Cancel Your Newspaper

Care About Journalism? Maybe You Should Cancel Your Newspaper

If an out-of-town owner is gutting your local paper, think about who’s getting your money.

By JACK SHAFER

It’s not a popular thing to say, but journalism may be approaching the point where dedicated news consumers might take a hard look at their local newspaper and—in the interest of better journalism—cancel their subscriptions.

For much of the past week, media pundits have been reiterating their warning calls about the dire fate, and the value, of local news. Fueled by a bleak new study about “the hollowing-out” of local news from PEN America, and prodded by two recent newspaper company merger deals, the pundits have become as agitated as Extinction Rebellion activists. Their worries are buttressed by the newspapers industries' waning financial numbers.

Newspaper circulation has fallen almost in half from 1994 highs and advertising revenues have dropped from $65 billion to less than $19 billion in 2016. With dwindling payroll cash to dispense, publishers have cut newsroom employment by about half since 2008, and nearly every newspaper has shrunk its coverage footprint. For example, Peoria Journal Star journalists once reported from 23 counties. Today, just three. Some newspaper chains have reduced their print schedule to three or four days a week. To avert bankruptcy, the McClatchy chain has dropped the Saturday edition from all of its papers. Meanwhile, most newspapers are charging more for less: Between 2008 and 2016, seven-day home delivery subscriptions at 25 big-market newspapers doubled, on average, and weekday single-copy prices tripled.

This collapse hasn’t gone unremarked. According to the New York Times, the newspaper apocalypse has caused a “national crisis.” Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan frets about a nation without local newspapers. Academics have charted the expansion of news deserts, communities where no newspaper is published. Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton co-frets with Sullivan, as does Brookings Institution research analyst Clara Hendrickson, who has given her study a title—“Local Journalism in Crisis: Why America Must Revive Its Local Newsrooms”— that perfectly sums up the zeitgeist.

Every media guru has an idea to roll back the apocalypse. Nonprofit newspapers. Philanthropists to the rescue. Government subsidies. Ad tech subsidies. But everybody insists that readers—the end users, after all—must subscribe, subscribe, subscribe.

This advice applies most of all to America’s undersized, overpriced, and struggling local and regional newspapers, which desperately need the support of devoted subscribers. (The New York Times and Washington Post, which frame themselves as national newspapers, have bloomed with online subscription revenue as their smaller cousins have withered.)

But should we automatically renew all of our newspaper subscriptions? I mean, really?

It’s heresy for a journalist to ask readers to consider dropping their newspaper. Beyond the obvious self-interest, reporters and editors consider a subscription to your local newspaper as a paramount civic duty, a view shared by academics, politicians, and activists. Local reporters hold government and corporations accountable, the refrain goes. They keep an eye on school boards and polluters and their stories boost voter turnout. They uncover corruption. They knit the weave in the social fabric. They foster democracy!

But when you pay for a newspaper, you’re also making a decision to send money to whoever owns it. And if you really care about local news, you might want to think twice about continuing your subscription to one of the 50-plus dailies operated by Alden Global Capital under the Digital First Media nameplate in Denver, Detroit, Long Beach, San Jose, Boston, St. Paul, and other smaller cities. Good journalism still gets done at these newspapers because reporters care. But less and less of it gets printed, because Alden owner Randall Smith and his right-hand man, Heath Freeman, don’t care about the news. As newspaper industry analyst Ken Doctor has amply documented, Alden is cannibalizing its papers for profit in a way that should repel subscribers.

Newsrooms have contracted everywhere, but few as dramatically as Alden’s. Deliberately starving its newsrooms and shriveled its news pages, Alden’s “ milk-it business model” is designed to extract the value of a newspaper over time until the day—poof!—their papers vaporize and Smith and Freeman climb into their Scrooge McDuck vault to count their riches. For example, in the 1990s, the San Jose Mercury News newsroom employed 440. By 2018, Alden had cut its newsroom headcount to 39. At Southern California’s Orange County Register, Alden reduced the newsroom from 180 journalists to about 70 in two years. The newsroom at the Denver Post once stood at 300-strong. Alden has shrunk it to about 75.

Charging more and more for a lesser and lesser product wasn’t a desperation strategy by a publisher struggling to survive: It was deliberate, and profitable. The firm earned the highest margins in the newspaper industry as recently as 2017, Doctor reports. It’s a “strip-mining” tactic (Doctor’s piquant phrase) that signals the fact that Alden has little interest in investing subscriber dollars in journalism. And the Alden menace is expanding. Last week it purchased 25.2 percent of Tribune Publishing‘s newspapers (the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, and other dailies). Should it boost its stake, the Alden style could be inflicted on those newspapers next.

Alden isn’t the only bad moon on the newspaper horizon. At the beginning of the year, Alden bid on the Gannett chain, which forced the company into the arms of the GateHouse Media chain, resulting in a merger that produced the nation’s largest newspaper publisher. Wall Street didn’t much like the deal, cutting about $265 million from the combined companies value ( 7.5 percent of its total expense base) when the deal was announced in August. Both GateHouse and Gannett have experience in cutting staff and quality, and will rely on those skills at the 260-daily strong combined company called Gannett. The front office has pledged to reduce Gannett costs by $300 million a year in the next two years. At the same time, it will be paying 11.5 percent annually on the $1.8 billion five-year loan that secured the deal, making additional layoffs and cuts likely. Most Gannett papers are already losing circulation fast than average, reports the Boston Business Journal. If you read a paper in a Gannett or GateHouse city, an Aldenesque future may soon greet you.

As Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce once said, “The first duty of the press is to survive.” No true newspaper lover (that would be me) wants to punish owners for making money. The Chandler family ( Los Angeles Times), the Graham family ( Washington Post), the Ochs-Sulzbergers ( New York Times) minted profits and produced great newspapers at the same time. But owners who gut and depopulate their newsroom don’t deserve the financial rewards a newspaper lover can bestow.

Don’t ask what my breaking point would be if I lived in an Alden town, because I’m a newspaper dead-ender. But if you pay for a local paper and it provides you little value—and shows no sign of doing so in the future—you have every right to cancel.

As long as dead-ender subscribers continue to make Alden’s properties profitable, the company will have little incentive to improve its newspapers. The best that most Alden cities can hope for right now is the sale of their newspapers to local or better owners, as has happened to the Salt Lake Tribune, the Berkshire Eagle, and the New Haven Register. Perhaps something like organized subscriber strikes in Alden cities might weaken the company’s bottom line enough to persuade it to unload its papers to owners who covet both good journalism and profits. After all, Alden has no emotional investment in newspapers. Last year, it reportedly shopped all of its newspapers for sale. But pouring cold water on the idea that Alden might sell off more newspapers rather than the whole chain is a Michael Roberts story from last year in Westword that predicted the company would never sell the Denver Post in a standalone deal because it is too profitable.

Could a reader strike even be organized? Most newspaper subscribers hail from the senior side of the demographic divide. Seriously habituated to their newspaper, they keep subscribing no matter how flimsy it becomes. There’s also the chance that the strong medicine of a subscriber strike might kill the patients rather than leading to their revivification. But at the rate Alden and other big owners are driving their properties to hell, we’re approaching the point that no newspaper might be better than what they’re publishing. Maybe a few Alden papers need to die to make way for something new.