Thoughts on our 30th Anniversary
Irony abounds. A
week before preparing this first of several anniversary editions that
you presently hold in your hand, the buzz was out – Mid-Michigan’s three
largest daily publications were cutting their frequency down to three
times per week.
Whether the dailies are victims of the mass economic meltdown that
affect commercial sectors worldwide, or similar to the Big Three in the
sense they appeared ‘too big to fail’, or displaced by the advent of
online news delivery, predicated upon theories asserting that ‘print is
dead’ - has been discussed by pundits across the spectrum from the top
of national news desks to the dusty corridors of local cable rooms.
As
usual, there is truth and nonsense embedded in each of these arguments.
But
for the purposes of this discourse and special Celebratory Anniversary
Edition, the following email is representative in terms of chorus of
those received:
Mr. Martin;
What’s your take
on the Saginaw News going downhill? Is the Review Mag going to follow
suit? Is print media dead? You need to do a story in your paper about
this.
Paul/Saginaw
Obviously, while one side of my attention wishes to be popping the cork
and celebrating 30 years of publishing history, as is often the case in
life – larger phenomena affecting the fundamentals of my industry
necessitate immediate attention.
When
the first issue of The Bay Area Review (we shortened it to
‘Review in the mid-80s) rolled off the press the vision – to a large
degree – was centered around providing coverage and focusing on topical
arenas not covered or addressed by the dailies. What this boiled down to
in one word was ‘depth’ – regardless of whether the subject was an
interview, an investigative piece, or assembling a massive events
calendar (which believe it or not, none of the dailies provided back in
1979).
Over
the years, as the tone and veracity of our publication took root, the
dailies would often try to assimilate or ‘imitate’ many of our features
– but regardless of your preferred media for receiving the news; one
truth holds true: there are innovators and there are imitators.
People
will support a product that is unique, which is something this 30th
Anniversary edition attests to.
And
with the explosion of online news delivery & blogging of all variety
(and often dubious reliability) the opportunity for carving a unique
niche for one’s voice has multiplied as quickly as the odds have
diminished for that voice actually being heard when it gets ‘lost in the
crowd’, online, so to speak.
The
truth is that national news – the AP variety – is available at your
fingertips from a multiplicity of sources; but quality state, regional,
and local reporting of any depth and substance is hard to find because
research & investigation is time-consuming and costly.
And
the bottom line is that if people want in-depth reporting – as
with anything of value in life – it will come with a price. I predict
all the major dailies will soon be shifting their subscription costs
online and the era of ‘free online news delivery’ will quickly come to
an end, unless online advertising revenue can cover the gap, which again
with so much competition for attention, is a tricky course to navigate.
As for
the future of The Review, we also will continue and expand our
energies into the many opportunities afforded by the Internet and Online
News delivery. We have already re-designed our site and have many new
interactive features, an expansive and cohesive events calendar, and
many surprises in store for the months ahead.
Will
we abandon print? Not in a million years.
In
reality, studies show that locally, print is still the most
viable and effective medium for spending advertising dollars. In the
case of The Review, we have 40,000 print readers each month with
less than a one percent return rate. Added to our 500 unique page views
online per day, that represents concentrated coverage throughout 4 major
counties. Indeed, a majority of our advertisers are on long-term
contracts precisely because they find us to be such an effective
marketing forum; and in reality, there is far less market fragmentation
than one encounters when dealing with broadcast.
As for
online marketing, the dirty little secret lurking there is the amount of
‘click-fraud’ that goes on, given there is an estimated billion
dollars a year that is paid out on internet advertising that is
generated by ‘click-bot’ programs, which invade computers and click on
banner ads to generate false data.
The
biggest ‘threat’ to print centers, in my estimation, upon not correcting
the myths and falsehoods being circulated about it.
As for
the situation with The Saginaw News and other dailies, I’ve asked
former award-winning Saginaw News reporter Mike Thompson
to weigh in on that topic with his own thoughts.
