Morning Read: GF Post-Star parent company files Chapter 11
One of the North Country’s most important regional newspapers, the Glens Falls Post Star, announced on Friday that its parent company “will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as part of an effort to secure comprehensive refinancing of its debt.”
Lee Enterprises, based in Iowa, has struggled to manage hundreds of millions of dollars in borrowing. This from the Post-Star:
Post-Star Publisher Rick Emanuel said the debt deal will allow the newspaper to continue to serve its readers, vendors and employees as the company repositions itself for the future.
“The completion of this refinancing agreement will allow us to really move forward with our business,” Emanuel said. “We continue to be the largest provider of local news in the counties we serve, and this will not hinder that effort in the least.”
Tags: adirondacks, economy, media
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I do wish the Post Star the best of luck.
The Post Star is a good paper, operating in a competitive news and ad environment. It would be a shame for the people to lose it.
The Post-Star’s quality has declined significantly in the last 15 years but it’d still be a shame to lose it. I’ve said a million times I’d rather they waste less on simplistic wire service crap and re-allocate those resources to improving local journalism, which is the only thing that would make the PS worth paying $1 for. If newspapers want to get people to pay money, they have to offer them something they can’t get a million other places for free. This is why people CHOOSE to give their money to an organization like NCPR even though they don’t have to. They recognize quality and are willing to pay for it.
I second this: “If newspapers want to get people to pay money, they have to offer them something they can’t get a million other places for free. This is why people CHOOSE to give their money to an organization like NCPR even though they don’t have to. They recognize quality and are willing to pay for it.”
Just wish The Mann, much as I love him, would stop with the national horse race stuff without any local angle, something you can get a million other places. Waste of time, his and ours. (My token protest: Not commenting on those threads, no matter how tempting it is to refute some of the false info that flies around on them.)
Brian,
I believe NCPR, like other NPR affiliates, and like The Post-Star, includes a mix of national and local reporting, and I think NCPR pays for those national shows, like All Things Considered, doesn’t it? I’m not sure how the NPR model works. But I am sure it’s a different model, in terms of payment, from newspapers. NCPR is a nonprofit operation, newspapers are for-profit businesses. You can argue relative merits of each but I think their nonprofit status is a big reason people are willing (they CHOOSE, as you say) to donate money during the fund drives. Of course, people choose to give their money to The Post-Star and other newspapers, too, in payment for subscriptions, single copies and for advertising.
I must side with Will here. Donate, pay? One could say one pays when they donate and they donate when they pay. Ads? Please explain to me the difference between an advertiser and a corporate sponsor.
A rose by any other name is still a rose.
Just an addendum… Mr. Wilson’s latest entry can be found at the link above. A link to all the articles in the series can be found here: http://mofyc.blogspot.com/search/label/Albany%2FGlens%20Falls%20media%20series
Will, my point remains. The media landscape has evolved such that the sort of national and international wire stories you read in the Post-Star and other smaller local papers are available in million other places for free (often better, since the wire articles are cut for space purposes and are usually not that great to begin with). Honestly, if I see a national/global story in the PS (which I usually don’t bother reading through anyways, since I have other, better sources of non-local news) that piques my interest, I always go somewhere else to read more anyway. The only real value worth paying for in the PS is that which it does that no one else does: local journalism.
The old model of giving a mile wide/inch deep, of giving a little of everything but not much of anything is no longer working, hence newspapers rapidly declining circulation (and the network news declining ratings). Much of what they give us is no longer unique, no longer must see TV/must read paper like it once was. Smaller papers would be better off putting most of their resources into local journalism, since that’s the real added value in the product… the only thing in there you can’t get anywhere else. If their goal is to get people to keep paying for news, give them news worth paying for (ie: not available for free elsewhere).
I think Brian’s (MOFYC) comments are worthy additions to the conversation, but I also think that it’s just not a simple nut to crack.
Almost all of my extended family is in the journalism/newspaper/reporting game — and they’re really bright people and no one knows quite how to sort through the changing media landscape.
Would more in-depth, analytic reporting be welcome to some readers?
Sure. But I’m guessing that if the marketplace were hungry for that kind of thing, we’d see a lot more people doing it already.
