The Inside Scoop – Your Newspaper Isn’t What It Used To Be

Philip M. Stone January 26, 2011 Follow on Twitter

For the past couple of years as newspapers cut back drastically on their staffing so revenue and costs could somehow survive together, there was usually a disingenuous note from publishers or editors that basically told their readers, “Not to worry, you’ll still get the same quality paper you had before.” Well, the Washington Post ombudsman in his final column has put an end to that lie.

Andrew Alexander wrote that perhaps the most dominant complaint he received during his two years as Washington Post ombudsman was that the newspaper’s journalistic quality had declined. “It’s a view I share,” he boldly stated.

After telling readers that even so, the Post on its worst days was better than most newspapers on their good days, he then got down to the nitty-gritty, “It has become riddled with typos, grammatical mistakes and intolerable ‘small’ factual errors that erode credibility. Local news coverage, once robust, has withered. The Post often trails the competition on stories ... Much of this is a result of upheaval, disruption and necessary cost-cutting. Over the past few years, once-separate print and online staffs have been combined. The traditional newsroom structure was blown up and reconfigured. New editors are in charge. Scores of staffers have been reassigned.

“And staggering financial losses have required unrelenting expense reductions to restore profitability. The loss of newsroom talent, through forced buyouts and voluntary departures, has been breathtaking. Some of the most respected Post journalists have left, along with institutional knowledge and leadership so desperately needed during a period of radical change.”

And he reminded us the real question today is not whether the Post and newspapers in general will survive, but rather, “At what level of quality?” The answer to a large extent is up to those left in the newsroom, but certainly what used to be is not now and all that most of us who are still left reading print can do is shrug our shoulders and be grateful that at least there still is a print product. But, onerously, more and more readers are doing more than just shrugging their shoulders – they are canceling subscriptions.

Marcus Brauchli, The Post’s executive editor, addressed some of his ombudsman’s issues in an online chat with readers on The Post’s web site. “The ombudsman is right that there have been too many careless errors lately--typos, grammatical errors, silly factual mistakes. I don't want to make excuses, because we shouldn't tolerate these sorts of errors. But by way of explanation I will say that we have made a number of changes in our processes in the last couple of years and are putting in a new editing system that will further change workflows for editors. We try to be diligent about publishing corrections, and the data are interesting: we published 1,054 corrections in 2010, up from 1,040 a year earlier and 961 in 2008, but down from a recent high of 1,319 in 2005. We have room to improve.”

Of course, he doesn’t really address there how the loss of staff has affected the number and type of stories now appearing, compared to what used to be before the loss of so many well-respected staff.

In that vein it was really sad to read this week a long New York Times blast of the Los Angeles Times.  Its fourth paragraph, quoting a L.A. Times long-time reader basically summed up everything that followed, “We need a paper that’s more, and this is less. I think it’s just not a world-class newspaper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world class paper.”

It’s true. This writer 50 years ago grew up some 50 miles east of Los Angeles, but it was The Times that everyone in that town read in the morning. Circulation then was well over 1 million and it near took two people to carry in the Sunday paper, and say what you might about the Chandler family they put out a quality editorial product. Today, under Tribune ownership, circulation is around 600,000, the newspaper is part of the Tribune bankruptcy, and questions are being asked about its future once it comes out of that bankruptcy, perhaps in March.  Another biting comment in the NYT article from a LA Times reader, “When I came here back in ’74 it would take me all day to read the paper. Now it takes me 10 minutes – tops.”

Not only has its circulation dropped by more than 50% since 2000, but so has its newsroom staffing, too. Breaking news no longer appears on its front page because deadlines for that page have been moved up so much – the breaking news, if it can be called that, is elsewhere in the paper.

What is true of the L.A. Times, and The Washington Post and so many others is that with perhaps isolated instances, things are not going to get much better in newsrooms any time soon.  Chain newspapers are still desperate to increase cash flow to meet loan payments even though the immediate heat is off in many cases as many of those loans have been renegotiated for longer term, but at higher interest rates. There’s not going to be much additional investment in editorial as long as that elephant remains in the room.

And while hopes are pegged on digital replacing the revenues that print is losing it’s really a slow, long slog. In most case print is still about 80% of a newspaper’s revenue so as goes print goes the business. And there really is nothing out there to say that newspaper advertising is going to pick up very much even if the worst of the global recession is gone – yes, advertising in general is improving, but it doesn’t seem to be going to print newspapers. They within just 20 years have gone from being virtual licenses to print money with margins often exceeding 30% to struggling to make single digit percentage profits, and that only by the savage cost cuts.

What seems to have happened is that publishers and editors have failed to pull the wool over the eyes of their readers; many readers really do recognize the product they have today is not the product they once had, and that, not because of digital, is why they have and are canceling subscriptions at alarming rates.

For newspapers to truly survive they need more economic investment and that means, among other things, changing the 80-20 advertising/subscription revenue ratio closer to 50-50. But that carries with it that if people are willing to put their hands deeper into their pockets to pay for a better quality product then those publishers had better put that subscriber money where it was intended and not to pay executive bonuses.