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The first time my name ever appeared in print I was 11 years old. The county youth basketball team I played for had just won a state tournament in Roanoke, Va. -- four hours from home -- and it was covered in our town's newspaper the following day. I was even visible in the black-and-white picture accompanying the story, much to my 11-year-old delight.
In another six years, my name would again appear in print, this time on a byline. I scored a job as a "stringer" for a different local paper, assigned to cover local high school sports. I wrote about basketball, football, and swim meets and was paid $40 for each story. (These were early Internet days, when no one asked you to do it for free.)
End of an era
In November of this year, my hometown newspaper and its accompanying Web property announced plans to close, effective Dec. 30.
I found the news a bit surprising, because over the summer it was bought by a Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B ) subsidiary called World Media Enterprises. Berkshire Chairman/CEO Warren Buffett is among the few businessmen in America who continue to invest in newspapers. Berkshire already owned papers in Omaha and Buffalo, and with its acquisition of almost all of Media General's (NYSE: MEG ) newspapers, it added scores of localized papers to its roster.
Six months later, the Berkshire subsidiary is closing one -- and thus far, only one -- newspaper: The News & Messenger of Prince William County, Va.
Things past
The local papers of my youth provided the pre-digital way of egosurfing -- or as we know it now, Googling yourself. If you participated in a sporting event, parade, academic challenge, etc., the following morning you'd flip to the relevant section to see whether you were written about.
In the suburban Washington, D.C., town where I was raised, that usually meant a subscription to the Potomac News. There was also the Prince William Journal (which later hired me as a stringer, for which I am forever grateful), but back then, it had only recently become a daily and lacked the cachet of the Potomac News.
That paper had the mindshare of my community. We knew the writers' names and faces, and my friends and I would debate whether they had biases toward a particular high school's athletics program. (Hey, we were teenagers.)
When I went off to college, I had no reason to think that the Potomac News, which had been around since 1959, would lose its grip on the area. Then again, Google hadn't yet been invented... so it was hard to see the cliff coming.
The Internet disruption
Consolidation came first. In 2001, all of the Northern Virginia Journal newspapers -- Prince William, Arlington, Fairfax, and Alexandria -- were consolidated and called the Northern Virginia Journal. That paper was eventually given away for free at train stations, and then was acquired by Phil Anschutz, called the Washington Examiner, and made into a free daily and political foil to the Washington Post.
Smack in the middle of the financial crisis, the Manassas Journal Messenger merged with the Potomac News to form the News & Messenger, a sort of super-paper to cover the fast-growing Prince William County. There was perhaps reason to believe that the community could sustain its own paper:
|
Year |
Population |
|---|---|
|
1980 |
144,703 |
|
1990 |
215,686 |
|
2000 |
280,813 |
|
2010 |
402,002 |
Source: Census data.
It wasn't just that the population was growing. It also featured the kind of demography advertisers love: Prince William County is among the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States, according to recent census data.
Yet here's the bleak picture of newspaper circulation figures:
- 1997 -- Potomac News: 31,000
- 2008 -- Potomac News: 13,440
- 2008 -- Manassas Journal Messenger: 8,234
- November 2012 -- News & Messenger (combined entity): 8,000-10,000
It was bleeding to death. Or as was reported in The New York Times after the closure was announced: "The News & Messenger has lost money for a number of years ... [and management was] unable to come up with a scenario that would result in a likelihood of profitable operations there."
Bad business
The eventual undoing of the News & Messenger and papers like it wasn't necessarily that the Internet made information more widely accessible, or that locally focused blogs could cover many of the same topics as a small newsroom. What changed wasn't the journalism, it was the revenue model.
There was one disruptor -- the Web -- that took two main forms:
- Craigslist took away the need for consumers to list their for-sale items with the local paper.
- Google took away the need for businesses to buy advertising with the local paper.
Traditional newsrooms were long bankrolled by the classifieds and advertising departments, which could do a lot with a dominant presence in even small markets. No more. Why would a local business owner want to buy display advertising in newsprint when they can buy keywords with Google, which come with highly targeted leads and a measurable return on investment?
Are there viable sources to fill the void?
The night that news of News & Messenger's closing hit, I sought out its local competitors to gauge their offerings.