NCPR has a pretty successful business model, but that’s largely because we do far, far less than the Post Star (and other newspapers).
Yes, we do some cool reporting.
But our budget — and our revenue — is a fraction of theirs.
We currently have between four and five thousand subscribers, in a broadcast region significantly larger than the GFPS’s coverage area.
As I’ve argued before, newspapers do something unique: they’re the ‘paper of record,’ the journalistic institution that tries to be everywhere all the time.
That’s an increasingly difficult model to sustain. But it’s a valuable role, and I guarantee you it’s one that public broadcasting can’t fill.
–Brian, NCPR
Thank you Brian M. And mostly I agree with you Brian MOFYC, but we do, already, put most of our resources into local reporting. All our reporters do local reporting, nothing else. Yes, we pay for the AP wire service and a few other national things, like Leonard Pitts and George Will and our comics and Dear Abby and so on. People like that stuff, believe me. If we cut Dear Abby, we would hear about it. But what we spend on national reporting and services is small in comparison to what we spend on local reporting. I don’t think the critique of “mile wide, inch deep” is accurate, not when we’re doing things like going to town board meetings in Fort Ann, covering the emergency service dispute in Thurman, doing writeups on the lives of local people who died (Epitaphs), and on and on. There is still a ton of local, useful information in every day’s edition of the paper. Our dilemma is, people are finding disparate places to find this information, instead of going to one central place (us), and young people are losing the paper-reading habit. As Brian M. says, neither The Post-Star nor any other local paper in the country has figured out how to keep making money and keep providing the same amount of information and entertainment we have done and transition from newsprint to the web.
Will: For clarification, the mile wide/inch deep was referring primarily to the wire stuff. I think you guys do a decent job of local journalism given the circumstaces but you’re hindered by the ever decreasing amount of staff and massive geographic area you have to cover.
Brian M: “But I’m guessing that if the marketplace were hungry for that kind of thing, we’d see a lot more people doing it already.” I’m not sure I agree. Someone has to be the first to try before others will be tempted to follow. Also bear in mind that like most institutions, newspapers are slow to change a model that’s served them well for so long. In terms of the print product, the newspaper is fundamentally the same as it’s been for 50+ years. What I’m suggesting is a fundamental change (by recognizing that they can’t compete with the Internet and TV for other things and should really just give up and focus on what they do best and what they offer that’s unique and MOST WORTH PAYING FOR). It’s not surprising that most still think they can get by with small tweaks (video clips, blogs, etc… all handy but still minor) here and there.
Of course people will complain if you get rid of Dear Abby or the comics. People will always complain about change. But the real question is how many paying customers will you get back? And how does that compare to the few you might lose because the jumble isn’t there anymore? Newspapers remain useful but they are in a death spiral and tweaks aren’t good enough if we want this important institution to be relevant in 10 years. I just don’t see the current model as sustainable. I’d really suggest someone seriously try my model before writing it off so casually.
The fundamental problem is that fewer and fewer people see the newspaper as worth paying for. (For the record, I still have a paid subscription to the PS)
Saying “You’ll miss them when you’re gone” (as B. Mann has done) may be true but it hasn’t worked. You have to understand WHY. The WHY is because there’s so much stuff in there that they can now get free elsewhere. Comics, sports standings, syndicated yapping heads… The local journalism is the one thing you CAN’T get elsewhere. That’s the stuff you want to hype as worth paying for.
One other important note: The business model of local newspapers isn’t actually all that bad.
In many cases, newspapers still make a tidy profit.
The problems are a) a lot of papers were bought up by chains that leveraged their acquisitions with crushing debt and b) newspapers used to have crazy good profit margins.
The biggest financial hit for many papers came not when subscriptions sagged, but when classifieds and other forms of utility-advertising began to shift on-line.
The truth is that a lot of newspapers subsidized great journalism for decades using an old-fashioned version of Craigslist.
Yes, subscriptions have gone down.
But the bigger problem in many cases is a toxic mixture of debt and lost ad revenue because of on-line alternatives.
