As previously reported, I've heard from a seemingly reliable source that the Statesman Journal, Salem's daily newspaper that's owned by Gannett, will cease being a print publication in 2019.
This would mark another milestone in the paper's steady journalistic decline, both in quantity (number of reporters and original stories) and quality (investigative reporting is minimal, especially on the local level).
Today I read a Politico Magazine piece, "This is How a Newspaper Dies," that provided some fresh insights into what is happening with the Statesman Journal. The subtitle of Jack Shafer's highly interesting story is It's with a spasm of profits.
Now, I don't know how profitable the Statesman Journal is. But what's been happening with the paper is very much in line with Shafer's analysis of the Denver Post and other newspapers owned by a so-called "vulture capitalist," Randall Smith.
Here's the core notion:
The business-school label for tactics like Alden’s, in which you get fewer customers to pay more for less, as Philip Meyer wrote in his book The Vanishing Newspaper, is “harvesting market position.” By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak.
This slow liquidation of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills the product.
Wherever newspapers can be found reducing page size, cutting news pages, narrowing coverage area, reducing staff, shrinking circulation area, postponing the purchase of new equipment and raising subscription prices, they are harvesting market position. Faced with two business options, earn small sums from his newspapers over an indeterminate time or cash in big all at once, perhaps hastening the end, Smith has chosen the latter.
So let's see how many of these criteria for "harvesting market position" by getting fewer customers to pay more for less the Statesman Journal checks off.
Raising subscription prices. Check. The Statesman Journal's Sunday-Monday home delivery rate has increased about 50% in a bit over a year. Annoyingly, new subscribers pay about 1/5 of what loyal long-time subscribers are being charged.
Lowering quality. Check. See "Devastating critique of Salem Statesman Journal by experienced journalist" and "Maybe its time for the Statesman Journal to die."
Declining circulation. Check. See "Salem Statesman Journal daily circulation in steep decline." There was a 41% drop in circulation from 2008 to 2014.
Staff layoffs. Check. See "Layoffs at Statesman Journal tied to worrisome Gannett 'newsroom of the future'."
There's probably no way to reverse the impending demise of newspapers such as the Statesman Journal. Young people aren't interested in paying to read yesterday's news, especially when it is printed on paper. And old people like me who are hooked on a daily newspaper are, sad but true, dying off.
Shafer tells it like it is.
Allow yourself to sympathize with Smith for a moment. He’s deeply invested in a stagnant industry whose primary audience is approaching its own expiration date. Think of the Denver Post and most other newspapers as your grandfather who is on dialysis, has a pacemaker and totes an oxygen tank behind him. He looks alive, but he’s overdue. Your grandfather is a pretty good stand-in for the average newspaper subscriber, too. Habituated to his morning newspaper, he’ll resist cancelling his subscription no matter how raggedy the paper gets or how high the owners jack up the price.
At some point, though, the game of jacking up the price of a newspaper while lowering the journalistic quality of the product has to hit a brick wall of reader resistance. It's just a matter of time, most likely, until daily print newspapers go extinct -- aside from a few high-quality national papers such as the New York Times and Washington Post.
Who will be responsible? Ultimately you and me, according to Shafer.
Why pin exclusive blame on Smith for the demise of the Denver Post when there’s plenty of blame to go around? In 2008, then-Detroit News reporter Charlie LeDuff spotted another villain in the rot and decay of his newspaper as it downsized to three days a week of home delivery. “The owner didn’t decide to shrink the paper. The reader decided to shrink the paper,” LeDuff said. It was readers who stopped subscribing. It was readers who stopped using newspaper classifieds. It was readers who stopped reading. Readers are the true villains in this murder mystery.
So -- “harvesting market position” eh?
When the mafia does it, it's called a "bustout."
Posted by: Jack Holloway | May 14, 2018 at 06:32 AM
Thank god for blogs, it's the only way to find out what's really going on anymore. And the blogs I read are way more transparent about their political and social biases than most newspapers.
When I moved to Salem back in the dark ages, I had a work schedule that made reading a morning newspaper impractical, so I subscribed to the afternoon paper. When those papers merged, they kept some really great old school reporters and columnists who had the luxury of time to specialize full time in one area: city hall, the Capitol, high school sports, the environment, nonprofits, religion, crime, local recipes, you name it. Many of them had lived in Salem for a long time and knew the background and history on so many issues and people, and then after running a story or column, they'd follow the issue and run a follow up a month or a year later and tell us what happened. The beginning of the long painful decline was the acquisition of Salem's paper plus a few local small town papers by Gannett. We had reporters and managing editors coming in who had No Clue about Oregon history or Salem politics or anything. And they weren't paid to spend time learning about them, either. And they weren't dedicated enough to the cause of Real Journalism to do it on their own time. Enter a zillion transplants from out of state and pretty soon we had a whole city of people who were new to town and couldn't count on their local paper to fill them in on what's what. It's so distressing to have watched all of this happen.
Under Gannett, compilation, layout, and physical production of the print edition were outsourced to Arizona and Portland, copy editors and reporters and columnists were laid off, and the SJ's links to the physical community grew ever more tenuous. (A couple of years ago a friend who worked at the SJ told me that our local writers and photographers upload their stories to a late night local employee who gives pages 1 and 3--where most of the local news stories appear--a cursory glance for typos then sends the whole package to an office in Arizona where the AP, Gannett, and other canned content are added, and layout and headlines are completed. Advertising apparently has its own channels.)
Then the internet, which I love in general (but seriously, is there a decent newspaper website ANYWHERE???) just made it easier for Gannett to toss all of its remaining shreds of professionalism out the window.
We canceled our print subscription when our monthly bill doubled unexpectedly. No one bothered to let us know. We assumed they were hoping people would cancel, since obviously it's such a challenge to get the print paper out every day, so we did. Thanks for volunteering to pick up the slack :-)
Posted by: J | May 15, 2018 at 08:44 PM