US papers are in crisis but this does not mean death of journalism

Roy Greenslade
4 Mar 2009

For the past 86 years the editors of American newspapers have gathered in annual conclave to discuss their problems. Now, as they face the greatest crisis they have ever experienced, the editors have cancelled their convention for the first time since the Second World War. In the words of Charlotte Hall, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors: "The challenges editors face at their newspapers demand their full attention."

Hall certainly knows at first hand all about those challenges. She edits the Orlando Sentinel, an award-winning daily paper that sells 220,000 copies on weekdays in Florida and more on Sundays. Add in the 1.8 million unique users a month who visit its website and the paper's audience looks healthy enough.

But advertising revenue has fallen dramatically in the past couple of years, as it has at virtually every American paper, and that decline in income is the main reason that the Sentinel's Chicago-based owner, the Tribune company, has gone into the US equivalent of receivership.

As bad as things are for Tribune's titles, which include the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, they are not - as yet - quite so disastrous as the crises that have hit other famous papers.

Last week the Hearst Corporation threatened to close the 144-year-old San Francisco Chronicle unless staff agreed to massive cutbacks. If they do not, the paper will be sold or closed down. Not that there are any buyers on the horizon.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has been up for sale since last July without attracting a single bid. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver published its final edition on Friday after 149 years. It was losing £1 million a month.

From next month the Christian Science Monitor, citing annual losses of £13 million, will stop daily newsprint publication after 100 years by producing a weekly magazine and moving online.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, founded in 1829 and America's third-oldest surviving daily paper, has followed the Tribune Company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as has the Journal Register Company, publisher of 20 dailies in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Connecticut and New York.

The New York Times, saddled with debt and keeping its head above water only because of a loan from a Mexican telecommunications billionaire, staggers from one crisis to another.

In the past year its owners, the Sulzberger family, have suffered a major boardroom upheaval and suspended payment of a dividend. They would love to unload a title they should never have acquired, the ailing Boston Globe, but cannot find a buyer. They are also questioning the wisdom of spending £415 million on a new set of offices.

So the tale of woe stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from the 49th parallel to the Rio Grande. The economic crisis that has seen advertising fall off a cliff has struck old money and new money. It affects the crusty broadsheets and the livelier tabloids, as well as a swathe of magazines, including those venerable weeklies, Time and Newsweek.

It would be facile to view these catastrophic events through the prism of the British newspaper industry. It is true US papers are less reader-friendly than ours, have larger staffs and that their unions retain more power.

These differences have had, at best, only a marginal effect on what has happened, however. Even if American publishing costs had been brought into line with those of their British counterparts, the coincidence of an unprecedented economic downturn and the increasing flight of advertisers and readers to the net would have had a similar result.

Virtually every major metropolitan daily paper in the States has been losing readers gradually for years.

The San Francisco Chronicle is a case in point. In October, when the last official circulation figures were released, it recorded a daily sale of 339,000, down from 370,000 in March and 385,000 the year before.

Yet, in 2000 when Hearst acquired the paper, it was selling a regular 530,000 copies on weekdays. In eight years the paper has lost 36% of its sale. It is surely no coincidence that Craigslist, the hugely successful website that offers free classified advertising, operates from San Francisco. From the late 1990s onwards it has been wooing advertisers away from newspapers and wrecking the business models on which they depended.

To borrow an apposite phrase from the late newspaper publisher Robert Maxwell, even a blind Albanian in a hurry could see what was going to happen.

However loyal people were to their newspaper of choice, they were not going to spend money unnecessarily on small ads. Similarly, the seekers after bargains were unlikely to go on buying newsprint for that reason alone when they were only a click away from finding what they wanted. It was effortless and free. Add to that the gradual improvement in online news, and the reasons for buying - especially among the young - vanished.

Now several publishers, including Hearst and Cablevision, the company that owns the New York title Newsday, are exploring the possibility of charging for online content.

The idea seems hopelessly optimistic. Just because the Wall Street Journal is reaping profits from its website does not mean that non-business papers will follow suit.

On the other hand, the reporters who are lamenting the demise of the US newspaper industry should not be so downhearted.Although newspapers may be dying, journalism need not die with them. But that's another story.