Salem Political Snark

Salem's "news desert" makes it tough for the city to pass a tax increase

In reading a Salem Reporter story about the effort of city officials to get voter approval of a property tax increase in order to deal with a $8 million - $13 million gap between revenues and expenses, I was struck by the several mentions of communicating with the public about this problem.

Here's some excerpts from "City Council discusses possible next steps to address budgetary shortfalls" by Joe Siess.

Salem city councilors appear ready to put a measure before voters next May to raise property taxes to avoid sweeping cuts to city programs.

But councilors made clear during a work session on Monday, Aug. 19, that they want a clear signal the community would back such increased taxation before they seek formal approval.

The majority of the council gave City Manager Keith Stahley the green light to plan for polling likely voters on what city services they would be willing to pay for and how much they would be willing to pay.

...Stahley on Monday also suggested auditing city finances and a deeper look at the city’s financial forecast. Those would provide transparency for citizens and ensure they have a firm understanding of the city’s budgetary shortfalls, he said.  

...Stahley told Salem Reporter after the meeting his perception is that while councilors support a tax levy going to voters next May, there is also tension about it in the sense that the city hopes to ensure the community both understands the problem and supports a possible solution. 

Councilors agreed engaging the community and adequately communicating the city’s budget situation will be a key element moving forward.

...The city council largely agreed that it will take more time to gain community trust, especially after the payroll tax failure [in November 2023].

....City Councilor Jose Gonzalez said he believes nothing can be done about the budget situation if the council fails to gain public support and understanding. 

So city officials are talking a lot about engaging the public, but aside from a poll of several hundred citizens in a city with about 178,000 people, there wasn't any mention of how those officials are going to communicate with the public.

This isn't easy in Salem. Unlike Portland, Eugene, Medford, and Bend, we don't have any television stations. Our "local" TV news comes from occasional stories on the Portland stations.

Newspaper-wise, our daily paper is the Statesman Journal. I couldn't find any current circulation figures for the Statesman Journal, but it's clear that the readership is way down in recent years. In December 2019 I wrote a blog post, "Statesman Journal print circulation is down 36% in last two years." 

It's interesting that while Eugene and Salem have roughly equal populations, the Eugene Register-Guard had a 2019 print circulation that was almost exactly double that of the Salem Statesman Journal. And the Eugene paper had a much lower decline in circulation, 23.9% for the two years vs. Salem's 35.7%.

I was curious to see where the Statesman Journal ranked among the 200 daily newspapers. I looked through the searchable database and found that 6 newspapers had an equal two year circulation decline of 35.7%; 62 newspapers had a larger circulation decline; and 132 newspapers had a smaller circulation decline.

So the Statesman Journal was in the bottom third, approximately. Meaning, about two-thirds of the 200 newspapers had a smaller two-year print circulation decline than the Statesman Journal.

The 2019 Statesman Journal print circulation was 14,494. It's likely considerably lower now. Many people have a digital subscription, but I'm pretty sure there's no public information about the number of digital subscriptions.

The online-only Salem Reporter does a better job of covering City of Salem news than the Statesman Journal does. Again, there's no public information about how many digital subscriptions the Salem Reporter has.

So it's tough to reach the residents of Salem. It's no exaggeration to say that we live in a "news desert." A journalism school offered this definition:

We define a news desert as: a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.

...Many newspapers have become ghosts of their former selves, both in terms of the quality and quantity of their editorial content and the reach of their readership.

That's certainly the case with the Statesman Journal. There's very little local news. There's no editorial page, so no letters to the editor, no opinion pieces. The Salem Reporter also doesn't have an editorial section, though it does a decent job with local news.

Thus city officials face a tough task in communicating with voters about the need for raising more revenue and why a property tax increase is the best way to do this. That would be a difficult job under any circumstances. It's considerably more difficult in a "news desert" city like Salem.

No opinion section in Statesman Journal getting more irritating

Wow, while eating breakfast today here in Salem, Oregon it was so great to use my iPad to read the opinion section of a local newspaper.

I enjoyed seeing an editorial about a local controversy, along with intelligent commentary on the recent horrible killing of 19 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. There were columns by nationally syndicated writers, both progressive and conservative. And the letters to the editor showed me how ordinary people are viewing various important issues.

Only problem was, I was reading the Portland Oregonian (which arguably is "local," especially compared to the New York Times), not the Salem Statesman Journal.

I can't read the Statesman Journal opinion section because it no longer exists.

Gone. Vanished. Sucked into a black hole of poor journalism earlier this month, as I wrote about in "Statesman Journal eliminates opinion section. I'm irked."

My irritation at something usually fades with time. But after three weeks of scrolling through the online Statesman Journal on my iPad, I haven't gotten used to the glaring absence of the section that used to be my favorite part of the paper.

