This book was written by Dan Kennedy wrote for the Boston Phoenix throughout much of the 1990s and 2000s and currently is a professor at Northeastern University and a contributor to WGBH. In April of 2019 he talked about this book at the West Roxbury Branch of the Boston Public Library.
We all realize that the traditional newspaper industry is in serious trouble.
— Advertising revenue fell from $37.8 billion in 2008 to $14.3 billion in 2018, a 62% decline.— Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers dropped by nearly half (47%) between 2008 and 2018, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000.
— Overall, the industry continues to shrink, with Editor & Publisher DataBook listing 126 fewer daily papers in 2014 than in 2004.
Dan Kennedy, who has been involved in the newspaper business for over 30 years, chronicles the shrinking of the industry and offers some hope for stemming the decline.
It’s the Web, Stupid! For almost a generation, newspapers have been in trouble, primarily due to the decline in advertising revenue that shifted to online media. For most of my life, print advertising was the way we found out about good deals and new products. Today, Craigslist, digital media, and web-based pop-up ads are what many of us rely on for this information.
Kennedy sees the erosion of newspapers and public service journalism as a threat to the civic and political health of the nation. Many reporters started out at the local weekly, covering the town council or the police blotter. If elected officials were doing bad things, it would be in the paper. On a larger scale, major daily papers prided themselves on investigative journalism and spotlight reports that routinely exposed scandals and self-dealing. Today, most of the newspapers that have survived are down to skeleton staff, with few resources to mount a long-term study of some issue or problem.
The book tracks three individuals who bought major daily papers - Jeff Bezos (Washington Post); John Henry (Boston Globe); and Aaron Kushner (Orange County Register). The Post and the Globe are doing reasonably well, while Kushner’s venture with the Register crashed and burned due to profligate spending and over-expansion. While having very rich people buy and support struggling businesses is one option, Kennedy points out that in many cases the new owners couldn’t save the papers they bought. He does offer some interesting recommendations about how to maintain a viable newspaper industry.
Twenty years ago, journalists noticed that circulation was declining as was ad revenue. Moving news to the web and selling digital ads to pay for content was the first thing many people tried. The idea was that readers could access the material at no cost, and there would be enough digital advertising to pay for everything. It didn’t work. Newspapers couldn't make enough money selling ads. Today, most news professionals realize that you have to charge for content, especially as the number of print subscribers sharply declines as does the effectiveness of print advertising with a shrinking readership.
Bezos, with a paper with a potential national audience, went all-in for digital subscribers at a relatively low monthly cost. Henry, with a smaller regional paper, also went digital but charged much more for access. Kushner’s business plan was totally different. He believed that he could keep a high level of print subscribers while building up the Web-based side of the business.
Kennedy makes a strong case that newspapers are vital to democracy’s success because 85% of professionally-reported accountability journalism is produced by newspapers. Local television does very little investigative journalism. While NPR does some, most commercial radio stations today don’t even cover hard news.
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in October, 2013. The paper had been slowly shrinking for years, with layoffs a routine activity. Bezos went digital quickly, and soon was getting as many web hits as the New York Times. While the Amazon founder can be a ruthless businessman, he seems to have purchased the Post for the right reasons. “This needs to be a sustainable business because that's healthy for the mission. But that’s not why we do this business. We’re not just trying to make money. We think this is important.” Since his purchase, he moved the paper to better headquarters and beefed up the reporting staff. By 2016, the Post was profitable, but barely.
Kennedy gives long-time Post publisher Katharine Graham credit for saving the paper in the 1970s by working with the union to get costs under control and by anchoring two big stories, the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971- against the Nixon administration's orders not to - and the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate investigation.
John Henry grew up on a soybean farm in Illinois. His family moved to California. He enrolled at the University of California campus but never finished college. He did decide that soybean farming wasn’t for him. He was good with numbers and eventually set up a financial trading company that made him a billionaire.
The Boston Globe was one of 11 newspapers in Boston in the 1890s, and it was the big one. Over time, however, the Globe became “fat and happy” according to J. Anthony Lukas in his classic book on Boston, Common Ground. The paper refused to take any strong positions on any issue and readers left it. Lukas talks about the Globe’s lack of reaction to the verdict (1921) in the Sacco-Vanzetti case that convicted political radicals of murder under very dubious circumstances. The Boston Herald, a conservative paper, questioned the verdict and won a Pulitzer Prize. The Globe had gotten very timid and boring.
