The Boston Globe’s strategy of focusing on digital subscriptions is paying off, according to the latest figures from the Alliance for Audited Media. For the six-month period ending on March 31 of this year, the Globe’s paid weekday circulation was 331,482, up 81,201, or 32%, over the same period a year earlier. On Sundays, the Globe’s paid circulation was 387,312, up 73,347, or 23%.
The increase came despite the continued shrinkage of the print edition. Weekday print was 77,679, a decline of 16%. Sunday print is 135,696, down nearly 15%. Paid digital now accounts for nearly 77% of the Globe’s circulation on weekdays and 65% on Sundays — numbers that no doubt had a lot to do with the hunger for local and regional news during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The numbers were not nearly as rosy at the Boston Herald, which has been gutted by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. Paid weekday circulation, print and digital, is now 56,791, a decline of 9,686, or more than 14%. Sunday circulation is 58,461, down 14%. Digital is essentially flat, with nearly all of the decrease coming from the Herald’s fading print product. The Herald today sells an average of 22,032 print papers every weekday and 25,892 on Sundays.
The new circulation figures at the Globe and the Herald come amid a massive decline in print circulation nationwide. According to the Press Gazette, a British website that covers the news business, print circulation of the top 25 U.S. dailies fell from 4.2 million to 3.4 million over the past year, a decline of 20%.
Especially harrowing was USA Today, which lost 303,000, or 62%. As we all know, the paper is highly dependent on hotel distribution, which took a massive hit during the pandemic. Gannett recently announced that some of USA Today’s content would move behind a paywall.
Correction: I botched one of the numbers and have updated this post.
In the documentary “News Matters,” Dean Singleton, who sold a majority share of his newspaper chain to the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2013, tells a gruesome story.
He recalls being sent out to a one-car accident after midnight when he was a young reporter working in Wichita Falls, Texas. The police officer at the scene told him the driver had been killed. Singleton, though, could see that the driver’s arms and legs were still moving, so he pressed the officer. The answer: the body would keep jerking around for a while, but that didn’t make him any less dead.
“That’s kind of where print newspapers are today,” he says.
“News Matters,” by Brian Malone, tells the story of Denver’s two daily newspapers — the Rocky Mountain News, which folded in 2009, and The Denver Post, formerly the crown jewel of Singleton’s empire, now being torn apart by Alden. The Post at one time had between 250 and 300 reporters; today it has about 60. As retired Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron says, that’s not nearly enough to cover a metropolitan area the size of Denver, with a population of about 2.9 million.
Among those interviewed for the film is Greg Moore, a former managing editor of The Boston Globe, who was the Post’s top editor for 14 years before resigning in 2016 rather than implement cuts demanded by Alden. Moore recalls being grilled by Alden’s bean-counters over every issue imaginable, and some that weren’t imaginable, like “Why do you have photographers?” and “Why can’t you be the same size as some pissant paper in New Jersey?”
If there is a central character in “News Matters,” it’s former Post editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett, who wrote a searing editorial in 2018 referring to Alden as “vulture capitalists” and calling on community leaders to buy the Post. Plunkett becomes emotional when he recalls the cuts that followed Moore’s departure, saying, “I felt like I was floating out of my body, not even attached to the real world. And I just had this very clear thought — this is where The Denver Post dies.” Plunkett resigned not long after writing the anti-Alden editorial.
Toward the end of the film, we see some of the Post journalists who we’ve gotten to know — Larry Ryckman, Dana Coffield, Tamara Chuang and Jennifer Brown — starting a new venture, the online-only Colorado Sun. “The journalists you see up here today are the owners of The Colorado Sun,” Ryckman tells the small crowd that had gathered, “and we will be the ones calling the shots.”
Singleton’s retort: “The Colorado Sun has no future in my opinion … There’s no business model there.”
Well, the Sun is still shining, and it appears that it may be on track toward becoming a sustainable business. The film takes us into the early days of COVID-19. “Ad revenue has fallen off a cliff,” Ryckman says, “but it has greatly increased membership.” Earlier this year, the Sun acquired a group of 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in Denver’s suburbs.