A newspaper without an opinion section just doesn't seem like a real newspaper to me.

Of course, the reality of the Statesman Journal has been steadily shrinking for many years with every layoff of experienced journalists and more reliance on USA Today to fill up pages in the paper that used to have local news.

Now, in addition to very little local news, I'm met with precisely zero opinion content. 

I guess this is better than having no newspaper at all in Salem. (I don't count the Salem Reporter as a newspaper, being more of an online news source with just a few stories each week -- and also no opinion section.)

However, at some point the Statesman Journal is going to be even more of a hollow shell of a newspaper than it is now. I almost look forward to this, since having it go out of business could be preferable to having it hang on as nearly useless.

Hopefully something better would replace the Statesman Journal if it disappeared completely. Can't be sure about this, though, so for now I'll continue paying as little as possible for getting as little local news and opinion as the publisher deems possible in Salem's paper.

Statesman Journal print circulation is down 36% in last two years

Salem's daily newspaper, the Statesman Journal, is experiencing a big decline in print circulation: it's down 36% between June 30, 2017 and June 30, 2019, which is an annualized rate of decline of 20% for those two years.

Here's a screenshot from a searchable database of 200 newspapers that's included in a recent Boston Business Journal story, "Most Gannett papers are losing print circulation faster than average."

This shows the results of a search for Oregon newspapers.

It's interesting that while Eugene and Salem have roughly equal populations, the Eugene Register-Guard had a 2019 print circulation that was almost exactly double that of the Salem Statesman Journal. And the Eugene paper had a much lower decline in circulation, 23.9% for the two years vs. Salem's 35.7%.

I was curious to see where the Statesman Journal ranked among the 200 daily newspapers. I looked through the searchable database and found that 6 newspapers had an equal two year circulation decline of 35.7%; 62 newspapers had a larger circulation decline; and 132 newspapers had a smaller circulation decline.

So the Statesman Journal was in the bottom third, approximately. Meaning, about two-thirds of the 200 newspapers had a smaller two-year print circulation decline than the Statesman Journal.

This isn't good news for Statesman Journal subscribers who prefer to read a print newspaper rather than an online version, which includes my wife and I. 

The Boston Business Journal story says:

The AAM [Alliance for Audited Media] provided data on a total of 200 daily papers owned by Gannett and New Media that filed circulation data for both [t]he quarters ending in June 2017 and June 2019 (Gannett says it now owns 260 newspapers nationwide, but not all newspapers file circulation data with AAM). The total weekday circulation at those newspapers was 2.95 million as of this past June, down from 4.34 million as of two years earlier.

That represents an 18 percent annualized rate of decline — significantly faster than the 12 percent rate of decline at daily print papers nationwide cited by Pew.

As noted above, the Statesman Journal had a 20 percent annualized rate of circulation decline, which is much greater than the nationwide figure of 12 percent.

This probably also isn't good news for Statesman Journal staff, since the story notes:

The new Gannett is now under intense pressure from shareholders to fulfill its vow to cut $300 million in expenses, and it’s likely that it’ll turn to its most underperforming newspapers to do so. Gannett did not respond to a request for comment on its circulation trends.

Of course, digital-only subscribers are off-setting some of the decline in print circulation. However, the Boston Business Journal story says:

While some regional dailies — notably the Boston Globe — have been successful in adding new online subscribers, the Gannett and New Media publications lag far behind. As of June, Gannett said that its digital-only subscribers totaled 607,000 — less than a third of its print subscribers. At GateHouse, online subscribers make up less than 20 percent of its print circulation.

It seems to me that the Statesman Journal is on its way to becoming a digital-only newspaper with a smaller staff and advertising revenues. One notable indication of this is how the Statesman Journal is charging print subscribers.

Almost exactly two years ago, on November 27, 2017, I wrote "Cancel your Statesman Journal subscription for 30 days to save $500 a year." 

I've subscribed to the Statesman Journal for 40 years. Today I cancelled my subscription (for 30 days), because this will save me $510 in 2018 -- following the outrageous Monday-Sunday home delivery rate increase from $44 to $59.01 that takes effect December 1.

(What's up with that one cent?)

That's a 34% increase, which is on top of a 14% increase last March.

In June I wrote a pissed-off blog post, "Statesman Journal outrage: new subscribers charged half of what loyal subscribers pay." Now the situation is even worse. New subscribers are being charged a bit over a third of what us long-time subscribers are paying.

New subscribers are still getting the same sweet deal: $11 a month for Monday-Sunday home delivery for the first six months, then $22 a month after that. 

So, after paying $11/month for six months, then paying $22/month, here's what the Statesman Journal notified me that I'd be paying as of July 1, 2019: $48.