AOL is betting big on its Patch network of local one-stop-shop blogs, but in its current form, it's not the answer. I follow the local Patch via social media, and several hours after the announcement was made, the news of the closing -- which is significant in the county -- appeared... as a link to the News & Messenger's website, InsideNOVA.com. The very site being closed by World Media Enterprises.
Could blogs fill the void? I ventured to a blog competitor, PotomacLocal.com, and found a short piece on the news, but it incorrectly spelled "losing" as "loosing" (it was eventually fixed) and "based" as "baesed," as well as "its" as "it's" (they were not fixed).
While I'm optimistic that the PotomacLocals of the world can fill certain niches, they don't yet have the resources -- copyediting and otherwise -- to be a viable alternative, and as an ad-supported business, I'm not sure they ever will.
A model for the future
I believe a business based on local journalism can work, because I believe it can provide something of value for the consumer. But it will look different tomorrow than it did yesterday.
Here's my playbook for making local journalism viable:
- It will be digital-only. Being free of legacy costs, and legacy thinking, is critical.
- It will acquire or partner with the best local blogs, to act as a one-stop shop for news and commentary about a specific area.
- It will have a sustainable labor model -- let's call this the Huffington Post Rule -- that will feature trained professional editors and reporters paid full-time wages, as well as paid stringers and bloggers and possibly even unpaid contributors. It will feature robust coverage from many writers (who will have multiple backgrounds and skill sets), with a full-time editorial team playing both coach and quarterback.
- It will have digital subscription elements, in either a metered paywall form (e.g., consumers can read up to X many articles per month for free, and must pay for access beyond X) or pure subscription form (e.g., an add-on, business-to-business-like local business spotlight, along the lines of Washington Business Journal or the Post's Capital Business).
I'm on Team Paywall, but No. 4 on my list is highly dependent upon getting No. 3 right, because you can't charge for something that lacks breadth and depth. It's simply too easy to imitate and give away for free, even if those competitors are getting only paltry RPMs.
But assuming the newsroom and its collection of motley contributors is aligned to provide robust local coverage, a subscription model can work. (Here's support for my view from Gawker's Hamilton Nolan.) - It will have an adaptive business model that is constantly testing and learning. The paywall or digital subscription isn't a panacea. Viable journalism-based businesses will need a mixture of advertising and subscription revenues, and will need to constantly experiment with new revenue opportunities. For example: events and conferences, one-off sales of things like e-books (compiling existing coverage of, say, local elections or popular sports seasons), or brand licensing to local merchants (think Good Housekeeping).
It's sad to see the News & Messenger go. But my hope is that as legacy publications fade away, digital-era upstarts can fill the gaps they leave, providing a place for new generations of kids to look for their name after basketball tournaments.
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Report this Comment On December 14, 2012, at 6:10 PM, bjohn17600 wrote:
Thank you, Brian Richards, for a very perceptive and thoughtful review of the status and future of print media. I suspect that BR regrets the demise of the print media, but I, and millions of other anonymous readers, delight that the narrowly focused and biased liberal media no longer has a strangle hold on disseminating the news and deciding what is suitable and politically correct for the rest of us to read. It seems to come as a surprise to many newspapermen that hardly anyone actually believed them all these years of their monopoly on "news". I hasten to add that I doubt BR ever considered himself in that select circle.
Bjohn17600
Report this Comment On December 15, 2012, at 8:45 AM, dbtheonly wrote:
BJ
Fox News is liberal? Wow!
Report this Comment On December 15, 2012, at 10:03 AM, wjcoffman wrote:
There's no love lost with the demise of our local paper. Shortly after moving here they chose to publish a photo on the front page (however, "below the fold") of a spring breaker with the tube from a beer bong in her mouth. "Freedom of speech" and "we're showing what happens in our community". Ok. Next they chose to advertise a play using a photo of a young man holding a revolver to his temple. Again we were told "freedom of speech" but this time they added "you don't have to read our paper" to which I responded "you are correct" and therefore "why subscribe?", cancelling on the spot.
The Sunday paper is now a sad collection of probably less than 20 sheets; weekdays look to be less than 10. I'm sure it's not entirely due to the trash they choose to print ignoring their audience but I can't imagine folks choosing to read that filth. The folks I know that continue to get the paper have children involved in local events and the others grew up flipping through the morning paper with their breakfast/coffee. I just fire up the iPad.
