Newspapers have been in financial difficulty for about as long as my recent memory can recall.
Not all newspapers, of course. Most of the large metro dailies that have been in the news lately because of the financial challenges they face have only recently begun to feel the effects of declining revenues, smaller page counts and shrinking news holes.
But the canaries in the newspapering mine, the community weeklies, have been taking financial body blows for the better part of two decades. It was in the early 1990s that national advertisers — the large retailers who gradually took control of the retail landscapes on Everytown’s main street — began steering their valuable ad dollars away from hometown newspapers and into flyers and the Pennysaver-type publications that often came with them.
I was there. I got to watch it happen.
Admittedly, there is little correlation between the sort of financial distress that resulted for weeklies then and the calamity facing huge metro dailies now, except for one thing: Both cases provide textbook examples that once-successful business models can break and, when they do, chaos and ruin follow. I was unfortunate enough to experience that in both situations — first as a community newspaper publisher liquidating everything I had in a futile attempt to survive, then as one of the worker bees tossed over the side by a metro daily looking to do the same.
Last year, I suggested to a friend who is a newsroom executive at the Toronto Star that I thought the newsprint version of the daily newspaper could be dead within 10 years. He thought that viewpoint too pessimistic. It would take a generation, he responded.
At the time, I bowed to his greater wisdom. Upon reflection, I am no longer sure I was wrong.
In recent years, we have seen the demise of two once-great newspapers: the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The latter continues only in a digital format. The Chicago Tribune retreated into bankruptcy protection, taking some of its more robust titles, including the Los Angeles Times, with it. Even the venerated Boston Globe appeared threatened.
More recently, we have seen the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Orleans Times-Picayune announce a retreat in its print schedule from daily to three days a week, and Postmedia spike the Sunday editions of its newspapers in Edmonton, Ottawa and Calgary.
All of these developments, recent past and present, are accompanied by significant job losses in newsrooms and elsewhere in newspaper operations. Young people who aspire to lifelong careers in journalism, even those already gainfully employed in many of these newsrooms, are quickly coming to the realization a Plan B might be prudent.
The executives who run these companies — most of whom, it should be noted, bear no similarity to the newspaper barons of old but, rather, come from the more generic ranks of accounting and business schools — see the economic fortunes of their titles tied to the digital age. If only, they reason, the revenue lost from the printed product can be retrieved from the online version. To that end, they envision the day when newly installed paywalls on their news sites will generate revenue, while they cut their losses by tossing assorted print products out of the boat.
Well, good luck with that. I have some experience with this sort of thing, and this is what I see.
• Killing Sunday newspapers is foolhardy. Sunday is the one day a week when many people have time to read a printed newspaper. To deny them that opportunity is to break them of the habit of reading a printed newspaper altogether. As strategies go, it only serves to hasten the newsprint-free era these executives seek to delay.
• If there is an economic model for daily newspapers that still works, it likely can be found in providing a service that is marketable but not found elsewhere: long-form journalism. Leave the breaking news to the TV networks and online news sites. Print products are uniquely well-suited for providing background and context, and what better day to do that than on Sunday?
• Not every newspaper product needs to be its own profit centre. If there is a common rationale for killing a Sunday newspaper but keeping the often skimpier, more barren Monday edition, it is because Monday still makes money. Yet it is the Sunday paper that builds the brand and provides a critical part of the circulation that keeps the newspaper in front of its potential customers. It is, in a word, advertising. Newspapers never made any money from publishing TV guides all those years, either, but those products built circulation because people bought the papers to find out what was on TV that week. As a result, newspaper publishers were able to charge more on those days for their papers and for the advertising in them. TV guides have outlived their usefulness, but the principle still holds.
None of this is going to be easy. It’s unsettling. Our democracy depends on the free flow of ideas and an informed citizenry. Yet an important component of that — the good old-fashioned newspaper — is being choked to death by a marketplace that places little value on it. So be it.
Nevertheless, the demand, the desire, for information is still there. Some might even argue that demand is greater than ever. If that is true, then newspapers can survive, even thrive, if they are smart, if they are innovative, about how they adapt. So far, the people who run the newspaper industry are showing little evidence they are up to the task.