This is uncomfortably close to the $59.01 rate that I was going to pay at the "old subscriber" rate as of December 1, 2017. Thus new subscribers are being hit with very large increases in the print home delivery rate, which likely explains a big part of the 36% decline in print circulation in the past two years.

Plus, there's been a clear decline in the quality of the Statesman Journal.

Investigative reporting is basically non-existent. The Opinion section has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. There's only one sports reporter, I believe. And the online Salem Reporter is only $100 a year, while the Statesman Journal is charging me $576 a year for home delivery of the print edition.

I hope the Statesman Journal continues as a print newspaper. But it seems increasingly likely that it won't.

Five reasons Statesman Journal has hit a new low

It doesn't give me pleasure to write about the further decline of Salem, Oregon's one and only daily newspaper, the Statesman Journal.

I'll end this post with a poignant anecdote from a New Yorker story about the death of newspapers. It isn't pleasant to watch the demise of someone that you care about. But turning our head away from reality isn't good either.

So building on previous blog posts I've written about how this Gannett newspaper has been steadily tumbling down the slope of journalistic excellence (recent posts assembled here), here's Five Reasons Statesman Journal Has Hit a New Low.

Introductory note: as mentioned above, the most recent issue of the New Yorker has a great piece, "Does Journalism Have a Future?" It talks about how BuzzFeed, among other online news sources, pioneered the use of lists -- which metrics show site visitors love. So I figured, what the heck, might as well jump on the list train.
Download Does Journalism Have a Future? | The New Yorker

(1) Additional firings are disturbing. Gannett recently ordered large layoffs, a.k.a. firings, of staff at its newspapers. I've heard that three newsroom employees at the Statesman Journal were fired: Carol McAlice Currie (opinions), Gary Horowitz (sports), and Amy Read (online/social media). 

Currie and Horowitz no longer appear on the newspaper's staff roster, so it appears to be correct that they've been let go. I assume the same is true of Read.

This significantly diminishes the Statesman Journal's ability to practice quality journalism, coming as it does on the heels of previous layoffs. Every business needs to cut fat. But the Statesman Journal has been cutting bone and muscle for a long time.

(2) The three people will be missed. Above is a screenshot of a profile of Currie. At the time the profile was posted, she'd worked at the Statesman Journal for 21 years. The next screenshot shows that Horowitz also worked at the Statesman Journal for 21 years. Read's profile says she began working at the Statesman Journal in 2002, 17 years ago,

So these aren't "cub reporters" who were fired.

They are some of the most competent people at the Statesman Journal, having a combined 59 years of journalism experience with the newspaper.

About ten days ago my wife and I spent a pleasant couple of hours at the French Press coffeehouse talking with Currie about a possible opinion page project. We found her wonderfully open, informed, and pleasant. Firing her is a big loss for both the Statesman Journal and subscribers.

Another gripe: to my knowledge so far the Statesman Journal hasn't reported on the firings or honored the lengthy service of Currie, Horowitz, and Read with a "we're sorry we had to let them go" story. The story could explain why this supposedly was necessary. Or, if it wasn't necessary, why the Statesman Journal is forced to follow Gannett orders.

(3) Pettiness about blogger moi. Back in December I submitted a guest opinion to the Statesman Journal about the Broadway Commons boycott caused by the Salem Alliance Church's mistaken view that homosexuality and same-sex sex is a sin. 

When January came, I told Carol McAlice Currie, the opinion page editor before she was fired, that I was going to share the opinion piece on one of my blogs, since it didn't appear the Statesman Journal was going to publish it. Currie emailed me:

My executive editor scuttled your guest opinion for a variety [of] reasons, mostly because you have a blog/existing outreach for your ideas.

Cherril Crosby is the executive editor of the Statesman Journal. On behalf of bloggers everywhere, it irks me that Crosby is discriminating against us.

Hey, Ms. Crosby, I've been blogging regularly since 2003. Not only have I earned zero money from the approximately 5,850 blog posts I've written, now on three blogs, every year I pay Typepad to continue to use my blogging platform.

Fairly often Statesman Journal reporters learn of a potential story by reading my Salem-related posts. Often journalists and opinion writers have blogs. Bloggers are supportive of newspapers. Newspapers should be equally supportive of bloggers. 

After all, as newspapers steadily disappear, other sources of local news are going to become more important. Yes, I regularly criticize Gannett and the Statesman Journal. But that's because I care about newspapers. If I didn't care, I wouldn't criticize.