The
Demise of the Daily Print Newspaper
By Mike Thompson
This
is sort of a Catch-22. The shift to a 3-day-per-week print edition at
The Saginaw News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal and elsewhere is
supposed to partly reflect a big drop in readership. But then why, if
there is this decline in reader interest, does everyone keep asking me
about the 3-day-per-week switchover?
And
why, given my previous career at The Saginaw News, cannot I come
up with a clear and spot-on answer? I’m sort of confused. It’s like some
people are saying, “We aren’t always interested in the daily print
paper, but we still want one.”
The
most common explanation for the decline of print newspapers is that the
main problem isn’t a lack of readers, but rather a decline in
advertisers, in the midst of a horrible current economy and the ascent
of the online era.
There
is no real quarreling with this outlook, but it seems there is more to
it.
One
outlook is that as people have learned how to go online through the
years, especially young people and advertising managers, they perceive
in isolation that everyone else is online, too.
However, the Pew Research Center reported early this year that
55 percent of 70-year-olds are NOT online, and that 38
percent of 60-year-olds are NOT online, and that even a full
17 percent of 40-year-olds are NOT online.
Imagine how these folks feel when they are told, either by a newspaper
or during local TV news, to “simply go online” for further information.
Recently there was a Channel 12 news report about a local
nonprofit group, and the anchor closed by telling viewers to “simply go
online” for the phone number, rather than just giving viewers the danged
phone number.
Also
imagine how someone feels if they indeed do know how to go online, but
can no longer afford Internet fees because they lost their job in the
bad economy!
Maybe
everyone supposedly goes online in an upscale university center such as
Ann Arbor, where they are shutting down the entire print paper. But even
in Ann Arbor, I don’t see it - and in places such as Saginaw and Bay
City, definitely not. I know a whole lot of people who don’t go online,
and my 53-year-old self still isn’t very good at it.
Regardless, print newspapers have no control over this perceived rush to
the Internet, even though the rush may be less than portrayed. This is
what most advertisers perceive, and so perception becomes reality.
Another Catch-22.
All I
can say to advertisers is that a print spot in The Saginaw News
or The Bay City Times (and definitely yes, in Review Magazine)
still can be a quite a better deal than they might imagine, in spite of
all the proclamations that newspapers and magazines are dead.
Lack of
Interest in Local News
Even
back during my start in the 1970s and 1980s, it seemed that newspapers
were destined to fall on hard times. The thought back then was that
television gradually would take over, which now the Internet is also
affecting.
My
intuition back then wasn’t entirely related to technology. My
observation was that people were taking less interest in their local
civic affairs, and thus less interest in their local newspapers. There
was sort of a last surge of interest in Saginaw during the early and
middle 1980s, when the City Council and the school board became more
fully integrated for the first time, but this soon died out. Even in Bay
City, which has more than its share of one-of-a-kind local stories, the
same was happening.
Saginaw’s voter turnout in local-only elections (those in the
odd-numbered years) was around 33 percent after World War II and all the
way into the 1980s. That was far from good, but for the past two
decades, turnout has dropped farther, to an abysmal 20 percent.
Attention readers: Can you even name the people who sit on your local
city or township governing board, or on your school board?
This
trend gained my personal attention in 1982, when I switched from sports
writing to local news. Friends and acquaintances started asking if I had
quit working for the paper; they no longer were seeing my byline because
I now was on those apparently obscure “metro” pages. This went on not
just for months, but for years.
The
Saginaw News started the daily Ballot Box during the 1980s.
Sometimes the Ballot Box question would go with one of my articles about
the City Council or the Board of Education, or maybe the United Way fund
drive or the next step in welfare reform. The next day, there would be
only about a dozen call-ins.
Talk
about being made to feel humble!
I was
a team member, sometimes captain, for a good number of weeklong special
projects, on topics ranging from housing blight to race relations. Few
gained genuine attention.
