Moody's Downgrades GateHouse, Bankruptcy Is Possible--Is there any future left for local newspapers?

Sometimes a news story is so bad and filled with such dark clouds that there's no way to find much of a silver lining. That's the case with GateHouse Media, owner of many small-market newspapers in the United States. The staff of Editor & Publisher, one of the two main trade publications in journalism, write this about GateHouse Media: "The Street stopped believing the GateHouse Media story long ago, forcing it into the Pink Sheets as a penny stock. Now comes Moody’s Investors Service declaring Thursday its “over-leveraged capital structure to be unsustainable.” This is based on the decision by Moody's to tell investors that the company is likely headed for bankruptcy. It's easy to blame liberal bias -- anyone who knows me knows I have usually been the most conservative man in the newsrooms where I've worked. There are reasons why the major national networks and national newspapers are struggling, but FOX News, the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, and similar right-of-center news operations are doing fairly well. The root of the problem, however, is not debt or bias, but the role of the Internet in delivering news. Why pay for something that comes a day late at best when you can get the news online for free and immediately after it's written? Print media is rapidly becoming much like blacksmiths making horseshoes when the automobile was in the early stages of becoming a mass-market item.

I wish you well in Freedom Communications. I used to be the military, police and religion reporter for the Clovis News Journal outside Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, which is a Freedom Communications newspaper.

I’m not a classic libertarian and I don’t fully share Freedom Communications’ underlying philosophy — I fall much closer to the “Christian right” perspective, though as the son of a Republican politican, I am painfully aware that politics is the “art of the possible.” Also, I think a lot of people in the “Moral Majority” camp fail to appreciate that the original intent of the Constitution when it comes to religious establishment issues, when written in the late 1700s, was quite different from the intent of the founders of Puritan New England. The Constitution was a deliberate compromise between religiously disparate views held throughout the former colonies, and quite specifically was crafted to allow men like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to hold office who would have been barred from voting rights and possibly even executed for blasphemy in New England, Scotland, or England in the early or middle 1600s.

However, I did enjoy my time at Freedom Communications. It’s one of the very few places I’ve worked over the years that had any sort of consistent worldview motivating its work, and adherence to a basically libertarian philosophy of individual rights is not a bad thing compared to the unspoken socialism and “it takes a village” mentality that dominates much of the media culture. Given the choice between what goes on at Freedom Communciations and what goes on in most of the rest of the media, I hope Freedom is able to survive its bankruptcy proceedings and retain some form of family ownership and libertarian ideology.

I like your link (which is here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/216703/), and I agree that community commentary and blogs, when they exist, are filling in for traditional print reporting. That’s especially true in suburban areas where the local daily has cut back on coverage of the “meat and potatoes” of city, school, police and fire coverage and is focusing only on the core coverage area of its city, leaving a news vacuum for bloggers because **SOMEBODY** has to cover those things.

Things are a little different in rural America where small local daily newspapers are generally still functioning and provide viable competition.

Here outside Fort Leonard Wood, at the Pulaski County Daily News (http://www.pulaskicountydaily.com/) I am partnering with a pre-existing commentary site, the Pulaski County Web (http://www.pulaskicountyweb.com/) run by a local businessman who started his site a decade ago because the local newspaper wasn’t doing its job; in the last half-decade since I’ve been in this community, he had moved more toward commentary than news because he could rely on my news reporting in the local daily print newspaper, and now that I am in business for myself running an internet news operation, we now have an arrangement where I post my lead paragraphs and a link to my articles on his site, and the comments for my articles are hosted on his site. It works well and builds traffic for both of us.

After reading the Newsweek article, I am beginning to think I have a marketing problem and need to spend more time promoting myself (which personally I hate doing, but I know is necessary). I do think conservative reporting has a future, and that future is on the internet.

Furthermore, since the simple fact is that most small business entrepreneurs tend to be politically conservative because they understand economics, we may see a resurgence of political conservatism in the news media as the majority of laid-off liberal reporters go on welfare or into academia (but I repeat myself) and laid-off conservative reporters decide to find a way to make what they love, writing the news, into a viable business proposition. I left traditional print journalism on my own, but lots of people are leaving because they don’t have a choice, and necessity can often be the mother of invention.