(4) USA Today section goes away. As part of what I interpret as the Statesman Journal moving closer to being online only, recently the USA Today section in the newspaper was deleted except for a single page of national news. Along with other subscribers, I got a self-serving email from the Statesman Journal (probably written by Gannett) which said in part:

Brian,
We know that the world is more connected than ever. News and information doesn't have boundaries thanks to the power of the internet and the growth of social media. 

We hear consistently from readers that they crave a robust local news report, but also want more exposure to stories happening at the national or international level.

...We will continue to provide a daily package of national and international news in the daily print edition, although the current free-standing compact USA TODAY section will no longer exist.

Well, if the Statesman Journal actually was giving subscribers "a robust local news report," losing the USA Today section wouldn't have bothered me and my wife as much. But when the paper does a crappy job covering local news, then ditches a section of national and international news, we consider that a loss.

And, no, we won't be accessing USA Today via the online offer provided by the Statesman Journal. I subscribe to both the New York Times and Washington Post online editions, and my wife prefers CNN to USA Today. 

(5) Timeliness is missing. There are some good reasons why the Statesman Journal should go fully online, even though many subscribers hooked on the print edition likely will hate this. One reason is that anyone with a smartphone or computer can learn about "breaking news" (I hate how CNN and others overuse that term) soon after it happens.

Case in point: sitting in our bathtub, last Thursday night I learned via the Oregonian's iPhone app that the Oregon men's basketball team had suffered a painful loss to Washington. On Friday the Oregonian ran the story on the front page of Sports in the print edition. 

Apparently because the Statesman Journal is printed in Eugene, our local newspaper didn't have a story about the Oregon loss until today, Saturday. When I saw the dramatic headline in today's Sports section (see above), at first I thought oh, no, the Ducks have lost again. 

But then I realized that the paper was reporting on Saturday what happened on Thursday night. Now perhaps there was an earlier online story about the Ducks' loss. I just find the online Oregonian easier to use, with better sports reporting, so that's where I go for breaking sports news.

UPDATE: Just came across a devastating critique of Gannett, "Local newspapers have already been gutted. There's nothing left to cut." This excerpt sounds exactly like what's happening here in Salem.

Gannett is ripe for a hedge fund raid, because cost containment has been the company’s only successful strategy for years. On the print side, Gannett is actively alienating its core readership — still its most valuable source of revenue — by reducing pages, cutting features and moving up deadlines so that virtually nothing that happens after 6 p.m. makes the next day’s paper. That includes sports scores, city council meetings and major news: When Nashville holds local elections this year, those results won’t make it into print for two days. 

Lastly, here's how the New Yorker story I mentioned above ends.

Like I said, there's no joy in seeing a once-beloved newspaper become a shadow of its former self. However, much of that diminishment is self-imposed by Gannett and Statesman Journal executives. It gets harder to love a newspaper that chooses to surrender journalistic quality in the face of pressures.

Jill Lepore wrote:

The death of a newspaper is sometimes like other deaths.

The Mrs. and the Miss, a very, very old woman and her very old daughter, lived in a crooked green house on top of a rise and wore matching housecoats and slippers. The Miss followed the Mrs. around like a puppy, and, if you found them in the parlor reading the paper, the Mrs. would be poring over the opinion pages while the Miss cut pictures out of the funnies.

“The Miss can’t think straight,” my father said. “Her head’s scrambled. So be gentle with her. Nothing to be afraid of. Be sure to help them out.” Once when I biked over there, the Miss was standing, keening, noise without words, sound without sense. The Mrs. wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t ever going to move again.

I called for help and held the Miss’s hand, waiting for the wail of sirens. I didn’t know what else to do. 

Possible Gannett takeover worrisome news for Statesman Journal

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that the Gannett Corporation, which owns the Statesman Journal, is ripe for a takeover.

Since the company that would make a bid for Gannett is notorious for cutting costs at newspapers it owns, I'm sure employees of the Statesman Journal aren't thrilled with this news.

Here's some excerpts from "Hedge-Fund-Backed Media Group Prepares Bid for Gannett." (If you can't access the story via that link, download this PDF file.)
Download Hedge-Fund-Backed Media Group Prepares Bid for Gannett - WSJ

MNG Enterprises Inc., one of the largest newspaper chains in the country, has quietly built a 7.5% position in Gannett’s stock and plans to publicly urge the McLean, Va., publisher to put itself up for sale, the people said.

MNG, better known as Digital First Media, will also offer to buy Gannett for $12 a share, they said, which would represent a 23% premium over Friday’s closing price of $9.75. The shares, which fell steeply last year, have been rising lately.

Closely held Digital First is known for its contentious history with the newspaper industry in part because of its penchant for slashing costs. It has over the past few years made multiple approaches to Gannett about a deal but has been rebuffed, the people said. At least one approach was made in the past month or so. It isn’t clear whether Gannett will be receptive now.

