Molly Ivins: Newspapers commit suicide by cutting reporters, news, costs

[DeepModem Mom]

Free Press
Molly Ivins
Newspaper suicide
March 23, 2006

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 percent, down from 21 percent 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 percent in 2004, and down 13 percent 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....

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/1/2006/1338

[Squeech]

1. We need to buy them

When I first signed on to DU, back in 2002 (pay attention, you young whippersnapper!), there were a couple posters who were agitating to build some sort of VLWC media network. Where are they now?

Part of the problem was simply that there were too many ideas in the pot: newspapers! No, cable TV! No, talk radio! (As we know, the last named was the idea that finally took off, as Air America.)

But it's newspapers that really serve as the First Draft of History. I don't know why an idea gains more salience when imprinted on dead trees than as a configuration of electrons, but that's the way of it-- one of those weird traditions, like Buckingham Palace guards wearing big furry hats.

And partisanship doesn't seem to be a barrier: concepts that appear in the Washington Times, owned and operated (at a huge loss) by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, have as much clout in the Marketplace of Ideas as anything in the Post, or the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal.

I'm aware that leftist newspapers exist, but they're perceived as rabidly partisan, largely because they are. I'm thinking of the tiny little papers published by various socialist and communist party organizations, which report pretty well on depradations of global capitalism, and then conclude that whatever the issue is, it proves how necessary is a new workers' vanguard motivated by proper revolutionary ideals, or some such chimera that ain't gonna happen.

But what should happen is a newspaper that reads like blogtopia (y!sctp!), where a contemporary story is put into a context that conventional newspapers are unable or unwilling to explore, where evidence is weighed, where institutional memory is given pride of place, and specifically where all those interesting inconvenient facts we remember and nobody else seems to would appear in print attached to stories they might elucidate. For instance, an account of yet another car bombing might include a paragraph about how coalition forces failed to secure a bunch of Saddam's ammo dumps in their quick march to Baghdad, but that persons unknown seem to have adapted those munitions to their own nefarious purposes. Especially useful might be comparisons of certain congresspeoples' votes to their campaign rhetoric.

[zbdent]

2. The option of buying single papers from Knight-Ridder was considered

by the lefties . . . but KR wanted to keep it in the hands of the super-wealthy . . . KR was not going to sell in pieces or groups . . . the sale was "all or nothing".

So, the only buyers were the ones who could afford the whole chunk.

Now, McClatchy bought KR, and is selling off 12 papers . . . someone may be able to buy a single paper (still unlikely that the "employee"-owned papers could occur) . . . Akron Beacon Journal is actually a thriving, Pulitzer Prize-winning paper . . . so it has to be attacked as a "leftist rag" . . .

[DeepModem Mom]

3. Excellent post, Squeech -- thank you.

And your ideas for a newspaper/blogtopia make excellent sense. I think a lot about the failure of our press to do its job for our system, i.e., inform, and educate, people. Such a "publication" as you suggest would do just that.

[gatorboy]

4. Just keep the obituaries and the crosswords.

That's what really sells papers these days.

[devilgrrl]

5. Precisely the reason I cancelled the Los Angeles Times.

The Chicago Tribune bought it a few years ago and it's been a steady decline down since. In fact, the new CEO bragged about cutting local reporters and that profits were up. Not at my expense it won't.