And the once-mighty Denver Post continues to shrink.
If you’d like to see “News Matters,” you’d better hop to it. I only found out about it last week, and it turns out that Rocky Mountain PBS is taking it down on Wednesday. For the next couple of days, you can watch it here. There’s also information about hosting a screening that you can find at the film’s website.
Pontoosuc Lake, Pittsfield. Photo (cc) 2006 by the Massachusetts Office of Tourism.
Ten months after reducing the number of days it appears in print, The Berkshire Eagle is upgrading its printing capabilities. According to a message from Eagle president Fred Rutberg, the paper, based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is in the process of acquiring a 9-year-old Goss Magnum press that will make it possible to print in color on every page. The move is aimed at making the paper more appealing to both readers and advertisers, Rutberg says.
Last October the Eagle moved from a seven- to a five-day print schedule, dropping its Sunday and Monday editions and transforming the Saturday paper into an all-weekend edition. The Eagle’s satellite papers in Brattleboro and Bennington, Vermont, ended a day of print as well.
At the time, Rutberg described the move as an acceleration of plans that were already in the works, explaining that the COVID pandemic had hit advertising hard. The Eagle ran a long story describing print cutbacks at other papers around the country, presumably to show readers that the lesser emphasis on print shouldn’t be taken as a sign that the paper was on the skids. Indeed, executive editor Kevin Moran told New England Public Media that the move would not result in any layoffs.
“COVID-19 really put a chilling effect on some of our advertising revenue,” Moran was quoted as saying. “But on the second hand, ever since the middle of March, we’ve seen a really big increase in our digital-only subscriptions.”
The Berkshire Eagle has been one of the good-news stories amid the local-news crisis of recent years. Once regarded as one of the best small dailies in the country, the paper was laid low under the ownership of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. In 2016, Rutberg led a group of investors who bought the Eagle back from Alden and began the slow process of rebuilding what the bean-counters had torn down. The Associated Press put it this way in a 2019 feature:
It’s easy to get carried away — The Eagle is still struggling, and its survival is far from assured. Readers are trickling, not flocking, back.
But if it does fail, it won’t be for lack of effort. The Eagle’s owners, editors and staff are waging an all-out campaign to revitalize local journalism in the Berkshires and southern Vermont.
Rutberg’s announcement that he’s buying a new press is surely good news, but it shouldn’t be taken as a sign that the Eagle favors print over digital. Click on the subscribe button and it’s all about digital, with the paper offering various deals for digital-only and digital-plus-print subscriptions. The reality is that even as papers (can’t we come up with a better name?) and readers continue to shift to online, print remains more lucrative. The value of print advertising has simply held up better than digital, which was driven into the floor by Craigslist, Google and Facebook.
In his message to readers, Rutberg said:
When I announced last year that we were reducing The Eagle’s print editions from seven to five days a week, I also told you that we had adopted a long-term strategy of Being Digital.
Judging from the mail I received, many of you surmised that we had decided to abandon print, and that the announced reduction in print frequency was the beginning of the end of The Berkshire Eagle print edition. That was not the case last year, and it is not the case now. I hope that the substantial investment we are making in print, as evidenced by our purchase of the Magnum printing press, will put those thoughts to bed.
The Eagle isn’t out of the woods. But in the five years that the Rutberg group has owned it, it’s provided far more quality journalism to its communities than would have been the case under Alden. And it has a fighting chance of becoming a profitable, sustainable business.
There is no substitute for committed local ownership.
I just skimmed the transcript of Kara Swisher’s interview with Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. It gets off to a slow start — but eventually she lets him have it in the chops over his pathetic rationalizations for not stopping the hedge fund Alden Global Capital from buying Tribune Publishing earlier this year.
The short version, for those who aren’t sure what I’m talking about: Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon and medical entrepreneur, owned 24% of Tribune, which publishes nine major-market daily newspapers. He could have blocked Alden by voting no or by voting to abstain, thus giving Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum more time to put a deal together — or to see if another buyer might emerge.