Newsweek thinks this blogger is doing something new with her site, but I’ve been doing it for years. This quote from Newsweek could describe me, except that I’ve been doing this for years and it’s nothing new in small towns with a small daily newspaper to have not only me but one or more of my competitors show up at car crashes, and now I’m doing it on the web:

“Connic shows up at so many auto accidents that for a time Millburn Fire Chief Michael Roberts began going too, just so he could deal with Connic’s questions while his firefighters worked. At Millburn town hall, town administrator Timothy Gordon often spends part of his week alerting the Millburn Township Committee about what news Connic is likely to break next—so they hear it from him, not from her blog. For decades the locals got their news from a sleepy weekly newspaper, but now, with Connic, rival bloggers, and the ‘citizen journalists’ they recruit walking the Millburn beat 24/7, Gordon sometimes has trouble staying abreast of town controversies. ‘They can come across problems before [town officials] know about them,’ Gordon says.”

Now take that “hyperlocal” model, add an underlying conservative ideology to it, and I think we’ve got a viable chance of fixing the media mess for the 21st century by providing a viable conservative media option in the marketplace of news as well as the marketplace of ideas.

I’m responding to several different people here who wrote similar things.

First, I agree with at least the broad outline of conservatism_IS_compassion’s essay. I’m not sure about the particulars, and I will need to read the thousand-plus comments to fully understand his perspective, so I don’t want to say much more now.

What I will say is this, and I think I’m agreeing with conservatism_IS_compassion’s essay when I say it — I am fundamentally in support of a diversity of ideas, of the free market, and of rewarding employees based on their value to their employers. All of those concepts are almost diametrically opposite to how the culture of a typical newsroom works. “Groupthink” is not helpful to anyone, quashing initiative and punishing hard work are the symptoms of bureaucracy that’s supported by taxes and not the marketplace, and the only reason the modern media has gotten away with things so long is that the “buy-in” factor was so high that it took the money of a Rupert Murdoch or a Sun Myung Moon to start a competing news organization.

Second, I have never been a supporter of internet paywalls, which make people pay to see articles on a per-article or a subscription basis. I don’t use them on the Pulaski County Daily News, and I argued (with mixed success) against them for print newspaper websites at four different newspapers over the last decade and a half. They seem to work for the Wall Street Journal, and that’s fine, but they are such an unusual case that their business model is more comparable to a specialized stock newsletter with a high subscription price paid by high-earning readers. For the average news consumer, I believe the advertiser-supported model of television and radio is the only viable way to make an internet web news operation work.

So how do you go about making that work?

That is emphatically **NOT** an easy task. Twenty years from now if I succeed, I’ll be able to say that if I can start a successful news operation in the middle of a news media collapse and a recession that may become a depression, I can do virtually anything. The structural challenges are tremendous and cannot be minimized.

It’s easy to say that traditional print media are no longer viable. I agree, and that’s why I quit after two decades in the newspaper business and am trying to run an online news operation.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Online news revenue is only a tiny fraction of the revenue drawn in by broadcast and print media, and there are many reasons for that.

Some of those reasons will change as online media become more common, but among the problems are that the people making advertising decisions tend to be older and are less likely to rely on the internet, the audience is not yet anywhere close to broadcast media levels (but is rapidly approaching print media levels — my own daily readership has exceeded my local print newspaper’s paid subscription levels and should soon exceed its total copy run) and there’s an inherent conservatism of rural businesspeople who are hesitant to throw away money on an unproven new technology of any sort.

Plus there’s a credibility factor. Most online news operations today are more-or-less one-man shows, at least as far as paid staff are concerned. Of the two major exceptions, the Christian Science Monitor is a special case and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer laid off about 90 percent of its news staff when it went to an online-only operation, and is working with a shoestring budget.

That can work well in a small town; lots of small newspapers have effectively had only one main news reporter for years and many behind-the-scenes functions like layout, design, and ad composition are either unnecessary online or can, if necessary, be done by a reporter who understands HTML and graphic design principles.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Editors and copy editors and photographers and similar people are there for a reason. Small-town news operations make mistakes because those people either aren’t there or are so overworked that they can’t do their jobs effectively. There is a legitimate credibility problem with small news operations, whether in print or online, and at least for a while until the mainstream media collapses, print media does have a reservoir of credibility that dates back decades as a viable advertising option for large businesses. They may have little credibility when it comes to news biases, but it wasn’t that long ago that they **WERE** able to clearly deliver customers for their advertisers. Online media have not yet proven to a lot of advertisers that they work, and what seems to be happening is that advertisers are cutting their print ads and putting their money into their pockets rather than some other non-print medium.

Here’s a story I posted just now about a Police Jury (County Commission) meeting I attended yesterday.

http://lincolnparishnewsonline.wordpress.com/

I do my blog as public service. I intend to not worry with advertising or promotion, except by word-of-mouth. My goal is to write unique commentary/news that will in time become “must read” for anyone interested in local/regional government and politics.

