I've been having this recurring dream. I come home late from work, a party, a movie – it's always changing—and I collapse into bed and fade off while cartoons play on the television. Suddenly, silence. Bonks on the head and xylophone music are replaced by the faint sound of wind. I'm stirred awake. Images of a bald eagle perched atop a barren tree and ducklings drenched in oil fade on and off the screen. A polar bear cub floats away into the distance on a slab of ice. Noah Wyle comes on – tears in his eyes. He looks into the camera and talks to me. He says for just a small, monthly fee I can save America's next endangered species. He tells me if I call now, I can save 65% off the cover price. He holds up a newspaper.
Melodrama aside, print journalism has always been a fantasy of mine. To quote Bill Nighy, "I wanted to be a journalist. I thought it was glamorous and that I'd meet beautiful women in the rain." I've had a raincoat and brimmed hat waiting for me in my closet for years now. I'm sure I'm not alone. Newspapers give aspiring writers one of the few legitimate opportunities available to write professionally. You start writing freelance for a suburban paper or perhaps intern at a larger publication and maybe, just maybe you have your own column in a metro paper someday, complete with a built-in readership and a sense that you're addressing something vital and interesting to your audience.
Of course, this was all before the media empire, Tribune Company, filed for bankruptcy protection in December. It was before the Detroit Media Partnership cut nine percent of its workforce and limited home delivery to three days a week. It was before Denver was well on its way to becoming a one paper town. If you choose to follow the issue, things are getting a little worse in the world of print journalism every day and, unlike other corporate victims of America's economic downturn; the government isn't rushing to their side with financial aid.
When I first started reading about these issue a few months ago, my initial reaction immediately went to the dramatic. Twelve years ago, when I hit my first little-league homerun my mother was able to cut out the newspaper clipping about it the next morning. Will our generation be able to do that for our children? Will a reference to the Sunday Times Crossword be lost on our grandchildren? These questions seemed petty in the grand scheme of things, with thousands losing their jobs, but it was my gut reaction and prompted me to send out my first waive of inquiries.
So I threw the proverbial darts at the dartboard. I emailed about a dozen suburban papers from across the country including the South Bergenite, a paper run just six blocks from the house I grew up in. What I found was startling. Not for the newspaper industry, mind you, but for me and this article. None of those who responded seemed all that discouraged. All of them seemed confident that their respective publication would dominate their local media markets for years to come. Bruce Crosby, editor of the McCook Gazette, a paper that services a town of approximately 8,000 in southwestern Nebraska went as far to say "In our town, if we don't report it, it basically doesn't get reported." He felt as though his publication's value to its locals was only increasing. Had I missed something? Was there no crisis? Perhaps the issue is primarily with metros – they, of course, are the ones operated under these various declining media conglomerates.
So I made some calls – one of the stupidest things I could have done. I, in my callowness, would call the front desk of the Los Angeles Times or Chicago Tribune, weasel my way into the ear of an editor, and immediately spew questions regarding the Tribune Company filing for bankruptcy. I'd call the Detroit Free Press and ask how their layoffs have affected their employees' morale. Click! The receiver would drop down and the phone line would be dead. All future calls and emails would go unanswered and unreturned. It wasn't as though I was trying to nail anyone to a wall here. I had no tough, gritty questions prepared. I think I made it increasingly clear to anyone listening that I had no idea what I was doing or how to conduct myself at all. I was able to talk to a higher-up at the Philadelphia Inquirer; this was weeks before they filed for bankruptcy. I got him on the phone and explained that I was a Drexel student trying to get a better idea of what was going on in the world of metro papers for an article I was writing and rather excited about. He sounded delighted. He asked for my contact information, I gave it to him; he told me he'd call me Friday at 2. That was almost three months ago.