Instead, Soon-Shiong declined to vote at all, which allowed the deal to go through. Here’s the heart of what Swisher told him:
So essentially you’re saying I couldn’t save them. And I’m — I don’t quite know what to say. There’s some point where you do make a stand and say, you can’t do this. And especially with Alden Global Capital having a reputation it does, you might have stood up for it. You might have said no. But you felt the current owners weren’t going to really do anything with your money. As you said, they had an agenda. It seems like you have a theory of their agenda. But they weren’t going to make it better. And so any port in the storm, is that what you’re saying?
Soon-Shiong’s hedging is pretty much in line with his recent interview with Brian Stelter of CNN. But this response screams out:
Well, it’s a little more than that, right? I think there should be enough civic responsibility in Chicago, enough civic responsibility in Florida, civic responsibility wherever these — Baltimore. And obviously, as you knew, there were certain billionaires and multimillionaires. So to be fair, it should be really the responsibility of people living in their community. I live in California. So I can’t personally be responsible for Florida or Baltimore and Chicago.
Baltimore? Baltimore? Is the good doctor kidding? Bainum originally had an agreement to acquire The Baltimore Sun from Alden after Tribune was sold and then donate the Sun to a nonprofit. After he concluded that Alden was jerking him around, he tried to put together a group that would buy the entire chain. (Bainum is now launching a nonprofit news project in Baltimore.)
Look, it’s great that Soon-Shiong seemed to be committed to the Times and his other paper, The San Diego Union-Tribune. But if you look up the word “disingenuous” in the dictionary, you just might find his photo.
Among the worst outcomes of Stewart Bainum’s failed bid to purchase Tribune Publishing is that he lost out on an earlier deal to buy The Baltimore Sun and donate it to a nonprofit organization.
The hedge fund Alden Global Capital had originally agreed to spin off the Sun to Bainum after buying Tribune’s nine major-market dailies. That deal fell through when Bainum, a Baltimore hotel magnate, balked at Alden’s terms and tried to buy the entire chain.
So it’s very good news that Bainum appears to be moving ahead with a nonprofit venture that would compete with the Sun. Rick Edmonds of Poynter reported earlier this week that Bainum is advertising for a chief product officer who’ll work for a “well-funded startup” aimed at becoming “a new paradigm for digital first, cross-channel local media.”
The project will include the web, mobile, terrestrial and satellite radio and video, both on television and online, according to the ad, which adds that the “vision is to be the leading provider of news and lifestyle content in the Baltimore area.”
Bainum was originally willing to pay $65 million for the Sun. Assuming that money is still on the table, this should be a well-funded regional news product. Bloomberg and the Lenfest Institute are involved, too, though Edmonds suggests their role will be minimal.
One aspect I find interesting is the cross-platform nature of the project. The biggest challenge facing online-only media is getting the word out that they exist. As a former newspaper executive once told me, the problem with dumping the print edition in favor of digital is that print is essentially a billboard for digital. If print goes away, you disappear to non-subscribers. Bainum might avoid that problem by moving into radio and television as well as digital.
I also wonder whether there’s an underlying strategy to wrest the Sun away from Alden. Given the way the hedge fund is already decimating its holdings, which include the Chicago Tribune, New York’s Daily News and the Hartford Courant, there is little doubt that the Bainum project will be a better, more comprehensive news organization than the Sun on the day that it debuts.
If the Sun’s audience and advertisers (yes, nonprofits can accept ads) move en masse to Bainum’s venture, Alden might prove willing to walk away.
The Connecticut Statehouse in Hartford. Photo (cc) 2009 by Dan Kennedy.
Chain ownership is almost never a good thing. But some chains are better than others — and Hearst is among the very best. No doubt its status as a privately owned company whose family is involved in management has a lot to do with that. The legendary mogul William Randolph Hearst would be proud.
Among other things, the Hearst-owned Times Union of Albany, New York, did some of the crucial early reporting about sexual assault allegations against Gov. Andrew Cuomo — accusations that have brought him to the brink of resignation or removal.