...Digital First Media’s largest shareholder is Alden Global Capital LLC, a New York hedge fund that focuses on investing in distressed companies. It became an investor in the debt of an MNG entity in 2010 after that company’s own bankruptcy and became the biggest shareholder several years ago.

Alden, founded by Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, has more than $1 billion under management. The sometimes-activist investor is known for slashing costs at its media investments through layoffs and the use of zero- based budgeting, an approach that requires operators to justify their expenses each year.

Now it may be that nothing comes of this takeover attempt. And I make no claim to knowing how hedge funds, nor the entities they invest in, operate. 

That said, here's some thoughts about this possible takeover based on some of my previous blog posts about Gannett and the Statesman Journal.

It's been curious to me that in a time of decreasing newspaper popularity and declining advertising revenues, Gannett has chosen to increase the monthly Monday-Sunday home delivery subscription rate from $46 to $68 over the past 18 months or so. 

That's a 48% increase in roughly a year and a half during a time when overall inflation has been running about 2% a year, so around 3% every 18 months. Thus Gannett has been asking Statesman Journal subscribers to pay 16 times more than the general inflation rate to continue getting the newspaper delivered every day.

In May 2018 I wrote a blog post called "The Statesman Journal seems to be on the track of 'How a newspaper dies.'" It starts out this way:

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. 

As noted in the excerpt in today's Wall Street Journal story, Smith is a founder of the hedge fund that is involved in the potential Gannett takeover attempt.

I shared the core notion from the Politico piece in this excerpt:

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.

That sounds bad. But I argued in the May 2018 post that it's what Gannett already has been doing with the Statesman Journal, and I assume other newspapers owned by Gannett. 

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.

So if harvesting market position has been the previous Gannett business model, seemingly this would make Gannett open to being bought out by investors who have a history of doing the same thing,

Time will tell if this actually happens. If it does, likely this will bring the Statesman Journal closer to journalistic demise.

 

Sunday's Statesman Journal had zero local content on opinion page

Salem's one and only daily newspaper, the Statesman Journal, is falling deeper into a well of mediocrity.

The newest outrage against journalistic excellence was obvious in yesterday's Sunday paper where, for the first time in the 41 years that I've been reading the Statesman Journal, to my recollection, there was precisely zero local content on the opinion pages. 

A post on the Salem Community Vision Facebook page nailed the outrageousness of this:

NO LOCAL OPINION IN THE SUNDAY PAPER
Charles Sprague is turning in his grave today. When he was the editor of the Oregon Statesman he wrote a daily editorial that appeared on the front page of the paper for 25 years. Today the Statesman Journal could not even manage to print one opinion piece by a local author. No staff editorial. No guest opinion. Not even a letter to the editor. Pathetic. The Statesman staff should be ashamed. They've hit a new low.

I too was struck by the absurdity of no local opinions in the first Sunday paper published after the midterm elections. Instead, there were five pieces by national writers, plus four editorial cartoons.

Further, there is no longer an editorial board, just two Statesman Journal staff members who, apparently, are staffing a nonexistent editorial board. (Easy job.)

Hopefully local content on the opinion page will spring back to life before too long. I'm a big fan of opinions, in part because I'm so prone to holding them myself. Along with, of course, almost everybody else in Salem. We all have opinions, and an important role of a newspaper is to provide a forum for them.

I'm not particularly concerned about the lack of a Statesman Journal editorial board.

It was a wise decision for the paper to not make any endorsements in the midterm elections, but rather to publish pieces by rival candidates side by side. Or, singly, if one of the candidates chose not to write a piece. 

There's really no reason now for newspapers to make political endorsements, assuming there ever was. The Internet allows people to have all the information that editorial boards are privy to, and it is more than a little condescending for newspaper employees to consider that they have a special right, or duty, to tell everybody else how to vote.

But I do enjoy reading letters to the editor and opinion pieces about local issues. For example, City Councilor Tom Andersen has made a reasonable proposal that councilors be paid, which would encourage more people to run for the City Council. But Mayor Chuck Bennett hates the idea.

So I'd like to read dueling opinion pieces by Andersen and Bennett on this subject. Along with letters to the editor taking one side or the other.

I'm finding that the new journalistic kid in town, the totally online Salem Reporter, is making it a bit difficult for me to feel close to this Salem news source. I have to remember to visit the web site each day, whereas the Statesman Journal appears at the end of our driveway every morning.

(Well, most mornings.)

Some days there aren't any new Salem Reporter stories. On the plus side, all of the stories are local, or about state government, whereas the Statesman Journal has a lot of USA Today and national content that isn't of much interest to me. I subscribe to the online versions of the Washington Post and New York Times, plus I browse Politico, Google News, and such.