I came to the conclusion that nobody with any real knowledge of the situation would talk to me. I began reading professional articles on the subject of the decline of newspapers; my ASK article, my beautiful, brilliant ASK article would be little more than a research paper. One of the first people I started reading was Richard Perez-Pena, a man who has been covering the fall of media empires like Tribune for The New York Times for nearly two years. If you would like to read a far more intricate, composed article on this subject, I highly advise you to click the little "x" at the top right corner of your screen and search for Pena's work. After reading a few of Pena's articles I decided to try and speak with him. I had yet to try and contact anyone of the New York Times, but still thought it would be righteous and romantic to try and lie my way into speaking with him personally. I called the front desk, I got to the newsroom. I was trying to imply that I was a member of a small Philadelphian publication that was interested in obtaining the rights to an article Mr. Perez-Pena had written several months prior. My words were so mumbled, jumbled, and nonsensical that nobody actually bought my lie – they just didn't want to listen to me flounder anymore and thus passed me off to the next person and to the next until finally Mr. Perez-Pena's deep, melodic voice picked up the receiver and said "Hello."
"Hello Mr. Pena-Mr.Perez-Pena, my name is Andrew Segedin, I write for ASK," as if he knew what ASK was. "I was just wondering if you could possible spare a few moments. I'm writing an article on the future of newspapers." Brilliant, I thought. Smooth. Direct. I'm a genius.
He paused. "When you figure that out, let us know. We have about a thousand jobs riding on it. Nobody has a clue." Then he laughed.
In the half-hour that followed, Pena likened the recent collapse of newspapers to a man in Kansas City trying to sell his car. Thirty years ago that man would have had to place an ad in the Kansas City Star or a local radio station. They would give him a specific price they wanted and if he tried to talk the price down, they'd tell him, in no polite terms, where to go. There was a finite amount of advertising space and they owned just about all of it. Today, that man has Cars.com, AutoTrader, Vehix, etc. That man doesn't need the Kansas City Star anymore.
Pena referred to the "commoditization of news"—what does your publication have that nobody else does? In 2005, The New York Times created a very small pay wall, all of their standard news was available to everyone but things like archives and editorials were only available for a small fee. The wall was raised in the fall of 2007 and within the first month readership jumped 50%. The wall wasn't worth it; people were going elsewhere for the past 18 months. Publications like the Wall Street Journal can pull off charging online readers, because they offer information no other publication has. Metro dailies, however, seldom offer daily news their competitors can't. In other words, if The New York Times starts charging online readers, those readers will switch to The New York Post.
Last year, The New York Times' website held a 2 to 1 advantage over its next nearest competitors in both traffic and average time spent on the site. That means that the average American is on The New York Times' site 4 times longer than any other newspaper site in America and it still only accounts for 12% of their annual revenues. This isn't an issue of readership; it's an issue of advertising. Printed newspapers rely on advertising for 80% of their profits, while online the figure is closer to 100%. With the ever increasing amount of advertising space made possible on the internet, most metro papers are receiving 4 cents on the dollar for online advertising. Couple that with a national recession, and you see a lot of newspapers going under. Metros are taking the biggest hit, because they relied heaviest on classified ads – by far the most profitable kind of advertising available. National papers never relied on such ads, rural papers haven't faced as much competition for them, and thus metro papers are the ones that suffer the most from the advent of classified ad-sites like CraigsList. While Pena had no real idea of where all this will lead, he did hesitate in saying that print news will completely die. He said such a move would be "an act of desperation" that would make little sense considering that in most paper's economic model such a move would eliminate 50% of the paper's expenses but a whopping 90% of its profits. And so we said our goodbyes and I hung up the phone feeling incredibly informed and completely lousy.
Two days later I received an email from Margaret Holt, Standards Editor of the Chicago Tribune. She had evidently read one of my frantic, apologetic emails from a few weeks prior and was willing to talk to me. Holt is of the old, enthusiastic, hands-on breed of reporting idolized by Bill Nighy and myself. Holt has stayed on as part of the new wave at The Chicago Tribune, a paper that has undergone new management and new ideals. Holt blames the papers themselves for not giving their readers what they want and deserve and standing atop a poorly formulated economic model. Holt, who started her career in Ft. Lauderdale, claimed that there are two types of news – what the writer thinks the people ought to know and what the people actually want to know. Holt believes most papers have been operating under the former for the past twenty years.