Hearst has been making some interesting moves in Connecticut for quite some time. Now, with the hedge fund Alden Global Capital tearing apart what’s left of the Hartford Courant, Hearst is positioning itself as a digital rival for statewide coverage. Rick Edmonds of Poynter reports that the company has launched a new website, CTInsider.com, that features coverage from its 160 journalists at eight dailies and 14 weeklies and websites in the state.
CTInsider.com offers a combination of free and paid content. Subscribers pay $3.99 a week after an initial discount.
The Hearst paper I’m most familiar with is the New Haven Register, a daily paper that figured heavily in my 2013 book about hyperlocal news projects, “The Wired City.” The project I was profiling, the New Haven Independent, a digital nonprofit founded in 2005, was providing deep coverage of the city, filling a gap left by the dramatic downsizing of the Register.
It was an interesting time for the Register. Under the ownership of the reviled Journal Register chain, the Register had lurched into bankruptcy. Journal Register then morphed into Digital First Media, headed by a visionary chief executive named John Paton who, about a dozen years ago, provided a jolt of optimism. Soon, though, Alden moved in, merging Digital First with its Denver-based chain, MediaNews Group, and, well, you know the rest. But then Hearst bought the New Haven Register a few years ago, and the paper has since undergone something of a revival.
The Hartford Courant had thrived for many decades as Connecticut’s sole statewide paper. But under Tribune Publishing’s chaotic ownership, it had been shrinking for many years. During the years that I was reporting “The Wired City,” a pair of vibrant websites devoted to covering state politics and policy had popped up — the for-profit CTNewsJunkie.com and the nonprofit Connecticut Mirror, both of which are still going strong.
Things went from bad to worse at the Courant earlier this year when Alden added Tribune to its holdings despite efforts by the staff to find a local buyer.
It’s great to see Hearst now upping its game in Connecticut as well.
Nantucket, where The Inquirer & Mirror is once again locally owned. Photo (cc) 2007 by Michael Galvin.
From time to time I’ve taken note of rare instances when Gannett has sold some of its 1,000 or so papers to local ownership. In Massachusetts, for example, The Inquirer & Mirror of Nantucket was acquired last fall by a group headed by the editor and a local businessman.
Kristen Hare of Poynter asked Gannett for some numbers, it turns out that the chain has sold 24 papers to community interests. (Be sure not to miss the correction. As you’ll see, Gannett can’t even keep track of how many papers it owns.)
Not that there’s any benevolent motive at work here. Gannett is going to do what’s best for its bottom line, and a few isolated weeklies don’t fit with its strategy of regional groups, dailies and stories shared across papers regardless of whether they have any local interest.
Just recently, Gannett shut down two weeklies west of Boston — the Marlborough Enterprise and the Hudson Sun. Maybe there weren’t any local buyers available. But those towns are also covered by Gannett’s MetroWest Daily News, so there was an incentive not to empower any possible competitors.
Writing for the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, Mark Jacob speculates that the hedge fund Alden Global Initiative might sell off some of the nine major-market dailies it acquired when it gobbled up Tribune Publishing earlier this year. I suppose anything is possible, but that seemed to fly out the window when Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum’s efforts to buy Tribune fell short. Bainum planned to break up the chain, starting with The Baltimore Sun, which he wanted to donate to a nonprofit. In the end, though, Alden’s offer prevailed, even though it was loaded with undisclosed debt.
Jacob also profiles The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, a rare instance of a newspaper that Alden was willing to sell to local interests, and The New Bedford Light, launched despite Gannett’s refusal to sell The Standard-Times.
And then there is this odd observation by Jacob:
In some ways, large chains can be beneficial for local news consumers. They often bring website expertise, technical support and consistent business practices. And they may have a greater ability to recruit talent.
No. Some chains are better than others, but all of them are dedicated to the proposition that newspapers exist mainly so that the owners can squeeze out profits that could otherwise be invested in news and technology. Even in terms of digital publishing, I have rarely encountered an independent news website that is as clunky and intrusive as a typical chain site.