Report this Comment On December 17, 2012, at 5:42 PM, TMFMorgan wrote:
Great stuff, Brian.
Report this Comment On December 17, 2012, at 6:37 PM, TMFTwoCoins wrote:
Great read. A very thought provoking and intriguing model for the future.
Report this Comment On December 17, 2012, at 6:44 PM, Darwood11 wrote:
Well Done!
Report this Comment On December 17, 2012, at 9:57 PM, TMFDivine wrote:
Sure is a tough business. I think you're just the man to revive it.
Report this Comment On December 18, 2012, at 8:49 AM, TMFBoomer wrote:
This was a very intriguing article, Brian. I hope you're right, that professional journalism will survive even on a local basis through a blend of the best blog content, trained reporters and editors, and of course, a profitable business model. As TJ said, democracy can only exist with an informed and educated electorate. Jefferson wouldn't stand for anything less for Virginia.
Report this Comment On December 18, 2012, at 8:59 AM, sgt1917 wrote:
The problem with "news" these days is that there are no real reporters anymore...just press releases and similar. In addition, news is mostly following political beliefs, primarily of the left & liberal, as most of the media is controlled by them (along with education). Therefore, in effect, there is no more freedom of the press, along with an increasing inablitity to know the truth.
Report this Comment On December 18, 2012, at 9:13 AM, Bkeepr100 wrote:
Our local rag is known as the "daily disappointment". It is run by an Editor that has never understood that he can't have a larger sports section the bigger papers have.
There is 4-5 pages of a mix of local news and stories directly off the wire by AP or other outlets. Yet the sports section is always 8-10 pages long. A bad mismatch for a town of only 29,000 people in a rural setting, nowhere near the place it would work best, Lost Wages, Nevada (Vegas). Our state is not even nearby.
The only newspapers that are still doing OK in the nationwide public sector are run by people of a conservative nature. Even these papers are just a weekly issue.
It is a lack of true journalism that is killing the papers, along with the web.
Report this Comment On December 18, 2012, at 9:13 AM, TMFKlesta wrote:
A good read. It reminds me of a couple graphics The Washington Post's "Wonkblog" ran a couple weeks ago showing the steep drop in newspaper advertising revenue. It really drives home how quickly newspapers have been displaced. Here's hoping the paywall model works...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/03/g...
Report this Comment On December 18, 2012, at 10:06 AM, CurToo wrote:
It's been hopeless, but every now and then I add some experience-based comment to reports such as these that seem to actually give a hoot. So here goes: it's a lie, that whole print demise thing.
Yes, certain major daily newspapers face cutbacks in a shifting landscape, but they were bloated messes that came with virtual monopolies in their sector. As "location" became more important in the news mix, they just were not small (re:local) enough to remain relevant. The industry faced a choice: admit it was dumb or just blame the Internet.
Here's how you know you're being lied to: newspaper closing are not that much higher than "before," and if tracked in terms of the economy they are about the same. And why have none of those big daily papers closed? Go back and look at the predictions, and they don't close.
Serious demerits if you thought "The Rocky Mountain News" or that "Seattle" paper. Both were hollow shells created by joint operating agreements, a crazed exception to the anti-trust laws that has killed many a good paper. Notice that omission from most reports of their demise.
What's actually happening is a transition from print to online that will come at different speeds in different communities. Even then, there will likely be a print edition to "sample" a community. The trouble is, the digital folks have somehow stampeded the sheep into moving ahead of their transition, and the same is happening with online advertising.
This report would have benefited from knowing that a former publisher has already announced a print/online replacement for the dearly departed, although that certainly clouds the narrative.
Enough, okay. But guess what's one of the first thing many of those Patch sites do when they launch? They go to mass-transit and other areas and hand out printed news of their arrival, yet nobody asks "why?"
And the best media startup of recent times is POLITICO in D.C., which has a great online effort yet gets most of its revenue from the print edition.
Stupid is as stupid does, and it's time to face the fact that maybe, just maybe, these are not the sharpest tools in the shed. And, for the record, the advice was pretty much dead-on otherwise, especially the pay wall hybrid.