Holt spoke of a world of journalism in fundamental shambles. You'd think that newspapers have been trying to target audiences, but Holt regretfully disagrees. Instead, there is a world of arrogance and self-interest in newsrooms. Speaking of the majority of foreign correspondence pieces Ms. Holt said "they're good for travel logs, but not for actual reporting." Holt stopped herself several times trying to convince me she wasn't trying to talk only about "doom and gloom and tragedy." The tragedy wasn't in what she was saying, but rather the fact that a woman still so audibly excited and appreciative about being in the news business had to say it. Ms. Holt went on to talk about a world of emotionally engaging, interestingly told news that appeals to a smarter audience. "We are woefully behind as a nation in utilizing intellectual capital. We have to see how valuable it is." And though Holt went on to speak about a budding, brilliantly talented newspaper industry that would again become relevant and essential to its audience, I couldn't stop trying to just focus on writing in my notepad and keep thoughts of doom, gloom, and tragedy out of my head.
My final interview was with Mike Leary, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Managing Editor, and I had to bite my lip over how I had essentially traded up from the member of the Inquirer's editorial staff that had ignored my emails. This was after the file for bankruptcy and I conducted the interview knowing all such questions on the subject were off limits. Instead, we spoke primarily on the new model of journalism created by Philly.com, which, with few exceptions, is a new and unique venture in journalism just being explored. Leary, like Holt, was more interested in the fundamentals of news and its engagement with its audience. While he made it clear that Philly.com and The Philadelphia Inquirer remain separate entities, he was excited over Philly.com's ability to expand readership and create the opportunity to post and update news as soon as possible.
Mr. Leary stressed the difference between circulation and sales. Rocky Mountain News, for instance, was a critically successful paper known throughout the world of journalism for its Pulitzer Prize winning photography. It just so happened that more people read The Denver Post and Denver couldn't support two papers. There's no rhyme or reason to it. He told me to watch out for The Miami Herald and Ft. Lauderdale Sentinel due to their decreasing English-speaking population and housing market that is among the worst in the nation. He echoed others in the rapid decline of online advertising and sales in general, but was quick to point out that 300,000 people still buy The Philadelphia Inquirer every day and that that number nearly doubles on weekends. While he acknowledged that news may someday move from the page to the smart-phone, he remained committed to the idea that papers won't die so long as hard, informed reporting continues. He pointed out an article that appeared in the previous Sunday's edition that was three years in the making. "I think that's the kind of news that people will pay for, and they do."
That was all a month ago. I've been trying to make sense of it ever since. Just days after speaking with Mike Leary, his prophecy came true. The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee, and the other 30 daily publications owned by McClatchy Co. slashed 15% of their work force, roughly 1,600 people. I know in the past month I, like so many of us, have only come a month closer to entering a real world in which the industry we've strived to have support us can't even support itself. Three months ago when I first started formulating this article in my head, the first person I thought to talk to was Woody Paige, Denver Post sportswriter and frequent ESPN personality. As a displaced fan of the Denver Broncos, I read Paige's work on a very regular basis and was surprised to read a particular edition of Woody's Mail Bag back in February. There, smack in the middle of typical sports news, was a few paragraphs dedicated to the paper that had brought him to Denver in 1981, Rocky Mountain News, which was on its last legs. Paige wrote of himself sobbing in his car upon hearing the news, wondering how he could possibly save what locals had grown to refer to as Rocky. He couldn't. I had left him emails and phone messages asking for him to expand upon his words, but he politely declined. At the time, he had to cover the Super Bowl and handle a heavier than usual load on ESPN. Afterwards, with changes in the Bronco's organization, he was swamped. I received an email from him just a few days ago. He asked for me to imagine I was Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and he was the man with one word of advice for him, only Paige had two: "Free Kindles."
While Paige's idea isn't exactly practical with today's technology, it does make sense for the future. Instead of giving subscribers a watch or substantial discount off the cover price, newspapers can give readers cheaper decedents of the modern Kindle with subscriptions of two or more years. The Kindle itself, is where you'd obtain the news – quick updated information that people can carry and read whenever, wherever they are with their own customizations (font, color, music, etc).
While Paige admitted that he may not live to see the new order of newspaper journalism, he is confident that it will occur because people will always want local opinions about news, politics, and sports that television news cannot possibly cover in their allotted time. If nothing else, he said, people will miss their comics and crossword puzzles. And while someone filling out the Sunday Times Crossword on a touch screen isn't exactly the same as meeting beautiful women in the rain, at this point, as a twenty-two year-old without an obtainable ambition in his head, I'll learn to take whatever comfort I can get.
