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Panic in the Newspaper Biz

Posted on Mar 23, 2006

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas—I don’t so much mind that newspapers are dying—it’s watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.

Let’s use this as a handy exercise in journalism. What is the unexamined assumption here? That the newspaper business is dying. Is it? In 2005, publicly traded U.S. newspaper publishers reported operating profit margins of 19.2%, down from 21% in 2004, according to The Wall Street Journal. That ain’t chopped liver—it’s more than double the average operating profit margin of the Fortune 500.

So who thinks newspapers are dying? Newspaper analysts on Wall Street. In fact, the fine folks on Wall Street just forced the sale of Knight Ridder Inc. to McClatchy Co., a chain one-third KR’s size. McClatchy’s CEO, Gary Pruitt, pointed out in an Op-Ed piece that investors are so chicken that his company picked up KR for a song. (Actually, he said no such thing—he was far more dignified. But that’s what it comes down to.) So if newspapers are so ridiculously profitable, how come there’s panic on Wall Street about them? Because we’re losing circulation—2% in 2004, and down 13% from a 1985 peak, says the Newspaper Association of America.

So we’re looking at a steady decline over a long period, and many of the geniuses who run our business believe they have a solution. Our product isn’t selling as well as it used to, so they think we need to cut the number of reporters, cut the space devoted to the news and cut the amount of money used to gather the news, and this will solve the problem. For some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful to people. I’m just amazed the Bush administration hasn’t named the whole darn bunch of them to run FEMA yet.

What cutting costs does, of course, is increase the profits, thus making Wall Street happy. It also kills newspapers.

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Aside from my own sentimental attachment to newspapers, I have no objection to all of us shifting over to the Internet and doing the same thing there. You’d still have the two big problems, however: (A) How do you know if it’s true? And (B) how do you put a lot of information into a package that’s useful to people? If newspapers were just another buggy-whip industry, none of this would be of much note—another disappearing artifact, like the church key. But while Wall Street doesn’t care, and neither do many of the people who own and run newspapers, newspapers do, in fact, matter beyond producing profit—they have a critical role in democracy. It’s called a well-informed citizenry.

We are in trouble.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, run by Columbia University, has a new report out that finds that the number of media outlets continues to grow, but both the number of stories covered and the depth of reporting are sliding backward. Television, radio and newspapers are all cutting staff, while the bloggers of the Internet either do not have the size or the interest to go out and gather news. Bloggers are not news-gatherers, but opinion-mongers. I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter—nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened. Or, as author-journalist Curtis Wilkie puts it, “Unless you can cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you shouldn’t be allowed to cover a presidential campaign.”

Tom Rosenstiel of Project for Excellence says: “It’s probably glib and even naive to say simply that more platforms equal more choices. The content has to come from somewhere, and as older news-gathering media decline, some of the strengths they offer in monitoring the powerful and verifying the facts may be weakening, as well.”

The McClatchy-KR merger, however, emphasizes the perils of ever fewer outlets. Twenty-five years ago, about 50 corporations owned most of the media outlets. Today, there are between eight and 12. McClatchy and KR both have fairly decent reputations for journalism, so what difference does it make if they merge?

Of course, McClatchy intends to merge the Washington bureaus. Guess which Washington bureau has the distinction of being the only one to report skeptically on the administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the war? Knight-Ridder and its terrific reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay. They didn’t have to go to Iraq to get the story—they found it in Washington: “Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials.”

I’ve thought for years that newspapers should all be owned by nonprofits. There is a chance something like this will actually happen—the Newspaper Guild, in alliance with the Communications Workers of America, is getting ready to bid on the 12 KR papers McClatchy has to sell. Eight of the 12 are Guild papers, with combined employment of 7,000 and circulation of 1.3 million. Among the 12 are such outstanding newspapers as The Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury News and St. Paul Pioneer Press.

McClatchy can’t swallow all of them, and so the two unions have turned to a “worker-friendly” investment fund to back their bid. Keep an eye on this: It is a most hopeful development.

www.creators.com

TAGS: business circulation content dying journalism media newspaper reporters suicide wall street

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By exitstan, March 28, 2006 at 2:06 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Good Golly Miss Molly!

Don’t delude yourself into thinking all bloggers don’t do their homework. I like you—and understand you live in hostile territory because I lived my first 27 years in Texas—but I know I have done at least as much homework as yourself and have never been paid one penny for it. The newspaper biz problems aren’t just about money. It’s about competence too. Bloggers have just as much a right to be opinion-mongers as the “professionals” who constantly bombard us with their vacuous “objectivity”—another word for non-existent analysis of important issues, based on a deeply conservative, narrow, corporate, provincial bias reflected by the journos’ and audience’s inability and refusal to think outside the tribe. This applies to US liberals (Demos) too. Journalistic incompetence and “yellowness” is one major reason 9 out of 10 Americans initially supported the doomed attempted theft of Iraq.

