Wednesday, September 2, 2009, 12:13
Section: Journalism
At least one Rhode Island paper seems to be making online content almost exclusively available to subscribers work for it. From Newsweek:
Spooky things began to happen this summer in the yachting mecca of Newport, R.I., shortly after the Newport Daily News hurled caution to the wind and began charging a $345 subscription fee for its online news—$200 more than for the print edition.
First, the phones stopped ringing in the paper’s circulation department. Fewer subscribers were canceling home delivery of the paper, something they had been doing in droves when they knew they could get the same product for free at NewportDailyNews.com. “Those calls have stopped,” William F. Lucey III, assistant publisher and general manager, told NEWSWEEK.
But something even stranger happened: after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that’s a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph.
The paper has what local papers pretty much everywhere have: A monopoly on professionally generated local news. According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, Newport has a median household income of $35,669, so a $345 annual subscription fee — more than what it costs to subscribe to the Economist — certainly would drive folks to the newsstand, and in large numbers, assuming any interest in the local news. (That end of the equation is a different department’s issue, obviously.)
Former Daily Press Hesperia reporter Hillary Borrud now works at a paper in Oregon that does something similar (and is also family-owned, so decisions to throw up a “pay wall” don’t have to be run past a board or stockholders).
I don’t know that pay walls are the solution for what ails the newspaper industry, but they may not be as crazy as many people (including me) once thought they were. It’d be hard to erect one if your coverage area was served by multiple entities — it’s not hard to get lots of Capitol Hill coverage, for instance — but in a community like Newport, that’s not the case.
Freedom Communications is expected to file for bankruptcy this week under a plan that will hand the owner of the Orange County Register and 30 other newspapers around the country to its lenders, people briefed on the matter told DealBook.
A filing by Freedom, which could be made as soon as Tuesday, would be the latest by a newspaper publisher as the industry struggles to cope with declining advertising revenue and heavy debt loads. Several big publishers have already declared bankruptcy over the last 12 months, including the Tribune Company and the owner of Philadelphia’s two major papers.
Freedom’s bankruptcy will probably wipe out the 45 percent equity stake held by two big private equity firms, the Blackstone Group and Providence Equity Partners .
That outcome could mirror what is expected in Tribune, whose expected reorganization plan will probably wipe out the equity stake of the billionaire investor Samuel Zell, who took the company private in 2007.
The majority of Freedom is still owned by the Hoiles family, whose patriarch, R. C. Hoiles, founded the company seven decades ago as an outlet for his libertarian philosophy. Freedom took on the investments by Blackstone and Providence nearly six years ago to allow some Hoiles family members to sell their stakes in the company, ending strife within the clan.
No, I don’t know what it’s going to mean. After all, when the Chicago Tribune bought the LA Times, my division at the LA Times Syndicate had a counterpart in Chicago, but we were fewer in number, had more products, more customers, more revenue — and got the axe anyway.
In that same vein, in a newspaper industry that I’ve described before as the dinosaurs arguing about what that meteor that just hit the planet is going to mean for them, the Hesperia Star is a healthy little mammal. Not only are we not losing our collective shirt, we’re growing in revenue. Small newspapers, like the small mammals, are thriving around the country. Unlike, say, coverage of Capitol Hill, there’s just not that many competing sources of news of Main Street.
That said, I felt pretty confident about the prospects of the new media group at the LA Times Syndicate, too, and I ended up being the guy training the folks in Chicago who ultimately closed out our contracts and put bullets in the brains of the products we’d worked so hard to create. So we’ll see.
(My role is at least; it’s certainly possible that I will sufficiently irritate my corporate masters to the point where someone else will be sitting in my chair.)
Although I can’t give details — frankly, the numbers go in one ear and out the other, even if I wanted to spill all the beans, which I don’t — the Hesperia Star is profitable. Quite so, when you compare the cost of doing business to the revenue generated.
This spring, Princeton economist Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and his colleague Miguel Garrido issued a paper of vital importance to print journalists desperate for a sliver of good news: “Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post.”
The economists noted their findings were “statistically imprecise,” yet concluded that newspapers, “even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed – can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.”
The Cincinnati Post, a former E.W. Scripps Co. paper that expired December 31, 2007, and its Kentucky Post edition dominated circulation in the northern Kentucky suburbs, where the economists focused their inquiry. They concluded the Post’s closure lowered the number of people voting in elections and the number of candidates for city council, city commission and school board in those areas. It also increased incumbent council and commission members’ chances of staying in office.
“What most surprised me is I actually did find evidence that newspapers matter,” says Schulhofer-Wohl, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs. At 32, he is on his second career. His first, as a journalist, included stints as a copy editor at Alabama’s Birmingham Post-Herald, another now-defunct Scripps paper, and as a copy editor and reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I was very worried when I went into this [research] that what I would end up proving is my whole career had been kind of pointless.”
Instead, Schulhofer-Wohl added to a small but growing body of economics research supporting the notion that newspapers make a difference in their communities – evidence emerging even as the industry struggles in a radically changing media environment during the worst recession since the Great Depression.
These attempts to quantify newspapers’ impact on public life come as a handful of major American newspapers close and others barely cling to life. The unsettling possibility looms that some big cities could lose their sole remaining daily newspaper – and that the public won’t care. If the dead-tree edition of a newspaper falls in a crowded media forest, will it matter, except to the journalists who work there? Are newer, hipper online news outlets poised to fill the void? What, if anything, will be irrevocably lost?
As often happens with AJR, there’s a bit too much obsession with major market papers, even when the magazine regularly acknowledges that smaller papers are doing fine.
New York, Washington and other major cities are not going to be without something covering the news roughly like newspapers do currently. Someone will fill the void, for commercial reasons, if no other. And if the early stats about what happens to voter turnout when a paper dies are borne out over time, there will be an increasing demand for post-newspaper news from the public, once they realize that they let bums into office because they were no longer paying for journalists to keep even a periodic eye on them.
Americans may not like reporters at the moment, but they hate politicians, and since newspapers (and the wire services) create most of the original coverage that’s endlessly regurgitated about them, something like newspaper coverage (most likely populated by many of the same faces, if newspapers really do vanish) will always cover them.
I was tipped to this by my brother: The Wall Street Journal’s staff has gotten a memo from their deputy managing editor, telling them how to blog and use social media, including Twitter. There’s a big push on for this in the newspaper industry, and we’ve recently blown the dust off the Hesperia Star’s Twitter site, although it’s still not something I remember to do automatically.
(That’s party because of the need to open a second tab for TinyURL or a comparable site to create short links. It’d be nice if our content management software that we use to publish our Web stories would automatically create Twitter posts, complete with a TinyURL when a post was made.) (And, as some people know, I’m not wild about TinyURL-type services — I dislike the lack of transparency about where they lead, by default — but I accept the necessity of them on Twitter.)
Anyway, most of the rules are the obvious — don’t get into fights with readers, remember you’re always representing the company, don’t recruit shills or use a false name when discussing your stories, etc. — but there’s an odd one that I frankly just don’t get:
Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
Really? OK, sure, don’t say “well, my story was awesome until it was edited into pablum,” but isn’t that covered under remembering that you represent the company? Maybe I’m missing something, but I think that a discussion of how you covered something, and why you made the choices that you did, is a pretty valid — and harmless — thing to discuss.
Yes, 
