Morning Read: Post-Star parent company struggling
One of the region’s most important daily newspapers, the Glens Falls Post Star, is owned by Lee Enterprises, a national company that operates hundreds of dailies and weeklies around the country.
Lee Enterprises is scrambling to avert a major financial crisis.
This month, the company sold roughly $1 billion dollars worth of junk-status bonds, according to the Wall Street Journal, in order to push back a tide of red ink.
Lee, weighed down by about $1 billion of debt, has long been high on the list of potential bankruptcies. But thanks to the roaring market for debt of risky companies, Lee is preparing to sell junk bonds that would enable it to pay off its obligations and give it a new shot at survival.
A regional blogger, MOFYC, is running a guest-essay this week looking at Lee’s travails, possible impacts on the Post-Star, and the struggles of traditional newspapers in general.
In the broadest possible terms what the Post-Star figures illustrate is a general decline in print circulation on the order of 23% since about the time Lee’s stock price started sliding.
Post-Star managing editor Ken Tingley, meanwhile, has described his paper’s future in hopeful terms, citing a rapid shift to on-line audiences and on-line revenue.
These days, poststar.com is flourishing and growing at explosive rates. In March, we had more page views and unique visitors than ever before.
The unique visitors were close to a half-million for the month, page views were well over 5 million.
Friday morning, when I was reading our report on the Warren County tourism committee’s meeting, I saw that their Web visits had improved to 480,000 for the year or what we now do in one month.
But it remains unclear how traditional journalism will work in the future. Who will pay for it? How? What will be lost if institutions such as the Post-Star can’t field big, professional teams of reporters and editors?
My view on this is pretty black-and-white. I think newspapers are one of the pillars of modern democracy, and I don’t think anyone knows what civic life will look like without them.
Bloggers and civic journalists can fill a lot of gaps, and help to open the dialogue to more voices and more points of view. (Public radio helps too…)
But newspapers are still the bread-and-butter and the shoe leather that keep our communities informed.
As always, your comments welcome.
Tags: economy, journalism
While I love the Internet, it is a bit of a black hole.
I don’t believe news papers can survive if they expect to depend on their Web pages, especially if those Web pages are free.
I have always wondered about the actual value of ads, be they in print, online, radio or TV. Unless I am actually looking to purchase something, I never even glance at the ads. Mostly, I judge and rate ads by their entertainment value. Some on TV are better than the shows. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy something just because I like the ad.
On the other hand, I do sometimes swear I won’t buy a product because I really hate the ad.
As to the Post Star, if it weren’t for the comics, I probably wouldn’t bother with the paper since it really doesn’t cover any news in Hamilton County and because I get most of my news from NCPR, Yahoo and TV.
Re: “What will be lost if institutions such as the Post Star can’t field big, professional teams of reporters and editors?” While regional dailies (especially those owned by debt-laden parent companies) may be faltering, local weekly and community newspapers are thriving. I am confident that those newspapers would fill the vacuum nicely, serving the area as well as, if not better than, the departed dailies.
Don’t forget, that local blogger is also an In Box commenter. =)
I don’t happen to think that daily newspapers are an irreplacable pillar of modern democracy. I think a free press is. The idea that any medium has an inalienable birthright to be the most influential part of that free press is precisely what caused the complacency and inflexibility that facilitated the problems the print media is having now.
I actually am a big fan of print newspapers. I make a point of buying one whenever I travel outside the area, as it gives interesting insight about what’s important elsewhere. But I notice they all run the same stale AP briefs, the same cartoons, the same nationally syndicated columnists (all stuff you can get for free online anyway). It’s like entering a strip mall in generic suburbia; 10% of the stuff will be distinctive to wherever you are but 90% will be the same as anywhere else.
I happen to agree that at this point, the new media complements the traditional media but is not yet ready to replace it. That may well happen down the road; the unreliability of the Internet alluded to by Pete Klein is no different than in other media. Both the Washington Post and New York Post are daily newspapers. Both the BBC World and Fox News (sic) are cable channels. People have learned over time to discern between what is good and what is crap in other media and will do so with Internet sources as well.
But merely that saying you’re important doesn’t get you more (paying) eyeballs. Sniffing that “you’ll miss us when we’re gone” will be cold comfort when that happens.
If newspapers drop the ‘mile wide, inch deep’ model they’ve followed for the last 100 years and replace it with a model much more focused on giving people what they can’t get anywhere else (good local reporting), then I think newspapers can recover. But if they keep trying to compete with the Internet for immediacy, with TV for pizzazz and with both for shallow infotainment, then they will inevitably lose and it will be their own fault.
Just to make a parallel… I live much closer to Albany than to Canton but am in the signal range of both NPR affiliates.