The professional Fourth Estate in the US is a stinking, black, blue, bloating carcass and the world is suffering because of it.

It is dying of it’s own dumbing down process. It is a synergistic echo chamber. Readers’ and professional journos’ willful ignorance has fed off each other for so long that the level of political discourse has now sunk so low that I am now answered by absolute silence when I bring up the subject of US foreign policy with almost any American I talk to, Republican or Democrat.
One contributing factor is that editors and journalists address their readership as an audience, not a citizenry. Another factor is that the employees of the corporate owned news organizations are solely obsessed with managing their careers, not with the “meaning of events”. Imagine how different these times would be if journalists of such competence and integrity as William Shirer, Ed Morrow, and Robert Fisk had been filling the front and editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post instead of Judith Miller, Thomas Friedman, and Charles Krauthamer.

The degeneration is now so acute that editors and journalists are no longer able to “dumb down” for their audience; that would require owning higher degree of curiosity and information about the world than their audience has.

There are few other explanations for the fact that Bush & The Neo Cons were… uh… elected… Twice. And that they have still not been placed in orange suites and perp-walked straight to The Hague. Americans gave them the keys to the arsenal and Supreme court, then thumped their chests as they together committed the greatest strategic blunder in the history of their country. After the consequences became obvious, they responded by… uh… re-electing Bush.

I meet taxi drivers here in Brazil that are better informed about geo-politics than many “highly educated”—as in having multiple graduate degrees—Americans I have known.

Knowledge of history—yours and theirs—would have been an effective BS detector and defensive weapon against the mass stupidity that has been exhibited by the US government, US “news” media, and “the great American people”. (It did work for some of us.) Knowledge of history also requires certain level of curiosity about the world and those who live in it. It may also presume a certain amount of respect for “the other 96%” of the world’s population.

It is not a stretch to speculate that if enough “educated” Americans of all walks of life had a healthy respect and curiosity about the people who live in Iraq, the US would not have tried to steal Iraq, fail, and now countenance suppliers who would rather sell to China, while gas prices continually rise until the gas is all gone.

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By Walt Jorgensen, March 26, 2006 at 7:34 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Re: Panic in the Newspaper Biz
Posted on Mar. 23, 2006
By Molly Ivins

Dear Molly,

Regarding your opining “that newspapers should all be owned by nonprofits,” may I suggest you take it a step further and advocate that they be owned by the readership they are supposed to serve. My mission is to replace the for-profit newspaper in my community with one that is held publicly with stockholders restricted to residents of Thurston County. It may or may not be structured to earn a profit depending on what other considerations, e.g., tax exemption, might be attractive benefits.

Imagine…, a Board of Directors comprised of citizen representatives. An editorial board of generous membership drawn as a juried panel from the populace at 3 month intervals. Reporters, uninhibited by advertiser* blackmail, who have the time and license to run a story to ground and stay with it. Citizen/voter/taxpayer/resident perspective given proportionate weight and exposure relative to institutional “press release” news reporting. Corroborated facts taking the place of a pointless “balanced” spin.

Also, I understood that what distinguished the “Doomed Dozen” that Mark Fitzgerald listed for me below is that they were the 12 newspapers that McClatchy was dumping because they had unions.

Walt Jorgensen
3439 14th Ave NW
Olympia, Washington 98502
360-867-0142

* Yes, advertising revenue would still be a major revenue source but with absolutely no influence on publication policy.

To: Mark Fitzgerald <MFitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com>
Subject: Re: Identity of the Doomed Dozen?
Date: Thursday, March 16, 2006 2:04:09 PM
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Mark Fitzgerald
Editor at Large
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,
Thank for the generous allotment of your time to answer my question so swiftly and thoroughly.
You provide a very impressive service.
Sincerely,
Walter R. Jorgensen, The Carnegie Group
3439 14th Ave NW
Olympia, WA 98502-4023
360-867-0142
———————Original message———————
From: Mark Fitzgerald <MFitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com>

> Dear Mr. Jorgensen,
> You are correct. The Olympian is unaffected by this sale. Here is a list of
> the 12 Knight Ridder papers now for sale by McClatchy:
> The largest are the Philadelphia Inquirer and San Jose Mercury News. Others
> include Knight Ridder’s other Philadelphia paper, the Daily News; Akron
> Beacon Journal (OH); Wilkes Barre Times Leader (PA); Aberdeen American News
> (SD); Grand Forks Herald (ND); Ft. Wayne News- Sentinel (IN); Contra Costa
> Times (CA); Monterey Herald (CA); and Duluth News Tribune (MN). The St.
> Paul Pioneer Press (MN) is to be sold due to anticipated anti-trust
> concerns involving McClatchy’s (Minneapolis) Star Tribune.
> Best,
> Mark Fitzgerald

