I don’t want newspapers as an institution to fade away like the 78 Victrola, I depend upon the news-gathering services of several national papers, including the Chicago Tribune. I have print subscriptions to three papers, but even more so, I rely upon their online presence. I may disagree frequently with the slant of newspaper coverage, and lament the obvious pro-corporate sympathies, but if suddenly the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal started cutting their reporting staff to ridiculous levels, I’m not sure what would happen.
This is why Dr. Alterman’s article troubles me:
Spend some time on the “future of news” conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you’ll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. The flight of readers and advertisers to the web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku. For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter’s invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in “perhaps the worst single trading day ever” for the newspaper business, “the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the[ir] lowest point in modern history.” When these losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed an amazing $3.9 billion in value in just the first ten trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of these companies’ combined stock price in 2008 alone
It’s been nearly two and a half years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, “for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.” And yet the strategy continues unabated. The Los Angeles Times just announced that it will cut loose another 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom–this on top of a series of job cuts by the previous owners, which led to a revolving door of resigning editors and publishers who could not in good conscience carry out the cuts demanded of them.
As a result of this avalanche of industrywide layoffs, buy-outs and firings, Mutter notes, the industry’s age-old ratio of one journalist per thousand papers in circulation is about to disappear. But as a contributor to Romenesko pointed out, this is “a self-correcting mechanism. As subscribers find less and less to read because newspaper staffs are thinned too much to produce quality copy, subscriptions will lapse and the ratio will be restored–until, of course, additional layoffs refresh the cycle.”
Very troubling indeed. Television news is a joke, the news-weeklies (The Nation, et al) don’t have the depth, or space, to cover each days events. The blogosphere, while valuable, would be hard-pressed to step into the breach. Blogs function more as a correcting mechanism, teasing nuance out of already published material. Hardly any blog actually does any hard reporting (Josh Marshall‘s empire, of course, and a few others, a very small percentage).
Answers? I have none, or I’d become fabulously wealthy selling advice to publishers. I do wish more corporate media moguls would take Ms. Ivins advice and find other ways to cut costs other than firing staff.
Of course, executives don’t have to worry about their salary: they’ll continue draining the blood from the goose1
Footnotes:Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance.
- or however that cliche goes [↩]