Both NCPR and WAMC air the same NPR programs (ATC, Fresh Air, Morning Edition). But NCPR’s news tends to run fewer local stories but in great depth and nuance. WAMC follows the “mile wide, inch deep” model I refer to above. I always make a point of listening to the 8 O’Clock Hour, even if it means waking up early, listening and going back to sleep (if I went to bed late). I often listen to WAMC news but I don’t feel truly compelled to do so. One follows the old newspaper model of trying to do a ton of things mediocrely; the other does what should be the new newspaper model but doing a smaller number of targeted things really well.
Guess which NPR station I feel more connected to? Guess which one I’m more inclined to voluntarily give money to?
To Tony’s point, the best journalism I’ve seen in any regional paper (by some distance) is in the free monthly Hill Country Observer. THAT is what local journalism should be. Not only nuanced and in-depth but tackling inconvenient but fundamental questions that the elite may not want discussed.
Sorry, I’m not trying to filibuster but there’s one thing I don’t understand.
Brian M, you’ve repeatedly expressed concern for an America without newspapers. Ok, fine. But like I’ve said, saying “they’re important” and “you’ll miss them when they’re gone” is not a strategy, is not a road map forward. While it may be true, it comes across as pouty and self-important.
It seems like what you’re saying is that citizens should buy newspapers out of the goodness of their heart, out of some long-view notion of civic responsibility (to prevent their bankruptcy), regardless of whether their own individual newspaper is good or crappy.
It’s like you’re saying that it’s readers who should adapt, not newspapers. That’s a stubborn and frankly awful approach if you really do want newspapers to survive. It smacks of entitlement.
To paraphrase Tony Blair, you seem to be saying newspapers should insist on “no compromise with their consumers!” I’m pretty confident in saying that approach will be a miserable failure.
Here’s a worthwhile read from Editor & Publisher on a revanchist strategy for the print media: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Columns/editorial-free-press-doesnt-mean-free-content-64646-.aspx
I agree that the Hill Country Observer is probably the best paper around. The Lake George Mirror is also an excellent paper. But the HCO is monthly and the LGM is weekly during the tourist season and monthly in the winter.
The Post Star used to cover a portion of the Adirodacks beyond Warren County– Indian Lake, Long Lake, Schroon– with some regularity the real money was further south in Saratoga County. So except for bashing the APA there is little Adirondack area news in the PS. Still, without a daily paper it will be difficult to keep up with the DWI arrests and the child pornography busts.
Besides, I still need to make a fire in the morning. I hope they find a way to succeed.
kuckle,
You’re being a little cruel but I agree with your points.
I can only say I wish the Post Star luck.
Sorry, Pete. Mostly tongue in cheek. I always try to buy local papers wherever I travel and I think the Post Star stacks up pretty well for a paper its size. I subscribe to the Post Star and I believe it would be a great loss to the community if they folded–so to speak.
Hey KHL,
You’ve left out a couple of things. You can use newspapers to kill flies, too. And to wrap fish, and gifts. They are good for spreading under pumpkins when carving them. They are excellent as a floor-protector when kids are engaging in art. They are de rigeur for papier mache. Bums seem to like them as blankets. They are excellent for hiding behind in hotel lobbies when you’re a gumshoe staking out a shady dame. You can fashion a floppy paper airplane with one.
Actually, Will, I think I have used the paper for almost all of those suggestions. Many times while doing remodeling work I have found papers used as insulation. It’s fun to read them.
All the sarcasm aside, starting a fire is very important to me and it is a good way for me to re-use a resource that is delivered to my doorstep–and let me say my delivery person does a great job. Once I recycled all my old papers and had to go to the store and take a stack of the local weekly just for starting fires. That was wasteful.
Of course I ALWAYS clip the Will Doolittle columns to paste in my scrap-book before any re-use.
Here’s a helpful tip for all you newspaper people from the Whitehall Times (yes, I actually subscribe to the Whitehall Times, one of about 7 or 8 local daily, weekly, monthlies I try to keep up with)–recycle news.
Seriously. The Times runs the column “Broadway & Canal” which is a reprint of a column from 25-35 years ago which re-ran stories from their files 50 years before. It’s actually pretty interesting, and a great way to save money. Imagine in 25 years they’ll re-run the re-run of the re-run. It boggle the mind!
The numbers are hard to pin down, but the percentage of people who say they read a newspaper yesterday is now about 35-45 percent according to most studies (that includes online), and it’s dropping like a rock. The number of people who have a profile on a social media is skyrocketing. It’s already at about 48-52 percent.
That should be proof enough that daily newspapers are not a pillar of society – unless Social Media is too.
I predict most local dailies will end up weeklies, and they’ll be forced to do what they should have been doing all along – cover local news seriously and with a variety of local perspectives.
We will come to thank new media for making that happen. Just like we should thank new media for forcing newspapers and other media outlets to provide opportunities for us to comment on their stories.
