I got a call this week from a local businessman, worried after learning that the newspaper in Greenville was scaling back to once a week, starting Jan. 1.
He wanted to know if the Commonwealth had any plans to reduce its publication frequency.
I wish I could have been more optimistic. I told him the truth. I didn’t know.
Our advertising business on the print side is not good, and the advertising community seems to be telling us it does not value a daily paper any longer.
Circulation declines in print have pretty well leveled off, and online readership is steadily rising, but online and circulation revenues are still nowhere near enough to fund a daily newspaper operation.
The only thing that is keeping us a daily newspaper at the moment is our printing business. That’s getting ready to grow significantly with the pending shutdown of the press in Greenville, a sister plant of ours.
We will be taking on 11 more weekly newspapers, bringing to 25 the number of weekly newspapers we print, plus a few monthlies and quarterlies. Our printing business, already our largest source of revenue, is all that is keeping us profitable at the moment. How long we will let it subsidize the newspaper side of our operation is uncertain.
What our company is facing is being felt throughout the country. Newspapers large and small are downsizing dramatically in response to declining advertising revenues, with dailies cutting frequency and weeklies closing their doors. Some publications have cut frequency more than once.
The newspaper in Greenville, the Delta Democrat-Times, was a daily until 2019, when it went to twice a week. It’s following the same shrinking pattern as another sister paper in the Delta, the Clarksdale Press Register, which also was a daily for a century or so and ran a printing press before it gradually scaled down to a weekly printed elsewhere. On the positive side, Clarksdale’s paper became one of the better-performing papers in our company once it got to a size that matched what its community would support.
Finding that sweet spot can be elusive, though. On average, two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The country has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005, and is expected to lose one-third by 2025.
Those grim numbers were rehashed this past week in a Washington Post story that illustrates one of the most worrisome consequences of the financial decline of newspapers — the decline in news coverage.
Perhaps you’ve been following the story for the past couple of weeks about George Santos, the incoming Republican congressman from New York who has been exposed as an over-the-top, serial liar about his background and qualifications.
Turns out, Santos’ penchant for prevarication was first uncovered back in September by a small weekly newspaper on Long Island. It reported on his inexplicable two-year rise in reported net worth, from zero to $11 million. It also noted that although Santos claimed to own two mansions in one of the richest areas in the country, the self-described gay Trump supporter lived with his husband in a rented apartment in the less tony Queens.
The newspaper, the North Shore Leader, followed that up with an editorial reluctantly endorsing Santos’ Democratic opponent because it concluded the GOP nominee was a “fake.”
The normal channels that would have taken this story and made it national news, however, didn’t click in until well after the November election. The larger news outlets didn’t pick up on the local paper’s story, even though two Fox News hosts, Sean Hannity and Jesse Waters, are reportedly subscribers.
“It’s possible that the Leader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past,” the Post speculated.
That’s more than a good guess.
Fewer and smaller newspapers translate into fewer reporters chasing the news. The number of journalists across all platforms has declined by 60% over the past two decades, forcing editors to make tough decisions about where they put their diminishing resources. What used to be a staple of newsrooms, such as investigative reporting and local government coverage, becomes a luxury.
That means that people in public office not only can get away more easily with lying, they also can get away more easily with stealing, cheating and other sorts of misdeeds.
I’m not the type to hold out a tin can, but if something is not done to save local news, communities are going to suffer and government corruption will become more common.
The news industry is hoping that Congress will come to the rescue by passing laws that make it easier for newspapers to force Google, Facebook and other tech giants to pay for the content on which they profit or by subsidizing newsroom payrolls and subscriptions through tax breaks.
I hope one or both of those things happen. I also hope more people in our community understand the value of what we do. As the last daily in the Delta, and one of only eight in the state, we’re swimming against the tide. There’s only so long you can do that before you give out.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
