What's Next

This is a rather lengthy post, but I hope you find it instructive, and helpful.
A few days ago, I copied over some startling statistics from Editor & Publisher…an audit of the top 25 newspapers in the United States and the circulation number. It’s pretty depressing. Circulation is dropping like a rock. Below those numbers is a piece I copied over from the Boston Globe. Much of it focuses on Philadelphia and what’s going on at the Inquirer.
None of this really surprises me. Why? Every semester I throw out a question to my classes, “how many of you read the newspaper regularly?” Few and fewer hands go up. But, when you ask how many of you go to the Internet and web sites for your news, more and more hands are raised. That’s a no-brainer, I suppose. But, where does that leave the neighborhoods? If more and more are in trouble, covering less and less of our neighborhoods, and circulation is dropping, where are they getting news…where will they get their news? If you watch a local TV newscasts these days, many of the stories are fly-by shots of a neighborhood accident scene, some fire or the aftermath of a crime with flashing lights and cops on the scene. We could spend of lot of blog-time beating up on local television, or cry about declining circulations, but the answer to me is: okay, if this is the way it’s going, what’s next? We looked at EPIC 2015 in class about what some believe is the future. What’s your vision for the future? If you could, what’s the perfect TV newscast…the perfect newspaper model for the cities and the neighborhoods? Is it electronic? Forget print, move all the stories online? Is it bureaus everywhere? Is it more neighborhood newspapers? Leave it alone!

As a point of reference, here’s the material from Editor & Publisher as well as the piece form the Boston Globe:


Editor and Publisher
(Updated with a list of the top-25 papers.) From the Audit
Bureau of Circulations FAS-FAX report for the six-month
period ending September 2006:
* Los Angeles Times daily circulation dropped 8%; down 6% on
Sunday.
* San Francisco Chronicle dropped 5.3% daily; down 7.3% on
Sunday.
* New York Times dropped 3.5% daily; down 3.5% on Sunday.
* Boston Globe dropped 6.7% daily; down 9.9% on Sunday.
* Washington Post dropped 3.3% daily; down 2.6% on Sunday.
* Wall Street Journal dropped 1.9% daily; WSJ Weekend
Edition down 6.7%.
* Chicago Tribune dropped 1.7% daily; down 1.3% on Sunday.
* USA Today dropped 1.3%.


Local ownership isn't cure-all for newspapers
By Robert Gavin, Globe Staff | October 27, 2006
As Philadelphia is finding out, local ownership of big city
newspapers isn't a panacea.
With a local group considering making a bid to buy The
Boston Globe from The New York Times Co., media specialists
warned that newspapers, regardless of ownership, face huge
challenges as readers and advertisers move online, and the
industry seeks a financial model to support extensive
newsgathering operations.
In Philadelphia, a local group earlier this year bought the
broadsheet Inquirer and tabloid Daily News from the
McClatchy Co. chain, sparking hope within the community and
the two papers for an end to the relentless cost-cutting
under its longtime corporate owner, the defunct Knight
Ridder chain. (Knight Ridder sold itself to McClatchy, which
in turn sold some of the papers it acquired.)
Last week, however, the new owner said layoffs
were "unavoidable" because revenue was falling so quickly
that the company would not be able to meet its debt payments
next year. Meanwhile, with the company pushing for deep
concessions in union contracts that expire next week,
members of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia,
which represents editorial, advertising, and other workers,
last night authorized union leader s to call a strike.
With tensions rising yesterday, union leaders were
unavailable for comment. Neither was Brian Tierney, a former
public relations and advertising executive who led the group
that bought the papers.
"The sentiment of local ownership is noble, but the
economics are still brutal," said Jay Harris, formerly
publisher of the San Jose Mercury News and now a journalism
professor at the University of Southern California. "The
good news is the desire to have strong local papers
committed to local service. But the industry is still
thrashing around, looking for a sustainable long-range
model."
After decades of big, publicly traded media companies
gobbling up local papers, that trend has recently showed
signs of reversing. Wall Street has been battering newspaper
stock prices, prompting companies to cut costs. The result:
Local groups led by wealthy residents are popping up across
the country with hopes of protecting and preserving the
papers.
In Boston, where falling circulation and advertising
revenues at the Globe have led to job and cost cuts, a group
led by Jack Welch, former General Electric Co. chief
executive, and Jack Connors, cofounder of the advertising
firm Hill Holliday, has emerged as possible bidders for the
Globe. In Los Angeles, entertainment mogul David Geffen is
among a group of local executives expressing interest in
buying the Los Angeles Times from Tribune Co. Local groups
in Hartford, Long Island, and Baltimore have signaled
interest in buying Tribune Co. papers in those communities.
Media specialists said local ownership could take some of
the cost pressures off papers, since, as private companies,
they wouldn't have to meet Wall Street expectations. But,
they added, they still face the pressures of paying off
loans that typically finance the purchases and providing
promised returns to private investors.
"Even a private ownership group has to operate in the
black," said Lou Ureneck, chairman of the Boston University
journalism department.
New owners would have to tackle newspapers' tricky
transition to the Internet. So far, newspapers' online
profits haven't come close to making up for declines in the
traditional business.
Another big challenge, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the
Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonprofit Washington
research group, is that newspapers operate under a model
foreign to most other businesses. Newspapers' mass audience
is their readers, and the circulation revenue generated by
sales to readers is important. But newspapers make most of
their money by selling space to advertisers based in part on
the papers' credibility with readers. That credibility must
be protected even at the risk of sometimes angering and
losing advertisers, Rosenstiel said.
"When you have management that has been in the business,
they know the integrity of the news product is what they're
selling," Rosenstiel said. "It's not clear whether the new
local owners understand this unusual economic model."
There are concerns that a new breed of owners, who have
largely become rich in other businesses, would interfere in
the newsgathering process to boost their own financial
interests, reward friends, or punish enemies.
In Philadelphia, the Tierney group signed a pledge not to
interfere with news decisions made by editors. The Boston
group, so far, has not made any such pledge.
Stephen Burgard, director of the Northeastern University
School of Journalism, pointed to Santa Barbara, Calif., as
an example of the vulnerability of locally controlled
newspapers. At the News-Press, at least five top editors,
including the editor and managing editor, resigned over
interference by the wealthy copublisher, Wendy McCaw, who
bought the paper from Times Co. in 2000.
Among the incidents prompting the resignations was when
McCaw stopped the publication of the drunken driving
conviction of one of her loyalists at the paper. McCaw said
in an e-mail that she was merely following the paper's
policy of not reporting drunken driving convictions unless
injury or death was involved. They weren't in this case.
"Local ownership is potentially wonderful and potentially
disastrous," Burgard said. "The question is, what is their
sense of community stewardship?"