Kennedy recounts some interesting tales about other Kennedys. Joseph, father of John and Bobby and Ted, gave the <em>Globe</em> a $500,000 “loan” – never repaid – in exchange for the paper’s support of Jack's senate campaign in 1952. In 1956, Joe Kennedy, setting up his son’s presidential run in 1960, wanted Jack’s book, Profiles in Courage, to win a Pulitzer. The problem was that it hadn’t made the final cut. Joe knew that the Herald and its bombastic editor, Beanie Choate, wanted to acquire a TV station but was not eligible to under FCC regulations because it already owned two radio stations. Joe also knew that Choate was a key member of the Pulitzer Advisory Board that could override the Pulitzer committee’s decisions on award finalists. In addition, Joe knew people on the FCC who could open the door for the Herald to get the TV station. A deal was struck. Choate worked to get Jack the Pulitzer, and Joe worked the FCC to get Choate the TV station. It all worked. Pretty slick.
Later, in 1972, the Herald lost the TV license when it became clear that shenanigans were involved in the acquisition of the license. Future House Speaker Tip O’Neill helped the Globe on that and was well treated by the paper going forward.
In 1993 the New York Times bought the Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram for 1.4 billion dollars. The Times treated the Globe like an underling which created a lot of resentment among staff. The paper also had two scandals hit in 1998, with Patricia Smith, a star African-American reporter, who had fabricated stories, and with Mike Barnicle, a high-profile columnist, who did the same. They both were dismissed.
By the early 2000s, the Globe had the same problems as other papers - declining readership and reduced revenue. It laid off reporters and closed most of its news bureaus around the world and hunkered down. In 2009, the Times, losing money, came down hard on the Globe’s unions, demanding give-backs. Despite still doing great reporting such as its coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the Globe a was a money loser. The Times was looking for a buyer and found one in John Henry. He paid $70 million dollars for the Globe and the Worcester Telegram and the Globe headquarters, quite a deal. After selling the Telegram newspaper and the Globe building, he essentially got the paper for free, which was a lot less than the $1.4 billion dollars the Times had paid for it in 1993.
Henry moved to cut some costs but did not gut the paper. He believed that high-priced digital subscriptions were the way to profitability as long as the paper produced quality journalism that people would pay for.
Aaron Kushner always wanted to own a newspaper. He wasn’t especially wealthy, but he knew lots of rich people. He had been unsuccessful in trying to buy a newspaper, including the Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald, but in 2013 he acquired the Orange County Register in California, which had barely emerged from bankruptcy and was in deep trouble.
Jeff Bezos and John Henry probably aren't the kind of people you’d like to go out drinking with. They are pretty intense business men who don’t let much of anything stand in their way. Kushner also was an intense business man but, based on all of the people he talked with in his attempts to buy a paper, he was kind of a jerk. Like Bezos and Henry, he knew nothing about journalism, but he thought he knew everything. He pitched the Globe with a six-page plan that said absolutely nothing specific about how to run the paper. The more he talked with people, the less impressed they were with him. As it turns out, his plan with the Register, the paper he did acquire, was to spend lots of other people’s money on mostly silly things. He was good at setting goals like “doubling circulation” and “increasing profits” but had no clue about how to do either.
He had a novel approach to saving the paper, which like its peers was in trouble. He believed that he could increase print subscriptions if he improved content. He also wanted to eventually get more digital readers but he believed that print was not dead.
(Many old-time journalists that Kushner spoke with really liked what he was saying and hoped that he was right. They wanted newspapers to be printed on paper.)
Kushner did have an interesting approach to increasing revenue. He would give readers vouchers to give to non-profit organizations to be used to buy ads in the paper. He believed that once these agencies started advertising in the Register, they would buy more ads because the ads were so effective. It didn’t work. Most non-profits don’t even have advertising budgets.
Your brain on the Internet Kennedy talks about how the Web really has changed how we take in and process information. As we rely more on clicks and quick hits, we lose our ability to process more complicated information. Since mankind’s earliest days, our brains have always adapted to the tools we have, which now are based on digital information. (This may explain part of why our politics have gotten so partisan and silly. Many of us just want the quick bit of information in a pithy headline; we don’t want to dig down to develop any deeper understanding of an issue or candidate.)
We are literally driven to distraction on the Web. We click from here to there and often will not read anything that looks too long. Kennedy is unhappy that news has become a commodity. A big story will generate millions of hits when Googled, and there is a remarkable consistency to content.
Since Bob is in the Basement and doesn’t have much going on, I read the Herald, Globe, Wall Street Journal, and NY Times every day; the big stories are remarkably consistent, which may not be a bad thing but it’s a boring thing.
Kennedy offers some ideas about how newspapers can help us move beyond the “skim and scan” approach to information-gathering we see today. Papers could become curators of events and package stories to add value to the bare facts. This would be more refined than the Fox News or MSNBC “opinion leaders” that are on TV every night. Ideally, there would be some balance to the analysis. The Globe and New York Times would slant left and other papers may slant right. Some papers may be more in the middle.