Can government help solve the local news crisis? The notion sounds absurd, even dangerous. You get what you pay for, and if government officials are funneling money to media outlets, then it’s not unreasonable to expect that they’ll demand sticky-sweet favorable coverage in return.
Yet the situation is so dire that once-unthinkable ideas need to be on the table. Since 2004, some 2,100 newspapers have closed, leaving about 1,800 communities across the country bereft of coverage. About 30,000 newsroom jobs disappeared between 2008 and 2020. The consequences range from the potential for increased corruption to a decline in voter turnout for local elections.
Now federal legislation long in the making may finally be ready to move ahead. Believe it or not, the bill is bipartisan. It also manages to avoid the entangling alliances that would endanger journalistic independence. That’s because the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, introduced in the Senate last week and in the House a month earlier, relies on tax credits rather than direct government assistance.
“This clever, bipartisan bill would provide more help for local news than any time in about a century, yet it’s done in a very First-Amendment-friendly way,” writes Steven Waldman, the co-founder of the Rebuild Local News Coalition as well as the co-founder and president of Report for America. (Disclosure: Report for America, which places young reporters at news organizations around the country, is part of the GroundTruth Project, affiliated with GBH in Boston.)
So how would the bill work? Essentially, it would provide three tax credits that would expire after five years, giving media outlets some runway to move toward long-term sustainability. I am oversimplying, but here is the rough outline:
• News consumers would be able to write off $250 a year that they spend on subscriptions or on donations to nonprofit news organizations.
• News organizations would receive tax benefits for hiring or retaining journalists.
• Local small businesses would receive tax credits for advertising in local newspapers and news websites and on television and radio stations.
The benefits would be restricted to small news organizations, defined as those with 750 employees or fewer in the House bill or fewer than 1,000 in the Senate bill.
At a time when Congress seems incapable of doing anything, some version of the bill appears to stand a good chance of passing. After all, elected officials, regardless of party or ideology, like to be covered by the hometown press, and the bill would help ensure that there will continue to bea press. As of Tuesday, there were 32 co-sponsors in the House — 25 Democrats and 7 Republicans. Because the Senate version was just introduced, the only co-sponsors so far are the three Democrats who introduced it — Maria Cantwell of Washington state, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Kelly of Arizona.
Among the all-Democratic Massachusetts delegation, Sen. Ed Markey will support the bill and has asked to be a co-sponsor, says Markey spokeswoman Giselle Barry. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is studying the legislation and has not yet stated a position, according to Warren spokeswoman Nora Keefe. On the House side, Reps. Jim McGovern and Seth Moulton are co-sponsors, and Mary Rose Tarpey, a spokeswoman for Rep. Stephen Lynch, says that Lynch will also be a co-sponsor, as he was during the previous session.
Government assistance for news is not new. During the early days of the republic, postal subsidies were the foundation upon which the distribution system for newspapers and magazines was built. Today, nonprofit news organizations ranging from hyperlocal websites to public broadcasters benefit from tax incentives that allow their donors to write off the money they give and that exempts the media outlets themselves from having to pay taxes.
Given the catastrophic state in which journalism finds itself, some activists and scholars are calling for more direct funding of news. For instance, Victor Pickard, a scholar at Penn’s Annenberg School, advocates much higher government spending on public media. Longtime media reformer Robert McChesney has talked about giving as much as $35 billion over five years to elected citizens councils that would fund local news and underwrite startups.
But there are dangers in such approaches. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Republican-dominated legislature cut off $750,000 to the state’s seven public radio and television stations after one of them, WITF Radio of Harrisburg, began calling out any elected official who continued to challenge the validity of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, while conceding there was no evidence of a direct cause-and-effect over what was admittedly a small amount of funding, wrote in his weekly newsletter that the action “shows the enormous peril of government dollars for journalism, even as a partial solution. In an era when a growing number of elected officials are waging war on the truth, from election results to coronavirus vaccines, would journalists be forced to choose between an important story or their survival?”
By contrast, the federal bill under consideration avoids those problems by putting as much distance as possible between elected officials and the aid that news organizations would receive.
