July
21Why Big City Newspapers Should Survive
As another wave of Los Angeles Times staffers got their “farewell” notices last week, everyone seems willing to accept the notion that big city newspapers are an anachronism.
Is this really true or are we all too ready to drink Sam Zell’s Kool-Aid? The Los Angeles Times, in point of fact, is making a nifty profit, though it’s not enough to bail Zell out of his over-leveraged deal.
But here’s the anomaly: Inner cities around the nation are experiencing significant revivals. Poor blacks are moving out and upwardly mobile whites are moving in, reversing trends of several generations ago.
Brooklyn, of all places, is becoming a metaphor for the demos of the future: The upmarket share of the population is increasing for the first time in a century. Similarly, in San Francisco, the black population has fallen by one third since 1990.
Washington, DC, Atlanta and Chicago are experiencing similar trends. And the newcomers to the city are better-educated, richer and certainly potential newspaper readers.
So here’s the big question: Are newspapers losing money mainly because their business plans are obsolete? Are they losing readers, not because of the rise of the web, but because the papers simply aren’t sharply edited?
According to Pew Research, three-fifths of 259 newspapers surveyed now devote less space to news then they allocated just three years ago, with foreign and national news getting the biggest cuts (after all, we have only two wars going on overseas).
Basic demographic trends would seem to favor big city newspapers. But if the Sam Zells of the world are going to take them over, they will be in no position to capitalize on these trends.
Besides, if newspapers don’t get their act together, all the good ones will be owned by Rupert. Notice that his acquisition of the Wall Street Journal has quieted all the naysayers. He hasn’t announced massive layoffs. In fact, he’s planning a new high-end lifestyle weekly magazine and has added new news pages to the Journal. And London readers can now buy the Journal several hours before it goes on sale in the U.S. due to publishing innovations.
But what sector of the Murdoch empire isn’t hitting its numbers? It’s online, folks. Myspace isn’t going to cough up the $1 billion in revenues it forecast. Oops.
Is this really true or are we all too ready to drink Sam Zell’s Kool-Aid? The Los Angeles Times, in point of fact, is making a nifty profit, though it’s not enough to bail Zell out of his over-leveraged deal. But here’s the anomaly: Inner cities around the nation are experiencing significant revivals. Poor blacks are moving out and upwardly mobile whites are moving in, reversing trends of several generations ago.
Brooklyn, of all places, is becoming a metaphor for the demos of the future: The upmarket share of the population is increasing for the first time in a century. Similarly, in San Francisco, the black population has fallen by one third since 1990.
Washington, DC, Atlanta and Chicago are experiencing similar trends. And the newcomers to the city are better-educated, richer and certainly potential newspaper readers.
So here’s the big question: Are newspapers losing money mainly because their business plans are obsolete? Are they losing readers, not because of the rise of the web, but because the papers simply aren’t sharply edited?
According to Pew Research, three-fifths of 259 newspapers surveyed now devote less space to news then they allocated just three years ago, with foreign and national news getting the biggest cuts (after all, we have only two wars going on overseas).
Basic demographic trends would seem to favor big city newspapers. But if the Sam Zells of the world are going to take them over, they will be in no position to capitalize on these trends.
Besides, if newspapers don’t get their act together, all the good ones will be owned by Rupert. Notice that his acquisition of the Wall Street Journal has quieted all the naysayers. He hasn’t announced massive layoffs. In fact, he’s planning a new high-end lifestyle weekly magazine and has added new news pages to the Journal. And London readers can now buy the Journal several hours before it goes on sale in the U.S. due to publishing innovations.
But what sector of the Murdoch empire isn’t hitting its numbers? It’s online, folks. Myspace isn’t going to cough up the $1 billion in revenues it forecast. Oops.
The following has been floating around the web lately.
- The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
- The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
- The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country, and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
- The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time, and if they didn’t have to leave
- The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.
- The Seattle Times is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something in which to wrap it.
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Bart's premise that upwardly mobile whites will move back to the city and they will boost newspaper readership is flawed. First of all, the readership of the L.A. Times is composed of all races and all parts of L.A. county and beyond. Race and residence are not the issues, but age is. Just last week, I saw one of those young, upwardly mobile white males explain why he gets his news from the internet. His response? "Newspapers are yesterday's news." Well, there you are. Young people don't care if they get their news with any context or history or back story. Just make it right now.
Posted by: sandmadd | 7/25/2008 12:03:10 PM
I'm fully convinced that writing quality (which includes editing) is a major part of the problem. The average city paper -- or even the above-average paper, if there are any of those left -- just doesn't give much pleasure. And what pleasure it does give (Dan Neil, for example) is kicked to death by misspellings, bad syntax, and general sloppiness.
A large proportion of my friends prefer to read British papers online rather than American ones, not to fill up on the latest Anglophilia but because the writing is both tighter and more intelligent. All the let's-take-it-online enthusiasm of American magnates will fall flat as long as the writing is sub-par.
Posted by: meg | 7/23/2008 9:01:15 AM
Maybe if the big-city, left-leaning newspapers covered the news instead of presenting a political agenda in their coverage, they might not be losing readers at 10%+ a year.
For example, reading the Boston Globe is infuriating as well as requiring too much effort to figure out what its stories really are about.
It refuses to cover inner city crime except when the stories are too big to ignore (such as three shot people shot dead over a weekend), black-on-white crime stories hide the race of the people involved while white-on-black crime stories scream the fact in the headlines. Naughty Democratic politicians get a pass, or are not identified as such in stories, while Republicans who jaywalk or litter get huge coverage. And nearly every day there's a sympathetic story about some young thug with an arrest record as long as your arm, who was "turning his life around" when he was either shot or arrested in a case of "mistaken identity."
So many writers have been retired or laid off that sections of the paper look like ghost towns. Today's Living & Arts section was barely 6 pages (with theater listings and movie times), as was the sports section.
With newspapers getting thinner and thinner, there's less to read, which will only lead to more readers abandoning them for the Internet and the freebie commuter newspapers.
At this stage of newspaper evolution, it's incredible to think that many newspapers continue to piss off half of their potential readers by having opinions masquarading as news stories and pushing a party line.
Newspaper will survive, but they may wind up as a 20-minute-to-read broadsheet published for commuters who don't have mobile Internet access.
Posted by: Dan Petitpas | 7/22/2008 3:04:45 PM