While this may surprise some readers, the Wall Street Journal’s news reporting is right down the middle, and it has lots of great graphs and charts, which Bob, being in the Basement, really likes. The WSJ’s editorials are to the right of Atilla the Hun, and most of the op eds are conservative (although MA Governor Charlie Baker had an op ed in the paper on Tuesday!), but the news is pretty much the news.
The newspapers, while having an ideological slant, do not dominate the cybersphere. Facebook does. Despite lots of criticism, Facebook pretty much publishes anything, albeit sometimes with accuracy warnings. Publishing everything makes more money, which is Mark Zuckerberg’s goal.
For worse or worse, Facebook has taken over the digital world. In 2016 Facebook had 1.65 billion active users per month. Now it has 2.7 billion. The New York Times and the Washington Post, the runners-up, have 100 million users. As Kennedy points out, the problem is that Facebook’s business has little to do with journalism. It just wants clicks and hits so it can sell more ads.
Millennials use smart phone-based media much more than the rest of us. Duhhh! Bezos and the Post realized this and optimized their website for smartphones, the wave of the future. Bezos’s Amazon also developed Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud storage to many clients, and made real money for the company.
Jeff Bezos was smart enough to figure out that the <em>Washington Post,</em> based in the country’s capital, should be a national paper. He aggressively pushed the <em>Post</em> into the national news ethos. The previous ownership had prided itself on being a strong regional paper; that approach would not get the numbers of digital readers that the paper needed to survive.
Bezos doesn’t do PowerPoint; all communication must be in memos which are limited to 6 pages. Many of his employees were challenged to come up with short summaries of issues but most thought that it sharpened their work. Having done regular presentations for a major New England business organization for five years, I can attest to the value of short presentations. Every six months I would present a summary of where we were on education reform. My spiel was never longer than eight minutes, and I didn't use PowerPoint. The business and academic elites in the audience loved Bob Out of the Basement’s approach to information sharing.
Bezos has been criticized for his rough demeanor with employees, but one staffer who had worked for Steve Jobs at Apple before working at the<em> Post </em>said that Bezos was a wimp compared to Jobs.
John Henry bought the Globe because he believed that it was important to have a strong newspaper in a major city. The paper is an anchor of civic culture. After he took over, he strengthened aspects of the paper, including its investigative team, which had been cut back. In 2015, there were general staff reductions as the paper was reorganized, but Kennedy gives Henry credit for his commitment to keeping the Globe a viable news outlet.
Henry did move to sell digital subscriptions at relatively high prices as he reduced the number of free articles available to a reader. In 2015 the paper still had 266,000 print subscribers. Henry’s leadership team decided to change the company that delivered the paper, a decision that created a disaster. The new company was not able to deliver the paper in a timely, effective fashion. It got so bad that Globe employees, including reporters and columnists, went out each morning to deliver papers. Finally, the old delivery company came back and all was well.
Another Henry reform that backfired was moving the printing press to Taunton, a city 40 miles south of Boston. That didn’t work either. It took many months to get the presses working correctly and even after they were running smoothly, papers were delivered later than before to many customers because of the hour drive needed to deliver the papers to Boston from Taunton.
Overall, though, Globe’s aggressive marketing of the paid digital subscription worked, helped immensely by what is known as the Trump Factor. Many people all over the country who were upset with the president subscribed to newspapers and magazines online. Although as of 2017 the Globe was losing money, there has been a steady uptick in paid readership which bodes well for the future of the paper. Having a billionaire backstopping a business helps keep it going.
Aaron Kushner's paper was in Orange County, California, a traditionally conservative area in Greater Los Angeles. The problem was that by the time Kushner took over the paper, the county had diversified, leaving the old white guys who used to run it behind. Aaron didn’t realize that and aimed the paper’s style and substance at the old Orange County, not the new one. It didn’t work and readership continued to fall. Despite that lack of success, Kushner, using borrowed money, bought several other failing papers. After initially adding reporters to his stable of newspapers, Kushner had to make massive layoffs as he continued to lose money.
Eventually Kushner was forced to leave the papers which ended up being sold and gutted by hedge fund-type investors. Kennedy notes that had Kushner been wealthy, he might have been able to do what Henry and Bezos did: hang in there long enough to make things work. Alas, he wasn’t that rich. Kennedy’s book shows us that having enlightened billionaires as owners helps newspapers survive, but many rich people have bought newspapers and run them into the ground. Warren Buffett purchased a chain of 63 papers in 2012 and took a hands-off attitude about the business. Some survived and some didn’t. Another billionaire, Sam Zell, bought the Chicago Tribune in 2008 and drove it into bankruptcy. Sheldon Adelson, a wealthy Republican donor, purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal so that he could write editorials blasting a local judge he didn't like. Sheldon soon tired of that and sold the paper which survived but is on shaky ground.