Bruce Potter, a former publisher of the News & Messenger, and edited by Kari Pugh, the editor of InsideNoVA.com.
Report this Comment On December 19, 2012, at 9:04 PM, TMFBrich wrote:
Re: @CurToo's comment: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-state-of-nova/post/n...
<<Northern Virginia Media Services, which already publishes Leesburg Today, Ashburn Today and the Sun-Gazette papers in Arlington and Fairfax counties, will launch the new journalistic enterprise. The as yet unnamed product will be overseen by Bruce Potter, a former publisher of the News & Messenger, and edited by Kari Pugh, the editor of InsideNoVA.com. They hope to begin publishing next month.>>
Best of luck!
Regards,
Brian Richards
Report this Comment On December 19, 2012, at 9:12 PM, TMFBrich wrote:
And another follow-up to @CurToo's comment. You wrote: <<What's actually happening is a transition from print to online that will come at different speeds in different communities. Even then, there will likely be a print edition to "sample" a community. The trouble is, the digital folks have somehow stampeded the sheep into moving ahead of their transition, and the same is happening with online advertising.>>
For a company with legacy costs, the decline of print ad revenue is just impossible to overcome. E.g., this from The Atlantic:
<<The scariest thing about the newspaper business is the idea that digital newspaper advertising is theoretically "alive" and "the future" even though it's growing at 1/50th the pace of print's decline.>>
A new startup such as yours may well flourish. Newspaper print ad sales is still a $5b a year business. Check out the first chart here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/the-scar...
It's a tough industry ... named one of 10 "dying industries" earlier this year by IBIS World. http://www.ibisworld.com/Common/MediaCenter/Dying%20Industri...
Still, I'm an optimist, provided new ventures have the right revenue and labor models, and provide something a decent portion of the community would be willing to pay for via some form of paywall/subscription.
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Brian Richards
Report this Comment On December 19, 2012, at 9:25 PM, NOTvuffett wrote:
Grandma will always need a daily coupon delivery service with cutting-edge journalism, lol.
I do not wish to seem adversarial, and I wish anybody in this endeavor luck, but I don't know why anybody buys news in the "dead tree" format anymore. Maybe if "The Onion" had a print format I would buy that just for posterity's sake, lol.
Report this Comment On December 19, 2012, at 9:39 PM, TMFBrich wrote:
@NOTvuffett:
You'll appreciate this: http://www.theonion.com/articles/dunbar-family-forced-to-dis...
<<PAULLINA, IA—In an e-mail to readers on Monday, editors of the Dunbar Family Annual Christmas Update announced that due to logistical constraints, they had decided to cease print publication of the newsletter, which will move to a web-only distribution model. “Amid a rapidly changing Christmas-letter landscape, the printed word has become a less effective way to keep you informed about Dunbar family affairs,” wrote editor-in-chief Phyllis Dunbar, who assured a readership of more than 60 friends and relatives that the December bulletin would remain the most reliable source for updates on Nathan’s progress in school, pet acquisitions and deaths, and the family’s travel plans.>>
Also, The Onion does have a print format ... given away free in eight cities: http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-onion-ceases-nyc-print-ed.... And of course, you can buy a print subscription and get it mailed to you.
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Brian Richards
Report this Comment On December 19, 2012, at 11:21 PM, NOTvuffett wrote:
Thank God,
I can take the Dunbars off the Christmas card list. I never liked them, but the wife liked them as potential finger-weaving candidates, lol.
Report this Comment On December 31, 2012, at 3:57 AM, thidmark wrote:
"Fox News is liberal? Wow!"
Good lord, man, what a clueless attempt at sarcasm.
Report this Comment On January 09, 2013, at 9:25 AM, CraigChilton wrote:
Whenever I see or hear a person who regards himself to be a "conservative" using the word, "liberal," in a disparaging way, that just reminds me to consider the source. Since l"liberal" is a very complimentary descriptor, and I have been very proud to be a SOCIAL liberal (but only sometimes a fiscal one) all of my life. The synonym for "social liberal" is "egalitarian."
As long as Fox News is around, there will be a real NEED for MSNBC and other, more objective and egalitarian media to offset what they present, and restore balance.
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