(I don’t know about the GFPS’s situation, how big a factor these are. I also don’t know whether the P-S as a paper is profitable…)
–Brian, NCPR
As Brian M points out the problem with newspapers isn’t that the didn’t make a profit. Newspapers traditionally have had HUGE profit margins. That led to a wave of take-overs by groups whose main interest was in milking them for a buck. So groups like Lee Enterprises bought a bunch of papers that they really couldn’t afford but revenue funded the buyout. Then when revenue started to drop from 20-30% profit ranges to merely 10-20% groups like Lee had difficulty with their financing. Compound that with the staff cuts that they made when they bought the papers in the first place, and then the further cuts they made to keep from insolvency and the quality of the product started to decline — at least at the PS. And before Will Doolittle jumps all over me, when I say the quality has declined I mean that the paper delivers less news, not that the writing has suffered necessarily. The Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday editions are about half the size they used to be.
Lee has tried a few other tricks to increase profitability, like charging $1 at the newsstand but giving huge discounts to subscriptions. (They got me with that one even though I would much rather walk down to Stewarts in the morning and get my paper there.) Have they increased the circulation numbers with that bit and stabilized the ad revenue? Judging by the decrease in pages printed every week I would guess not.
It is too bad because the Post Star was always a great paper. Wouldn’t it be great if the employees could buy the Post Star back from Lee?
One more helpful piece of advice for the Post Star, get rid of the cut and paste Lee Enterprises website. Get someone like Dale Hobson to build a site that is easier to navigate.
Brian M,
You describe the dynamic at Lee succinctly. I would emphasize your point that Lee’s behavior over the past two decades or so was all too common. As Will Doolittle has pointed out in another forum, even the NYT went on a buying spree that it subsequently regretted. The difference with the Lee/Pulitzer deal was in the size of the pig relative to the python. That, and the timing of the deal (2005 was pretty well along into the internet’s erosion of car/classifieds/employment ad revenues). From the outside it certainly seems like the weakening of those income streams made the real estate advertising collapse after 2008 so much more debilitating.
As for the future of the Post-Star, I agree with those who see Glens Falls and the whole area as too dynamic to not have a daily paper of record. The way ahead for Lee may have been already paved by the Journal Register Co. (publisher of the Troy Record and Saratogian). After undergoing a public stock delisting and bankruptcy in 2009, the news publisher recently was sold as a privately-held company to its major lender, a global hedge fund.
One might see that as a vote of confidence from a sector of the economy that doesn’t like to lose money. The bad news is that the new class of banker-owners are precisely the folks you want your newspaper investigating these days. Personally I would hope that Lee finds some advantage in downsizing, and might find a smaller, more regionally-located buyer for the Post-Star property. In this changing media environment, adaptation might well favor the smaller operations.
In the several years I’ve been having this conversation the same newspaper defenders keeping making the same arguments. It doesn’t surprise me, but what does surprise me is that even as newspapers are crumbling around them, they stick to their guns. They’ll go down blazing, but go down nonetheless.
Newspapers will continue to fail until they recognize that there is a new media model that means a handful of old white men can no longer continue to act as the arbiters of our news and information. Newspapers leaders have continued to act as though they know better than the rest of us and have shoved their constant stream of corporate-fed opinions down our throats in the guise of news. We don’t have to take that anymore, so we go somewhere else for everything except local news. Bottom line is, the internet has democratized news and information, and the least democratized institution we have – local media – is not interested in losing its control of the story.
Will rightly says that the Post-Star’s has lots of local information. However, the Post-Star isn’t competing with people “finding disparate places to find this information” or “young people… losing the paper-reading habit” – those are convenient scapegoats, but they are not borne out by the facts. More people are reading and writing than ever before, albeit in different ways.
Some of Will’s local information is good, important stuff, most of it is nothing more than an opportunity to move forward the editors’ agendas whether it’s anti-education, anti-environment, anti-labor, anti-government, that scourge of people 18-21 who drink (heavens no!), or it’s simply sensationalism like astoundingly lame crime reporting, accidents, or dozens of other petty initiatives. Remember the scourge of sexting? The false war reporting? The failure to report how free trade was destroying our economy? How our neighbors are becoming more impoverished? How workers rights have been stripped? How millions of Americans have lost pensions and health benefits, all the while their wages remain stagnant at 1950s levels? These were all local stories that Post-Star failed miserably to report. Instead we got a constant stream about troubled youth, crime (even though it’s been falling for decades), the evils of government spending, all those rich people who were supposedly fleeing NYS. It was all nonsense. We no longer have to buy nonsense in the form of a newspaper.
