After The Fall
Wall Street leads the retreat from Main Street’s community news trust
David Cohea
In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s 1977 sci-fi novel Lucifer’s Hammer, a comet strikes Europe and America, the Gulf of Mexico, and both Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Earthquakes and volcanoes are triggered, tsunamis ravage coastlines, the skies open up with incessant rains from vaporized seawater. Millions die and human civilization ends.
Of all the desperate things people do in the first few days following Hammerfall, only one really counts. An astrophysicist who understands that his PhD “would never again be worth as much as a cup of coffee” spends his time pulling books from his library, sealing them into multiple Baggies with bug spray and mothballs, loading them into a wheelbarrow and taking them out to the septic tank where they are set upon the tide with a plunger and submerge, safe from marauding hands.
What books? Not fiction or poetry. In fact, fully “four-fifths of the shelves were still full” when he’s done. “He’d packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.”
A little culture and a lot of knowledge: that is this ex-astrophysicist’s gift to humanity, one of unimaginable value — if the human species is able to survive its end.
Driving off in a car he knows he must eventually abandon, with only enough food to last three days, the one book he takes with him as what may be the greatest bargaining chip for life: Volume Two of How Things Work, Volume One safely stored now in sewage depths. He holds the key to the future, but in the new world it’s a crapshoot if anyone will recognize it.
* * *
For some reason, that passage comes to mind when I get news of another newspaper folding. It’s been happening a lot lately. The Boston Phoenix. Two Maryland Gazette weeklies. The San Diego Daily Transcript.
But why Lucifer’s Hammer? A newspaper’s end is not the end of the world. If the organization behind a newspaper not able to survive changing conditions in the market, folding the paper is quite understandable.
Perhaps a newspaper’s end would not be so tragic if it were only a business. But newspapers (and all other local news sources) are also a community trust. Profit and public service are the inextricable qualities of local newspapering, but these days its seems only the first has merit, at least to the decision-makers.
Attempting to save on margins that are still twice the Standard and Poor average, newsroom jobs have been ruthlessly cut. The American Society of News Editors just released their annual census, and newsroom jobs dropped 10.4 percent or 3,800 in the past year alone.
It probably could be said that newspapers also lost 10.4 percent of their value to communities last year. As Molly Ivins put it cryptically all the way back in 2006, “For some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful to people.”
* * *
Digital First Media (65 dailies, 65 weeklies) seems to be on closing spree. When it launched its digital first strategy a few years ago, the company underwent through a massive centralization. Maybe it was visionary. Weekly newspapers across markets were consolidated. Digital staffs at the individual properties were eliminated for the sake of corporate digital efficiencies.
But then, having too soon run out of time with Alden Global Capital, the equity firm they are currently beholden to, DFM earlier this year began looking for a buyer. A deal with Apollo Global Management fell through. Alden assumed more control of operations and called for massive budget cuts. 10 properties were sold to Gannett.
Last year, DFM consolidated six weekly Detroit area newspapers with a combined 650 years of local reporting into the regional Washtenaw Now.
Just last month, DFM shut that paper down.
Corporate digital staffs were cut, putting the responsibility for digital back on the individual newspapers, many of which had cut digital staff and were not getting them back. “What does that mean to the readers?” Ken Doctor recently asked. “In some cases, news just doesn’t’ make it onto smartphone news products, leaving ‘Local News’ pages blank.”
Following the cuts, profit margins for DFM look to reach 20 percent again.
DFM has also shut down a number of other Michigan weeklies in the past month: The Leader, The Kalkaskian, Grand Traverse Insider, Romeo Observer and the Countryman. I found out about these because several had accounts for our editorial service, but I wonder it this is happening more widely across the country.
For a long time I’ve heard that weekly newspapers have been financially more stable than their daily counterparts — less competition from other media, at a remove from the Internet that may have as little to do as lack of broadband — so it’s puzzling to me why so many weeklies are now being sacrificed. There must be something we’re not hearing about in the corporate spreadsheets.
Is this what managing decline means? Watching the hammer fall and getting out when you can?
* * *
McClatchy last Friday reported 2Q earnings of just $98,000. A financial analyst suggested that the company start using more freelancers to cut editorial costs.
On Monday, McClatchy stock lost 15% of it its value — down to 85 cents.
* * *
Closing weekly newspapers may make sense on the business side. Wall Street loves to see FTE blood — but the resulting loss of a community’s news is what is making the local news desert spread across the country. And news deserts may pose a greater threat to communities than anything else, since a community that does not know itself cannot make informed decisions its future.
Worse, what does it mean to close a newspaper with no apparent plan for archival of its accumulated news, print or digital? I have tried contacting a half-dozen of these newspapers, trying to get anyone to talk with me about what they plan to do with the flotsam and bones. So far, no one has returned my email and calls. (DFM does have a ban out on talking to the media these days, perhaps the highest irony of all.)
I just don’t get it. Closing a weekly newspaper with still-enviable profit margins, taking all that news away from the community, and then simply neglecting the remains? Doesn’t that trespass beyond the merely unethical into the wantonly destructive? Is that how little Wall Street values community trust? And what does that say about corporate responsibility to the communities whose advertising dollars have been happily siphoned off to the last drip?
Worst of all, I see all of this happening in silence, off the collective radar until nothing can be done to retrieve it. By stripping newspaper staffs to the bone, who has time to look around and consider what’s about to be lost, much less think of measures to preserve what they can?
In the end, it looks like community trust is really all that newspapers have left. Print advertising is plummeting and digital initiatives leap inches with all their might. According to Wall Street optics, newspapers aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. But to Main Street, its heart and soul is there on every page.
Maybe the hammer has fallen. Nothing left but swamps of ruin unless you understand just where too look for everything to follow.
If your newspaper is getting ready to fold, or you know of others that may be, don’t let your community’s news be lost. Consider donating your print and digital archives to a local memory institution like you local library. For more information, email me at dcohea@hearstsc.com.