One
huge exception came in August 2004, with the City Council’s mysterious
5-4 midnight vote to fire Deborah Kimble as city manager. This
evolved into a special project of its own, with all of the emerging
twists and turns. People suddenly came out of the woodwork, not just in
the Ballot Box but also in pedestrian “water cooler” chitchat. This
really was puzzling to me. What was so different about this story,
compared to the others? Did this mean that I had been pressing the wrong
buttons in all of my other reports; both in the stories I selected and
in the way they were written?
Maybe,
just maybe, the Deborah Kimble scenario indicates that there remains an
appetite for local news (and therefore local newspapers). Consider Bay
City just this past few months, where a 93-year-old man froze to death
in his home, and then a 15-year-old boy died after he absorbed a Taser
from the police.
These
two stories would certainly seem to make someone want to grab a
newspaper, Bay Cityan or otherwise.
On the
other hand, must local happenings be “off the charts” nowadays before
people pay attention?
Will
Three Days Devolve to Zero Days?
With
the switch to 3-days-per-week for local print newspapers a pair of other
questions arise.
First,
does this simply portend zero-days-per-week, such as in Ann Arbor? My
tentative answer would be, not in the near future. Those Sunday
newspaper ad inserts don’t bring in as much revenue as you might think,
but they still exist and they can’t really be transformed onto the
Internet and achieve near the market penetration.
The
second question is, did this have to happen? Did newspaper managers fall
upon their own swords, or are we looking at factors beyond their
control?
At
The Saginaw News, or in any newsroom or in virtually any workplace,
the rank-and-file will imagine that they could have done a better job of
managing. Myself, and some of my reporting peers, felt that hard news
was giving way to soft news, or fluff. Might this be true? Well,
consider that nearly half of the adults in this region didn’t even vote
in the presidential election last November. Maybe fluff sells better
than hard news. Or, maybe there are a lot of folks who don’t really care
a whole lot about hard news OR soft news; just the funnies or the
television booklet. (Or if you judge by TV, cops and weather, fires and
weather, car crashes and weather, court arraignments and weather, sports
and weather, weather and weather...)
Go to
your main library, where The Bay City Times and The Saginaw
News are captured on microfilm in month-by-month boxes. Pick a spool
from the 1950s or 1960s. First, it’s a lot of fun. But while you’re at
it, check out all of the advertisements for the local retailers. A
Thursday paper then contained as many as 64 pages, bigger than today’s
Sunday paper. Many of those enterprises have vanished. So has the ad
revenue.
Would
Art Dore buy The Bay City Times if it were for sale, or
would Dr. Sam Shaheen buy The Saginaw News?
The
arrival of this combined online and short-attention span era should not
mean that every report needs to be squeezed into 12 paragraphs or fewer.
A good number of people still desire in-depth reporting that they won’t
find on radio or television.
My
theory always has been that some readers just want short articles, but
that once a story becomes medium length, the reporter might as well go
whole hog with all of the details. If someone will read 20 paragraphs, I
figure they’ll read 30 or even 50, if the added information is pertinent
and organized. The most frustrating articles can be those medium
articles that sort of seem to go in-depth, but then don’t really take
you there.
A
third suggestion is that newspapers should become far more open, or in
today’s lingo “transparent,” regarding their finances. Readers are
constantly told that newspapers are facing tougher times, but there are
scant few statistics.
How
much profit was the newspaper earning in the old days? Has the newspaper
actually been losing money lately, or is it just a case of smaller
profits than in the past? How much money will the newspaper save by
withholding print editions on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and
Saturdays?
Newspapers still serve as watchdogs on local government and schools,
although maybe not as intensely as in the past. Reporters will ask how
much money is in the total budget, how much money goes to various
departments, how much money the top executives are earning, and what
types of contracts the labor unions are receiving. This is all based on
the public’s right to know, bolstered by the Freedom Of Information Act.
Yet if
a reader asked these questions of their local newspaper, the response
would be in so many words, “No comment. We’re not the government, we’re
a private business, people don’t pay taxes to us.”
Maybe
so, but citizens depend on their newspapers and they don’t have much
choice. Citizens actually have more control over their local government
than over their local newspaper.
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