And so far the Salem Reporter doesn't have an opinion section, nor any way for subscribers to comment on stories. Both of these absences are turn-offs for me, though I feel like I'm getting my money's worth from the $100 annual subscription that I signed up for soon after Salem Reporter announced its presence in our town.

UPDATE: Almost forgot to mention that the current Statesman Journal Monday-Sunday home delivery rate is $62/month, which is up from $46/month in June 2017. So that's a 35% increase in a bit less than a year and a half, which is, um, a LOT greater than the overall inflation rate.

My suspicion is that the Statesman Journal's corporate masters at Gannett are trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of subscribers before the paper ceases print publication next year -- and perhaps shuts down altogether. Meanwhile, us subscribers are paying more for crappier content.

Statesman Journal partnership with Verify More seems creepy

About a week ago Salem's daily newspaper, the Statesman Journal, ran a story, "Statesman Journal partners with nonprofit on political candidates' background checks." 

Most businesses run job candidates through a background check before hiring, to ensure there are no surprises or issues that didn't come up during the interview process.

With that in mind, the Statesman Journal is partnering with a nonpartisan, nonprofit called Verify More to do background checks on Mid-Valley political candidates.

This idea struck me as strange at the time. Now that I've learned more about Verify More, I'm adding disturbing and creepy to describe how I feel about this budding partnership with the Statesman Journal.

What got me to look into this was a message I received from a local candidate for public office. This person told me:

Not sure if you'll find this interesting, but this "non-partisan" non-profit seems to be run and funded by right-wingers. I looked up the guy, David Doud, when I got the invite. He ran for office in Washington a few times as a Republican and lost. Then, the board of the "non-profit" are mostly lobbyists from what I could tell. I talked with a few other candidates and a democratic consultant confirmed that they're funded by real estate developers and other corporate lobbying groups.

I haven't been able to learn who exactly is funding Verify More. The organization's website doesn't share that information, from what I could tell. But let's assume that the Partners listed on the website are financial contributors to Verify More. 

Most of these organizations do seem to tilt toward the conservative side of the political spectrum, aside from Amplify Washington and Ballotpedia.  And David Doud, the founder of Verify More, was indeed a Republican when he ran for Commissioner of the Port of Seattle. 

In his 2009 race for Port Commissioner, Seattle's the Stranger publication had a pleasingly caustic piece about Doud, "David Doud: Dickish!" This was their election endorsement statement. 

So this is another sign that Doud leans rightward.

The piece in the Stranger also discussed numerous false or misleading statements David Doud made in his campaign materials, including my favorite -- citing the "Seattle Times online" as the source of a quote that wasn't made by a reporter or editorial writer, but by someone who commented on a Seattle Times story. 

Given that Doud now supposedly is all about fostering clean political campaigning, it sure seems discordant that seemingly he didn't run his Port Commissioner campaign that way.

At any rate, I'm left with a feeling that the Statesman Journal may end up regretting its partnership with Doud and his Verify More organization.

There certainly isn't much history to go on. Currently Verify More only has lined up four newspapers to partner with (including the Statesman Journal), and has conducted thirty-one background checks, all on candidates in the state of Washington. 

Actually there is more to the Verify More investigation than a background check, as the organization's database lists three categories: Background Check, Resume Verification, and Social Media screening. Here's how the FAQ's describe each:

Background check: Our Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) approved background checks are self-authorized, voluntary and limited in scope to a Multi-State Instant Criminal Check, National Sex Offender Registry, Criminal County Search (10-Year Address History), Criminal Federal Search (10-Year Address History), Civil Federal Search (10-Year Address History), Civil County Search (10-Year Address History). Finally, we offer candidates a safe forum from which to disclose prior criminal convictions or other adverse information beyond the scope of our reports.

Resume Verification: Education, Employment, Professional Credentials, and Military Service Records (e.g. Medals, Tours of Duty), i.e. DD214/SF180.

Social Media screening: There are two types of social media searches: 1) ‘Character Search’ includes negative behaviours a candidate may exhibit online by scouring all publically available content (excludes non-user generated content). 2) ‘Reputation Search’ provides a 360 degree view of a candidate’s reputation by searching all publically available online content (excludes non-user generated content)

The 31-person politician database currently has only one non-green Clear or Verified rating on the 93 ratings. Terry Harder got a red ALERT on the social media screen. 


Naturally I had to view the report so I could see what sort of "negative behaviours" (English spelling, for some reason) candidate Harder was exhibiting online. What I found was shocking!

By which I mean, I found it shocking that Verify More would put a big red ALERT next to a candidate's name because the person had some mention of marijuana on Facebook, given that the sale, growing, and use of marijuana is legal in Washington state. 