Good conversation here, folks.
One thing I think gets muddled, however, is the issue of how the internet affects the business model of daily newspapers (disastrously) and the very different issue of how the internet affects the journalism model of daily newspapers (mostly positively).
A lot of people who dislike the institutional approach of daily print journalists like the fact that the new media have broken open the field to all kinds of voices and experiments.
And yes, this revolution in media has forced print journalists to try new things, to get better, to accept a more experimental approach, to listen more closely to their readers and critics.
That’s all to the good.
But so far, there’s little or no evidence that what news consumers are waiting to pay for is “better” newspapers.
If that were true, the New York Times would be doing a lot better, because it is a GREAT newspaper.
Similarly, if it was quality people wanted, a lot more people would be showing a willingness to pay for cool on-line media experiments. But they’re not.
(I would love to see an essay on his website from John about how he sees Adirondack Almanack moving forward as a sustainable business.)
Tony and others have praised the future of weekly newspapers. And maybe that will be the ultimate fall-back position for print journalists.
But I continue to believe that having a paper-of-record in communities is a valuable thing.
We need someone who goes to all (or most) of the meetings; someone who tries to be a central place for conversation and ideas, and not a specialty journal; and someone who has the institutional strength to occasionally dig deep and take on big fights.
Without disrespecting the alternatives that are developing out there, I still don’t think they are anywhere close to filling this role, or even substantial parts of this role.
On the contrary, I see some of the biggest on-line experiments already falling into shabby disrepair.
Huffingtonpost? It’s basically a stars-and-gossip tabloid with a little progressivism thrown on top.
Politico? It’s mostly devolved into a venue for conservative Washington to snark and snipe, with very little investigative or insight reporting.
DailyBeast (which recently absorbed Newsweek)? It runs headlines like “Mad Maine Governor Strikes Again” and “Horoscopes: Your Week Ahead”.
Slate? Their lead story right now is a goofy bit about who pop icons should apologize to if they’ve insulted Jews or blacks or women or Arab Americans.
I don’t point to these examples to be mean-spirited. I point to them to illustrate the fact that I’m not sure the new media revolution is getting us where we need to go.
If these are models for where on-line journalism is going, give me the Washington Post and New York Times (and the Post Star) any day.
–Brian, NCPR
As a partial instigator (with thanks to Brian F for the soapbox) I would like to add two thoughts to this discussion (a parallel and equally thoughtful discussion is going on over at http://mofyc.blogspot.com/2011/04/lees-last-stand-guest-essay.html).
Arguably the most successful model of online journalism in the North Country is NCPR.org. I don’t know how the numbers stack up against PostStar.org’s, but as a full-time news consumer, I can only speak from personal experience that I spend considerably more time reading actual news here than there. (Plus they have a really good occasional cartoonist!) The fact that NCPR.org is an arm of a largely member-supported medium doesn’t change the liklihood that if it wasn’t enhancing the overall operation, it would not be growing as it has (good going on the recent membership drive, by the way). And, of course, it offers the full menu of news: local, regional, state, national, world. . .
Really, comparing Post-Star.com to the upstart bloggers doesn’t make much sense. The Post-Star’s real competition is right here (and to a lesser degree down at WAMC).
Brian’s failure to add NCPR to the comparison (way too modest) brings me to my second point. We are talking media here, and the media are not the message. The unit of written-word news consumption is the news story and the feature, not the newsprint and ink. The media are in major flux right now. Good reporters and editors and proofreader,etc. will ultimately follow the market (as determined by the advertisers and the readers/listeners/viewers).
For what it’s worth, I think the Post-Star has a number of excellent reporters and columnists, but I find some of the paper’s editorial choices to be ham-handed. I have even known the paper’s distinct editorial voice to stray too close to the line of it’s reporting mission on occasion. Enough so that in the back of my mind I frequently wonder if I am being spun one way or another. I experience far far fewer nagging doubts when reading reports here.
Here’s a thought inspired by Brian Mann saying the NY Times is a great paper.
Newspapers need to be careful to not think too highly of themselves. The NYT, in my opinion, thinks way too highly of itself. The Post Star sometimes falls into the same trap, most obviously with its editorials.
Newspapers should not be acting as though they are the Pope speaking ex cathedra.
As to internet social media, it is mostly junk. It can never replace newspapers and reporters with a byline. To the extent people limit themselves to what they can get online or on TV, they limit their understanding of what is taking place locally, statewide and nationally.
I would suggest news magazines should be part of the mix if you want to stay up to date.
The Internet can be good if it is part of the mix and doesn’t replace traditional sources for news.
The more, the merrier.
Finally and most importantly, read, listen and watch what you don’t like and disagree with. Never, never just limit yourself to those you agree with.
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