My one reservation about the bill is that chain-owned newspapers would benefit along with independent projects. That said, the Rebuild Local News Coalition, whose members represent more than 3,000 newsrooms, includes some of the most public-spirited organizations that are working on these problems, such as LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, the Lenfest Institute and the Solutions Journalism Network.
Perhaps the problem of chain ownership could be addressed, as Waldman proposes, by giving tax breaks to the likes of Gannett and Alden Global Capital if they sell their papers to local nonprofits and public benefit corporations. I would also suggest tax penalties if they decline to do so. Corporate ownership is killing local news just as surely as technological change and the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, and we need to get the publicly traded corporations and hedge funds out.
At a time when political and cultural polarization at the national level is tearing us apart, local news can help encourage the kind of civic engagement we need to rebuild community. But that can’t happen if the newspaper has gone out of business or is on life support, and if nothing else has come along to take its place.
Fundamentally, what’s at issue is that the advertising model that paid for journalism until recent years has collapsed. Publishers need to find a way forward, whether through reader revenue, nonprofit funding, paid events or even starting a bar and wedding venue next to the newsroom, as The Big Bend Sentinel in West Texas did.
The Local Journalism Sustainability Act will help sustain local news while we search for a workable model that doesn’t rely on advertising. After 15 years of declining revenues and dying newspapers, it may be our last chance to get it right.
Axios has a story on “journalism’s two Americas” — the thriving national media and struggling local news outlets, mainly newspapers. “The disparate fortunes skew what gets covered,” write Sara Fischer and Nicholas Johnston, “elevating big national political stories at the expense of local, community-focused news.”
The data they present isn’t new, but it’s striking nevertheless. Local reporters earn an average annual salary of $49,000, compared to more than $65,000 for national reporters. Of course, many of those national jobs are in the ultra-high-cost New York era, which means the disparity may not be quite as great as those two numbers suggest. Still, the national media are growing and hiring, while local newspapers — most of them owned by corporate chains and hedge funds — continue to eliminate jobs.
Fischer and Johnston note that CNN is hiring 450 people for its new CNN+ streaming service. And Fischer reported just a little while ago that NBC is “adding hundreds of jobs to its digital organization,” mainly for news-oriented positions.
Not all news on the community journalism front is bad, though. The apocalyptic stories about what’s taking place at the grassroots invariably focus on chains owned by the likes of Gannett and Alden Global Capital. By contrast, entrepreneurs are launching for-profit and nonprofit digital startups at a dizzying rate. Chris Krewson, the executive director of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers writes:
Research shows new newsrooms are launching fast, 50 a year for the last five years. They’re for-profit, non-profit, public-benefit corporations, and LLCs; they’re a husband-and-wife team covering a small town; they’re a staff of dozens holding politicians to account at the statewide level….
They’re not replacing the newspaper. They don’t need to. This nascent industry has the potential to grow beyond the limitations of newspapers, to truly reflect and serve communities large and small, rural, urban, Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer… and on and on. We just have to stop thinking about saving the unsaveable and build businesses that serve the needs of communities first. In fact, what these publications are starting to offer is just as good, if not better, than the legacies they’re increasingly supplanting.
I’ve been tracking such projects since the late ’00s. From New Haven to San Diego, from Burlington, Vermont, to Batavia, New York, community journalists step up when there’s a market failure on the part of the local legacy newspaper. Ellen Clegg and I are following similar projects across the country.
There’s no question that these are tough times for local news. But there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic as well.
More downsizing at The Sun of Lowell, part of Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group chain. Kris arrived at The Sun 42 years ago as a Northeastern co-op student. People like him are the heart and backbone of local journalism.
Robert’s departure follows the layoff of @kplowellsun, the Sun’s managing editor/nights. Alden Global Capital continues with its destruction of a quirky, vital newspaper. Kris’ farewell column: https://t.co/pJgdxMLCuChttps://t.co/qpsH04CtoV
— Dan Kennedy is on Threads (@dankennedy_nu) July 17, 2021