The new normal for news
The traditional model of having one (or several) major newspapers in a community has pretty much gone away. Even as the <em>Globe</em> and <em>Post</em> survive, they no longer dominate the local news and information market, and most cities do not have papers as strong as the <em>Glob</em>e and<em> Post</em>. Kennedy describes how two cities have handled the reality of shrinking newspaper readership.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, which at the turn of the century was part of a national chain that gutted papers to sell them, was purchased by a local group in 2006. While the new owners did a good job running the paper, they didn’t have enough money to turn it around. The Inquirer is still an important paper, but it certainly does not dominate the market. Other media resources have sprung up in the city to fill in the content vacuum created by a weakened major paper. Billy Penn is an 8-person digital site that covers local news. It does receive some ad revenue but is primarily funded by contributions and fun fundraisers it regularly holds. Philadelphia Magazine, which historically ran feature articles on aspects of city life and culture, now does a fair amount of hard news reporting.
The Burlington Free Press (Vermont) has seen its circulation drop from 50,000 in 2000 to 16,000 in 2016 and that number is probably lower today. The paper, which prided itself on its strong investigative journalism, has lost many reporters including those who were assigned to do spotlight-type stories. Other media have stepped up and become active in ferreting out scandals and political shenanigans and self-dealing. Seven Days is a weekly independent founded in 1995 that has grown as the Free Press has shrunk. The paper specializes in covering local news as well as doing in-depth investigative pieces that the Burlington paper can no longer undertake. Similarly, the online-only VT Digger specializes in public-interest journalism and has a budget of a million dollars with 13 employees, a pretty big deal in the Green Mountain State. It has thrived over the past ten years or so. While it has some ad revenue, it, like National Public Radio, relies on contributions to survive.
Bob’s Take
The book goes into minute detail about the status of newspapers today. Sometimes the level of detail is a bit much, but Kennedy knows his stuff. I learned a lot from his work.
After reading it, I am a bit more optimistic about the future of print/digital journalism. We will see some traditional newspapers fail, but there are ways to help others survive.
● Having rich owners who are committed to the journalistic side of news coverage is one way to keep newspapers around.
● Another option is to develop non-profit support organizations to raise money to support papers. This is the NPR model and it might work.
● Realistically, at some time in the near future, the print edition will go away. When that happens, it should make things simpler for ownership. Getting out an actual newspaper is difficult, as is delivering it every day. Once newspapers go all digital, it should be easier to get the news content out. One problem, though, is that today the print edition is where most papers make their money. The switch to paid digital will have to generate profits at some point.
Even with enlightened leadership, money matters. Kennedy talks about a lot of papers that had strong leadership but ran out of money, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a respected paper for generations, went all digital in 2009. The New Orleans Times Picayune cut publishing to only three days a week in 2012, but, after merging with a local weekly paper, it has returned to publishing every day, although with greatly reduced print readership.
Even with lots of money, leadership matters. The book documents situations where the rich owner was clueless about how to run a newspaper and how long it would take to turn around a bad situation.
It takes time. John Henry and Jeff Bezos bought their papers in 2013. As of now, the Globe is not making money. The Post keeps its numbers close to the vest, but there are some indications that it’s breaking even. It is positioned to make a profit as it moves to a more digital news delivery environment. Each of these moguls has enough money to subsidize their investments for many years.
Blue and Red America. Our country still faces big civic challenges that go way beyond what even strong newspapers can fix. One reason Dan Kennedy is interested in the vitality of the newspaper industry, even if it ends up digital, is that papers can offer some common ground on helping people understand what’s going on. Papers, like everything else today, tend to be politically poarized. Many of the big ones slant left - The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the LA Times. Many smaller dailies in the Midwest and South lean to the right. It would be nice to have some newspapers/news sources that were pretty much in the middle, which, I believe, is where a lot of Americans are these days. Newspapers, or what emerges online to fill their role, may be a way to bridge some gaps. As Kennedy noted in talking about our information sources today, “Blue America clustered around mainstream news outlets such as the three major networks, NPR, and newspapers. Red America watched the Fox News Channel and logged into Breitbart News.”
It would be nice to have some other options.
An American quilt I keep trying to come up with a metaphor that makes sense for the US of A in 2020. I’m not sure that “melting pot” and “salad” work today. I’m thinking that a quilt may work. The quilt is not homogeneous; it is literally a patchwork. Each square is different, but they each contribute to creating a complex and coherent whole.
We’ll never be the same in our views, but we can be sane and level-headed and try harder to understand where other Americans are and why they’re there. People with different views aren’t necessarily bad. Their views are based on their experiences and life styles.
I will end with the last paragraph in the book: “Journalism will endure regardless of how it is distributed. But newspapers, whether in print or online, are still the most elegant vehicles for delivering that journalism. The way forward for newspapers will not be easy. It’s not even clear if there is a way forward. But our democracy will be much the poorer if they lose their struggle for survival.”
