Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — This town has a specific and instructive version of the problem.
Our daily paper was bought a few years ago through a holding company that initially wouldn’t say who owned it. The newsroom found out who its own owner was by reporting the story, which is either the best or the worst advertisement for the profession depending on your mood.
The owner turned out to be a local casino figure with extensive business before the state and the courts.
I don’t need to characterize any of it. The structural point stands on its own: in a one-paper town, ownership of the paper is a significant public question, and there’s no mechanism for the public to have any view about it. It’s an asset that gets sold.
That’s the thing that worries me more than the closures. A dying paper is a loss. A surviving paper owned by somebody with business before the government it covers is a different problem, and the second is the likelier outcome in a market where these things are cheap.
Tyler, Texas Correspondent — I sit through school board meetings. I’ve done it for years and I’ll do it Thursday.
There used to be a reporter there. Now there’s me, two or three parents, and whoever has an item.
Here’s what I’ve watched happen. When somebody was covering it, the board explained things, because the explanation was going to be printed. Now it doesn’t, because there’s no reason to, and I’m not going to write it up for anyone.
That’s a district with a budget in the tens of millions and a bond program, being overseen by seven people accountable to an electorate that has no way of finding out what they did.
Nobody is stealing anything. It’s worse than that in a way. Decisions get made carelessly, because carelessness has stopped having a witness, and the compounding on that over a decade is real money and real buildings.
Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent — Rural news deserts are the version out here and they arrived before the pandemic.
There are counties in this state with no paper at all, and several more where what remains is a page of legal notices and a syndicated column. The state capitol press corps has shrunk to a handful of people covering a legislature that meets eighty days every two years and passes several hundred bills.
The consequence I’d point to is specific and unglamorous. When the legislature meets, the people who know what’s in a bill are the people who wrote it and the lobbyists who asked for it. That used to be a third category and it’s mostly gone.
We didn’t lose an opinion page. We lost the only people whose job was to read the bill.
Sydney, Australia Correspondent — We’ve tried the most aggressive remedy anyone has attempted and it’s worth reporting on because you’ll have this argument next.
Our competition regulator concluded that the platforms had captured the advertising revenue that funded journalism while carrying the journalism itself, and the government released draft legislation in July requiring them to negotiate payment with news businesses, with binding arbitration if they refuse.
The platforms have responded with warnings about withdrawing services from Australia entirely.
I’d offer two cautions rather than a recommendation. The first is that the money, if it flows, will flow disproportionately to the largest publishers, because they’re the ones with the bargaining leverage, and the outlets in genuine trouble are small. The second is that it establishes a relationship in which news businesses have a revenue interest in a regulatory arrangement, which is a somewhat awkward position for an industry whose product is scrutiny of government.
We may still be right to do it. It isn’t free.
Orange County, California Correspondent — The financial mechanics deserve stating precisely, because the story gets told as technological inevitability and a good deal of it wasn’t.
Several major newspaper groups were acquired by financial buyers in the last decade, in transactions that loaded acquisition debt onto companies that were, at the time, profitable. The debt service then required cost reduction, and cost reduction in a newspaper means the newsroom, because the newsroom is the largest discretionary line.
Separately, some of these companies held valuable urban real estate — printing plants and downtown buildings — that was worth more than the operating business. That real estate has been monetized.
So a portion of what looks like an industry dying of the internet is an industry whose assets were worth more disassembled than assembled. That’s an ordinary outcome in finance. It’s just not the story being told, and it matters for the remedy, because a subsidy applied to a company structured to extract rather than to operate goes to the creditor.
Clermont, Florida Correspondent — I advise small businesses on where their marketing money goes, so I’m part of the mechanism.
Twenty years ago a professional practice in a town this size took an ad in the local paper because there was nowhere else. Now I tell clients to spend it on search and on local social, because it’s measurable and it’s cheaper and it reaches the actual customer.
That advice is correct. I’d give it again tomorrow. And the aggregate of everyone receiving that advice is that the paper’s revenue went away.
I don’t know what to do with that. It isn’t a market failure — the market worked, and the businesses I advise are better off. It’s that a public good was funded as a byproduct of an inefficiency, and when the inefficiency was corrected, the public good went with it.
Anybody proposing a fix has to start there rather than with a villain.
Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — Industrial coverage is what disappeared here and I noticed it as a reader before I noticed it as a citizen.
There used to be somebody who understood manufacturing writing about manufacturing in this region. When a plant announced a layoff or a supplier moved a line, there was an account of it by a person who knew what the words meant.
That reporting required a beat, which required somebody being paid to develop sources over years. It’s gone, and what replaced it is a rewritten company announcement.
The practical consequence is that a community with sixty thousand manufacturing jobs cannot find out what’s happening to them except from the companies. When a plant closes now, the first the town hears is the WARN notice, and by then everything is decided.
Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — I keep books for a church and I use the library, and both of those tell you something about what a paper was.
It was the record. Obituaries, the sale notices, who was appointed to what board, the school lunch menu. Small things that added up to a town knowing itself.
The library has the microfilm going back a hundred years and people come in to look up a grandfather. There will be a gap starting around 2010 that nobody can fill, because it was never printed and the website that replaced it was taken down when the owner changed.
Does it matter? Ask somebody in 2070 trying to find out what happened here.
Novi, Michigan Correspondent — The trade press is the piece of this that industry people would miss and nobody else would.
Automotive has publications read by everyone in the business, and they do genuine reporting — supplier trouble, program delays, what a company is actually doing rather than announcing. Several have thinned considerably.
What that means practically is that the information advantage has shifted toward the largest companies, who have their own intelligence functions, and away from mid-size suppliers who relied on the trade press to know what was coming.
That’s a competitive effect nobody would have predicted from a story about journalism, and it’s the kind of thing that shows up as a supplier being surprised by a decision he should have seen in a publication that no longer employs anybody to find it.
Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — I would mention the loss on our end of the same collapse.
American and British newspapers once maintained correspondents who covered this region. Not many, and not always well, but there were people who knew the Caribbean and wrote about it for readers elsewhere.
That has essentially ended. My region now appears in the international press during a hurricane and during a crime wave, and the reporting is done by people who arrive and depart.
The consequence is that decisions taken in Washington about the Caribbean are taken with no press scrutiny at all, because there is no correspondent to notice and no domestic constituency to ask. Foreign policy toward small states now happens in a genuinely unobserved space.
Local journalism failing in your counties and foreign coverage failing in my region are the same economic event, and both produce the same result, which is that power operates unwatched.
