My local New Bedford Standard-Times has been shrinking for years, laying off nearly half of its newsroom staff since 2005, and now it’s again shrinking physically. I woke up a month ago to find my morning paper had lost an inch off each side, with a note inside helpfully informing subscribers the paper is becoming “more compact.” Even the smaller size didn’t help spread out the woefully thin news coverage – just 3 pages worth.
As the Boston Globe’s Jon Chesto has documented, GateHouse Media has been conducting an experiment with its nine Massachusetts daily newspapers: How small can it shrink the journalism staff while still getting readers to pay for it?
“They are finding that even in 2015, there can be lots of efficiencies in these enterprises, which is somewhat surprising given that we’ve had cutting for seven or eight years now,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst who runs the Newsonomics blog.
But some say it’s not just jobs that are being lost.
“You get this homogenization effect,” said Thomas Caywood, a reporter who left the T&G post-acquisition after his request for a modest pay raise was denied. “Yes, it’s more efficient to have this design center in Austin. But I think you lose some of the regional individuality. GateHouse is to journalism like what Olive Garden is to Italian food.”
GateHouse and corporate owners like it aren’t fooling anyone. Print circulation has fallen in lockstep with layoffs. GateHouse bought the Providence Journal from Belo, which as Dean Starkman reported, had laid off newsroom staffers not because it couldn’t afford them but to free up cash for huge executive bonuses. GateHouse, of course, immediately laid off even more newsroom staff.
We’re often told that newspaper circulation decline is inevitable due to the rise of the internet and the KIDS TODAY (yells at cloud). But how much circulation decline is baked in, and how much is driven by corporate owners only focused on immediate profit over building a long-term product?
Here’s one example. NewBedfordGuide.com has over 53,000 Facebook likes, while the Standard-Times has barely over 7,000. How did they let a tiny startup drink their milkshake? How much in long-term profit was lost?
Again, the long-term opportunities are there, but they take a back-seat to short-term profit, if they’re allowed to ride along at all. Today’s Wall Street newspaper overlords are in this game to wring out every drop of profit they can, and if the layoff-profit merry-go-round ever shows signs of stopping, they’ll burn down the newspapers in bankruptcy, write off the ashes, and leave us to count up the damage to our communities.
..but the Cape Cod Times has MORE local content since Gatehouse. There are now fewer AP type stories. Editorial is now almost local columnists and many more ‘My View’ local reader columns, sometimes 2 a day. Of course this is much cheaper than national as local regulars are paid per piece with no paroll/benefits and the ‘View’ columns are free.
Physical changes identical which is part of the problem.
Recently cut 14 staffers: http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass_roundup/2014/04/former-cape-cod-times-employees-band-together-to.html?page=all
I was just responding to Green’s remarks about the outsourcing of content. The Times actually has a skosh more local content now – sans reporters – by amateur fee-for-pay writers. There is also a new phenomenon of outfits like More Content Now and Senior Stories, which also do piecework pay. This is the new syndication, and they are taking some business away from the AP-like traditional syndicates. They are cheaper because a single good piece is purchased and can be run ad infinitum, where a syndicated piece had a royalty based upon how many papers ran it.
I once spoke to a newsroom editor from a large paper in Philadelphia, and asked him if the local ‘pieceword’ people weren’t taking jobs away from J-School graduates. He growled that at least they were being paid, unlike the goddamn bloggers.
The Times has had two rounds of reporter layoffs, and the entire printing facility was shuttered – and it was so much newer than the New Bedford facility that the Standard-Times was actually printed on Cape and trucked off. in fact, every employee in the plant save one was eliminated and he was transferred to the Main St. office to a job that doesn’t look very long term. Compositing and some editing has been moved to Texas.
The supreme irony in all this is that they publish to a bastion of printed newspaper readers – 70+ retirees, the bulk of population on the Cape.
Local news is desperately important, even if the current model of paying for it is failing in many places.
The thing is it wouldn’t take that much money to fix this.
PATCH was an interesting concept and was (in the grand scheme of things) cheap to do, it just wasn’t turning a profit so it’s basically in a death spiral.
I’d love to see what a hybrid PATCH-NPR model could do, though… where we put some small public dollars behind it, with maybe a few regional editors and the rest freelance.
A million in public funding buys 7 staff members/editors to oversee the content at an average of cost of $70k/yr per employee, $250,000 for web costs and $250,000 for stories. At even 25 cents a word, that buys 2000 different 500 word stories.
If you figure that private fundraising and NPR-like ads could at least double or triple whatever public investment is made once it becomes established, suddenly it becomes something that rivals GateHouse in size and scope and could be completely dedicated to local news.
I don’t even think it would have to be something that the GateHouses of the world would want to fight — make their scopes different. Use the public enterprise to cover the nitty gritty — meetings, town elections, zoning issues, developments, etc., while the GateHouses of the world can continue printing the kind of stuff that sells its papers, local sports and letters/columns, etc.
Does anyone here think Olive Garden gets a bad rap? I mean I feel like I’m in Italy everytime I eat there!
It’s one of my favorite restaurants.
I’m reminded of Yogi Berra’s famous criticism of a local establishment — “Nobody goes there, it’s too crowded”. Olive Garden, for better or worse, is a reasonably successful enterprise.
How about “Gatehouse is to journalism as ABBA is to music”? They did, after all, have more than one platinum hit.
I suspect many of us have personal favorites that do not necessarily meet critical acclaim. For example, I have always preferred the Devo cover of “Satisfaction” to the original. So shoot me. 🙂
Awesome.
Fact: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/10/us-darden-board-idUSKCN0HZ0U320141010