Here’s one good recent example of how the Post-Star fails. The Occupy movement has brought on a wave of national and local discussion over the impact of corporate corruption of our political and economic systems. This story has dozens of local connections. Occupy Glens Falls created an astounding list of 10 biggest corporate tax cheats in the Glens Falls area – that is more reporting on local connections to this story than the Post-Star has ever done, or ever will.
When the Post-Star starts reporting news I want to read I’ll start paying for it again. I look forward to the day they become a weekly – they won’t have so much space and time on their hands to attack the people they are supposed to be serving.
There are three areas of news/media that do the worst when it comes to reporting anything of value.
They are the local TV news programs, entertainment news which isn’t really news and free newspapers.
The two best for in-depth reporting are the PBS News Hour and the PBS BBC report.
I should have added the TV national news programs which come after the local news.
To me, all reports about so called celebrities (especially anything about Michael Jackson) is not news nor worth the time of day. All the reality programs are phonier than a $3 bill because as soon as the camera starts rolling, reality ends.
People like crime reporting in general, and ours, specifically. Crime stories are almost always the most read on our website. Crimes are news — perhaps, along with natural disasters and accidents like fires and car crashes, the stories that are most widely acknowledged as “news.” People want to read about local crimes, car crashes, DWIs and fires, a whole lot more people than want to read about corporate tax cheats and workers rights. Those are important subjects, but no newspaper is in business to cover only “important” stories and ignore the stories that “sell papers.” Yes, we do want to sell papers, more than we are selling. The idea we could do that by writing about the “failure to report how free trade was destroying our economy” is just silly. It makes me suspect it was written by someone who has never actually worked for a newspaper. We do a lot of serious, in-depth reporting and, with few exceptions, the stories about puppy abuse draw far more interest.
Will, not put what you just said in news slang, “Blood leads.”
Will, thanks for clearing up what the mission of the Post-Star is. I always suspected all the folks who carry on about “professional journalism” being the savoir of our democracy were full of it. I know it’s really just about entertainment for the vast majority of small time newspapers, which is one reason they are falling so far behind other media. I guess that’s also why choosing a sports editor to lead the Post-Star seemed to make so much sense to your paper’s owners? Because entertainment comes first?
You ought to consider this if you think your model is the right one, and mine is “just silly”. Why has your paper shrunken considerably in column inches, been losing subscribers, and your parent company is declaring bankruptcy, while the Wall Street Journal, one of the most serious newspapers in the country which relies on a fairly focused financial coverage – a paper that does none of the things you declare a newspaper must do – has one of the best records of GROWTH in the country?
Maybe, just maybe, you have it all wrong. Maybe, readers don’t want to be treated like badly raised children sat in front of a TV?
And BTW, the heyday of American daily newspapers was a time when newspapers did exactly what I’m suggesting you do now.
The plan you are on is failing – do you have a different plan, other than blaming kids for not reading enough and the web for stealing your thunder?
Let’s hear it – how can our local newspaper avoid bankruptcy?
Well, for one it would be nice if people who use the product chip in a little bit to help pay for the work their neighbors do.
Thanks KHL. Yes, if there’s one thing that works worse than the current newspaper model, it’s the read-it-for-free on the web model. Newspapers, including the Wall St. Journal (although that is a bit more focused than most) have for many decades been a mix of things, a big hodge-podge, packing in tons of stuff, serious journalism plus comics and puzzles (which are great, I think, what do you have against comics and puzzles?) plus crime briefs. That formula hasn’t changed — it was the same back in what you call the heyday of papers, which were salad days for papers because they had a monopoly on much of the information they provided. They thrived because of that. Now the monopoly is gone and we’re limping along on the same formula. Plenty of papers were dull and poorly written 60 years ago, as plenty are now. And plenty of serious, excellent journalism is done at newspapers now, as it was 60 years ago. I’m the third generation of my family to make a career of newspaper journalism and I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager, as my father did. He started in the ’50s, working at big city papers and small papers, and he can tell you, the formula newspapers use didn’t change, and the quality of the journalism, good and bad, hasn’t changed. The market has changed.