This is one of the reasons I find Verify More to be creepy.

Obviously it's Social Media screening is highly subjective. Yet Harder's opponent would be able to cite Verify More in a campaign ad that says "Terry Harder's character rated an ALERT from a group that checks the background of candidates for public office."

I'll do my best to keep an open mind about Verify More's upcoming ratings of Oregon candidates. I'm just suspicious of the organization's motives, and also its methodology.  

"Salem Reporter" is a new Tokarski-funded online news site

Here's some interesting news about the news industry in Salem. Read all about it in a Poynter story, "Salem, Oregon is getting a new online news site. 'I'm pretending there's no other media there.'"

And they already have a website!

Leslie Zaitz is the publisher and editor of the Malheur Enterprise in Vale, Oregon. Larry Tokarski is a businessman and real estate developer with strong connections to Salem. 

On Sept. 17, the Salem Reporter will go live with Zaitz as CEO and editor and three full-time reporters who will cover “local government, schools, business, nonprofits and state government,” according to a press release.

Zaitz isn’t revealing the amount of Tokarski’s investment to get the Salem Reporter up and running, but Zaitz expects the for-profit site, which will have a paywall, to be subscriber-funded.

“You have to pay to get the news,” he said.

A monthly subscription will cost $10 and a yearly subscription will cost $100. The Reporter will accept advertising, and Zaitz is looking at founding sponsorships, “but I forecast zero dollars from either one of those.”

...The new reporters — Rachel Alexander, Aubrey Wieber and Troy Brynelson — will move into their new office Aug. 13, and will have a month to get up and running.

In figuring out what the Reporter will cover, Zaitz sat down with a whiteboard and started sketching things out, he said, based on his own experience and judgment. He hasn’t modeled the Reporter after anything, and he isn’t worried about the other media in town, which include the daily Statesman Journal, the Salem Weekly and the Salem Business Journal.

So how will the Reporter be different? Zaitz isn't worrying about that. The Reporter won’t choose what it covers based on holes left by other media outlets, he said.

“I’m pretending there’s no other media there, let’s put it that way,” he said. “Otherwise you handcuff yourself.”

It'll be interesting to see how the Salem Reporter affects the Statesman Journal, Salem Weekly, and the Salem Business Journal. There's a rumor that the Statesman Journal will stop print publication in 2019.
If that happens, the Salem Reporter will have a head start on becoming the online news leader in this town, making it more difficult for the Statesman Journal to hold onto subscribers.

Seemingly Salem Weekly and the Salem Business Journal will be less affected by the Salem Reporter, since both are free publications that don't rely much on subscriptions. 

The price of $100 a year, or $10 a month, for a Salem Reporter subscription strikes me as a pretty good deal.

A new subscriber to the Statesman Journal pays $22 a month after an introductory rate expires, while old subscribers pay an outrageous $59 a month, the last time I wrote about this. 

My main concern about the Salem Reporter is how Larry Tokarski's funding of it might affect news coverage, given Tokarski's conservative leaning.

UPDATE: I just found the Salem Reporter website. It has this statement from Larry Tokarski, which makes me feel much better.

“Les has complete control over the editorial content of Salem Reporter. I won’t participate in or be consulted about story selection, framing or decisions. The independence of Salem Reporter is essential to guarantee its credibility. I trust Les to establish and guard that credibility.” – Larry Tokarski.

Given Zaitz's long experience in journalism, I suspect he wouldn't have taken the job of Salem Reporter CEO/editor without an assurance that he'll have free rein in covering local news. 

Meaning, without a conservative slant. Or any slant. The Poynter story concludes with some encouraging words.

He [Zaitz] is using experience from 45 years of reporting, he said. And from that time he thinks only two things really matter.

“One, content is everything. We have to deliver quality news that serves the local community and not be worried about the clicks, not be worried about having some cat video go viral because it brings people to the site.”

The other: credibility.

Zaitz wants to know, when he retires (again), that he tried to do everything he could to help journalism and society.

“I expect this will work,” he said. “If it doesn’t, at least I tried. I didn’t just sit back and chip my teeth and bemoan bad fortunes.” 

FURTHER UPDATE:  I just forked out $100 for a year's subscription to Salem Reporter because I want this venture to succeed. I also contribute $10 a month to Salem Weekly, and have a Statesman Journal subscription, plus I read the Salem Business Journal every month.

I want more and better reporting of local news here in Salem. The more competition, and also some cooperation, between various news outlets -- and this includes bloggers like me -- is good for our town.

Yeah, it's kind of weird that after I've written critically about Larry Tokarski, and even got a warning letter from his attorney after Salem Weekly published an opinion piece I wrote about his Creekside development, I'm now paying a hundred bucks a year to a company that Tokarski provided start-up money for.

