleague from my Dubuque days, now working for a major metro daily owned by another large chain, writes, "These days, I have a front row seat to the imminent death of the newspaper industry. The newsroom has been hit by three separate waves of layoffs, with a bunch of buyouts in-between. Rumors have been flying for weeks that the paper will be shutting its doors — although our editor and publisher have told us (and readers) that the paper's here to stay. Well, we'll see. . . ."
And some newspapers do simply go out of business. In our corner of the state, the Lordsburg Liberal was shut down in 2007 after 120 years; it had been the oldest surviving weekly in New Mexico.
Roughly a year ago, the Albuquerque Tribune shut down after a failed six-month effort by owner E.W. Scripps Co. to find a buyer. Circulation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning afternoon daily, which was 42,000 in 1988, had fallen to 9,600. Despite a joint-operating agreement (JOA) with the Journal, under which the papers shared some business functions, the Tribune could no longer survive.
That sad story is about to be repeated in the big city to our West. Gannett recently announced it will close the afternoon Tucson Citizen if a buyer isn't found by March 21. Arizona's oldest continuously published newspaper, founded in 1870, the Citizen has been operating through a JOA with the Lee-owned Arizona Daily Star. Its circulation has dwindled to 17,000, dwarfed by the morning Star's 117,000.
And farther to our north, Denver may soon become a one-newspaper town if a buyer isn't found for the Rocky Mountain News, another Scripps property.
But it's not just small-town weeklies and afternoon dailies that are endangered. A recent Atlantic magazine article by Michael Hirschorn, "End Times," speculated that a credit crunch could kill the nation's "newspaper of record," The New York Times, as soon as this May. Times officials dismissed such speculation, but Hirschorn continued, "At some point soon — sooner than most of us think — the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company."
According to Hirschorn, in December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: "Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010."
So what? you may be saying. If I have to go online to read my favorite Journal comic strips, it's hardly the death of western civilization. Even if a few big metro papers go online-only or fold entirely, we can always get our news on the Internet. Heck, just go click on your favorite blog!
Except where do those bloggers get the news they link to and chatter about? For all the talk of "citizen reporters" blazing a new journalism on the Web, few bloggers go to the trouble of original reporting (much less balanced reporting), rather than just commenting on somebody else's reporting. In most cases, that somebody else was paid by a daily newspaper.
As Hirschorn puts it, "The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands." If all your news gets funneled through a blog, Yahoo! or Google News, who really knows or cares where it originates or how it gets paid for?
Would an Internet-only Washington Post have exposed the Watergate scandal or the corruption of Jack Abramoff? Would an online New York Times have the resources to expose the abuse of mentally ill adults in state-regulated homes, as it did to win a 2003 Pulitzer Prize? Or could a paperless Miami Herald support the detailed reporting that revealed pervasive voter fraud in a city mayoral election, which led to the election being overturned?
Perhaps. But consider this quick economic lesson from Hirschorn's article: The Times' Web site ranked fifth among all Web news sites in October, attracting an impressive 20 million unique visitors. That dwarfs the reach of its print edition, which is sold to a (diminishing) 1 million readers on weekdays and (also dwindling) 1.4 million Sunday readers. But those print readers not only pay for the privilege of reading the Times; they're also worth more to advertisers, fetching the newspaper five figures per printed ad page. Though only a fraction of the Times' Web audience, the newspaper's print readers are far more profitable to the publisher.