And that type of news is out there. How many unreported brother-in-law deals are done by Mayors and School Boards every day? Deals the local weekly is scared to write because of what their advertisers might say?

Our little town here is full of news that doesn’t get reported because of fear of stepped-on toes.

And so is every other little town and county in the country.

But the slack is about to be taken up.

Dear darrellmaurina,

Thanks for some very interesting posts.

I'm a newspaper person. By that, I mean, I've always been a reader of newspapers. I got hooked when I was eight years old during the 1968 election campaign. Had to have my fix of the WashPost every morning before school.

At one point, we subscribed to both the Post and the Washington Times.

But I canceled my subscription to the Washington Lying Thieving Post (that's who I made the check out to every month for my subscription - they always cashed it - I view that as an admission on their part) the better part of two decades ago, and just recently canceled the Times as it drifts leftward under the direction of the Postie who now is the top editor.

I look at my own hometown paper, the Annapolis Capital, and I wonder how what you've written applies or fails to apply.

We recently re-subscribed some years after previously canceling our subscription. My wife says we get more in coupons on groceries than we pay for the subscription. That's the only reason to subscribe to the fish wrap.

Currently, we also subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.

When I canceled the subscription to the Capital, I had an involved e-mail discussion with the publisher. The straw that broke the camel's back, the proximate cause of our cancelation was when they'd added a feature to the paper aimed at teens that used inappropriate language. The publisher pointed out to me that the phrase they used for the regular, weekly column, was part of the standard vocabularly for most young folks. I countered that there were any number of words in the standard vocabularly of most young folks that nonetheless shouldn't be printed as part of the title of a weekly column.

He argued that he was trying to attract new readership from groups that traditionally don't read newspapers. I wished him luck with that, but suggested that racy headlines probably weren't the answer.

He felt that I was pretty much an over-the-top Christian zealot out of touch with the real world. We homeschool, and he focused in on that, telling me that we were even over the top for homeschoolers. But he did put it very nicely, very diplomatically. LOL. In any event, I told him that if he didn't immediately cancel the column and expressly apologize in writing to the newspaper's subscribers for it, I'd cancel. He didn't and I did.

Ironically, the column didn't seem to attract any new readers, and they canceled it within weeks of my canceling my subscription.

What I took away from this experience is that newspaper people are generally very stupid. I have two nephews who have degrees in journalism or communications, and my anecdotal experience with these two mush-brains conforms to the overall theory.

What was so stupid, and the Capital's publisher was so blind to, was that in seeking to try to get new subscribers from non-traditional groups of folks, newspaper folks often turn off the folks who are actually inclined to read newspapers. Imitating the Internet by filling the front page with large, colorful photos and increasingly smaller, more poorly-written articles often lacking basic facts doesn't make me want to read newspapers more. I'm reading the newspaper because I LIKE the written word.

I LIKE when someone writes a good, informative, tight news story that quickly answers Who, What, Where, When and Why (and an occasional How). I LIKE the effort, at least, to report objectively. I LIKE it when the writer of the story evinces some background knowledge of the subject of his story, as opposed to writing the story in such a way as to expose the fact that he never even HEARD of the subject of the story before the story was assigned to him.

I understand the problem that perhaps my demographic (folks who love to read newspapers as we traditionally knew them) is shrinking. But their efforts to add readership and subscribers needs to be additive.

sitetest

Enjoyed your reply, thanks for the agreement. In my previous post, I linked to
Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate, and you sound like you have taken the time to read some of it, which I always appreciate and to any reponse on which I always reply with alacrity.
But although there is some interesting stuff, and particularly links to interesting threads, in it that is not replicated in
The Right to Know,
that thread is newer and is a good summary of my present understanding of the issue of freedom of the press. And it has the not-inconsiderable virtue of being much shorter. The primary point in referencing the earlier thread is that it shows clearly that I did not come to the issue with the idea of finding a single villain, but rather I went into it looking for the economic factors which would explain why journalism is so powerfully correlated with leftism. It just turns out that those economic factors which I have identified are expressed in an organization - the AP - which arose in the mid-Nineteenth Century and is still alive and kicking.
As to your current business endeavor, I wish you well. Have you considered looking for people like abb and making common cause with them, by linking to their reports and becoming an aggregator? I highly recommend 4 Advances that Set News Back to your attention. The link is to an FR thread in which I posted the stuff most germane to my own perspective; they seem to have changed their site so that the FR link takes you only to a login page and not directly to the parts I wanted to refer to. But I suspect you might find it rewarding to log in to the site.

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