But life is complex, and makes for strange bedfellows.

Larry Tokarski and Les Zaitz, plus their reporters, are doing something good with Salem Reporter. Progressives like me shouldn't recoil from supporting this online news source just because Tokarski is a backer of it.

Let's give it a chance to succeed. 

USA Today Premium Editions a new Gannett scam

Oh, I'm so (not) thrilled to learn via a USA Today postcard that came in the mail today that, as of August 1, 2018, my Statesman Journal newspaper subscription will be charged $3 each time an unwanted Premium Edition is delivered to me. 

This is the newest scam being foisted upon us Gannett subscribers, who, here in Salem, Oregon and I presume elsewhere, have had to endure massive subscription rate increases while the quality of the reporting in our local paper steadily declines. 

Here's my blog posts about the rate increases:
Salem Statesman Journal seems to be scamming subscribers
Statesman Journal outrage: New subscribers charged half of what loyal subscribers pay
Cancel your Statesman Journal subscription for 30 days to save $500 a year

Now, to be fair to Statesman Journal staff, who do the best they can while working under the thumb of their evil Gannett Corporation overlords, the rate increases are the responsibility of USA Today executives such as Barbara Smith, VP of Customer Service. 

(That's an ironic title, for sure.)

And so is the Premium Edition scam, as evidenced by the front of the postcard.

I'm calling being charged $3 for every unwanted Premium Edition a scam, but I'm sure USA Today/Gannett attorneys would gleefully point out to me and other hapless subscribers the information on the web page referenced in the "For further details..." section of the postcard. 

Why, who knew that such a web page existed?

Silly me thought that when I signed up for a Monday-Sunday home delivery subscription to the print edition, what I was going to get (and pay for) was a Statesman Journal newspaper every day. But the Subscription Terms, which I bet virtually every subscriber reads as often as the Facebook terms of service, say otherwise. 

So lucky me will be getting an unknown number of Premium Editions throughout the year, starting August 1. The postcard provides a teaser of the subjects that will provide the content for these USA Today collector items.

Which, actually, I won't be collecting, because they'll be thrown in our recycling bin as soon as they arrive.

"America's Landmarks and Hidden Gems"
"A Day of Infamy: December 7, 1941"
"Holiday Magic"

Naturally I was curious about what other Premium Editions USA Today has foisted upon the nation. These are some of the titles that can be bought in the USA Today online store for $4.95, a price that, by an amazing coincidence, happens to be exactly 495 pennies more than I'd be willing to pay for any of them.

"A Royal Wedding: Special Commemorative Edition"
"Billy Graham: 'America's Pastor'"
"Elvis Rocks On"
"Inauguration 2017" 

(That last one would really find its way into the recycling bin, pronto.)

Some Googling led me to the conclusion that these USA Today Premium Editions are a new Gannett scam, since I couldn't find any sign that people have been complaining about them. 

I did, though, find a kindred spirit in Michigan, Rebecca Foster, who has criticized the previous Gannett scam of charging extra for local premium editions. I liked the sarcastic title of a blog post, "'New Premium Edition' will cover local news!"

I just received a postcard about the special "Sunday Premium Edition" of the Livingston Daily Press & Argus.

Apparently, I've "asked for more content relevant to my area" - and it's true I, personally, have grumbled often on social media and in conversation about the lack of actual local coverage, the increasing use of stock Gannett pieces, and the inclusion of USA Today articles and entire sections, as if USA Today was a paper that anyone actually reads outside waiting areas, airports or hotel rooms. But it's not like anyone from Gannett actually asked for my opinion.

My subscription - and it goes on to list what is currently included - will now "include an exclusive, special Sunday premium section on popular local topics four times per year." Except the subscription rate for this "premium edition" will be $1 each, and will be added to my bill. So, really, you are simply increasing my subscription rate to cover the occasional local content that I should be getting from my local paper every day. Right?

A few days later Foster wrote a similar piece for what appears to be an alternative paper in her town. It was called, "Gannett defines 'premium edition' and 'local content' for me; it's an epic fail." Here's a right-on excerpt:

Plenty of people have already bemoaned the decline of print journalism, or even any kind of journalism at all (recently, the Huffington Post proudly declared that they do not pay their bloggers, because paying for writer product somehow makes it less honest). Small community papers, through no fault of their own, get gobbled up by the news conglomerates, and become less of a news outlet and more of a revenue stream for the parent company.

None of which is in the control of the Livingston Daily Press & Argus. But when the “boss” doesn’t give a damn about quality content, then it becomes increasingly difficult to be bothered to provide it at the local level.

Statesman Journal seems to be on the track of "How a newspaper dies"

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.