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By Pat Williams, March 25, 2006 at 9:01 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

People are losing confidence in what they read in most of the newspapers. We’re still buying the Washington Post every day mainly because my 86 year old mother doesn’t use computers. But they lost my trust when they ran that huge piece of spin in November 2004 on exit polls being unreliable. The trust is broken as it was some years back with the scandal sheets. Presenting official liars opining “new realities” to counter the facts when the reporters and editors know the difference is unacceptable.

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By James H. Fetzer, March 25, 2006 at 8:48 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Molly,

Could you check out the scientific studies of 9/11 found at the Scholars for 9/11 Truth web site, http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org? I think you might be impressed by how much we have established about the events of 9/11. Good places to start include their “press releases” at the top of the page or the revision of the article on Wikipedia that Wikipedia would not allow be posted, even though it corrected many false claims about the society. And if you want more, my contact information is at the top of the home page. Many thanks for considering this. The nation deserves the truth!

Jim

James H. Fetzer
Founder and Co-Chair
Scholars for 9/11 Truth
and
McKnight Professor
University of Minnesota
Duluth, MN 55812

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By Merrill, March 25, 2006 at 11:46 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

Loved your comment about needing years of reporting experience before being allowed to monger opinions. I spent a quarter century in the news business (started in the composing room!) before writing my blog, which covers mostly health care and drug issues and where (on most days) I try to do original reporting. My reward? 500 readers a day. What most bloggers on the internet (left or right) won’t admit is that the MSM, from the New York Times to Fox News, is text; they’re commentary.

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By Wayne Smyer, March 25, 2006 at 10:55 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

“Who Killed Gus Boulis”???

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By Wayne Smyer, March 25, 2006 at 10:36 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

Thanks Molly, for your many years of fighting the good fight!” I have long admired you from a far” Please do a story on the Jack Abramoff-Adam Kidan,Sun-Cruz Casino Ships and the murder of Konstantino “Gus” Boulis. . Suggested title: “Who Ordered The Killing Of Gus Boulis”
I would be happy to send what info I have collected on this murder cover-up. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
“The best eviddence to support Darwin’s Theory is George “The Chimp” Bush , a.k.a. “Austreo-pissus Tex-anus”
Pobre Mexico, tan lejos de Dios, tan circa La Familia Bush! with apology to Porfirio Diaz

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By TC, March 24, 2006 at 10:09 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Molly
I totally agree that newspapers need to be run by non-profits. And whatever happened to our elected officials divesting themselves of corporate holdings before they take public office?

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By Jake - but not the one, March 23, 2006 at 9:48 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Molly, these contradiction in thses two statements refute at least some of your position:

“Tom Rosenstiel of Project for Excellence says: Its probably glib and even naive to say simply that more platforms equal more choices. The content has to come from somewhere, and as older news-gathering media decline, some of the strengths they offer in monitoring the powerful and verifying the facts may be weakening, as well.

“Guess which Washington bureau has the distinction of being the only one to report skeptically on the administrations claims about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction before the war? Knight-Ridder and its terrific reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay.”

Newpapers ARE abdicating their responsibility. Until they get back to their real business, they deserve to disappear.

Jake

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By Tim, March 23, 2006 at 3:17 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Anecdotally; I’m two hours on the “interwebs” now every morning. That’s the same two hours I usually take to read the L.A. Times, which I’ve done faithfully for 30 years.

The paper is still sitting at the bottom of the hill.

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By felicity smith, March 23, 2006 at 3:06 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Boy, Molly, have you looked at the LA Times recently? You could fit the “news” of today’s Times on four pages of the old Times. Their renamed, Sunday edition Opinion section has forced protest cancellations right and left. Makes sense. If subscriptions are down, change the paper into a rag guaranteed to reduce subscription numbers even more because newspaper readers don’t subscribe to rags.

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By Larry Deyab, March 23, 2006 at 2:49 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

“I have no objection to all of us shifting over to the Internet and doing the same thing there. Youd still have the two big problems, however: A) How do you know if its true?”

What makes the New York Post true?
Toilet paper is paper as well.
The sooner the tabloids are gone the better, as even the New York Times has turned into People Magazine for the upper crust.

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By John Earl, March 23, 2006 at 2:31 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Does anybody still read the paper besides me?

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By Joe Citizen, March 23, 2006 at 1:24 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Newspapers are not dying, Molly, they are in transition! Geez.

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