From a New York Times column by Ben Smith headlined “Bail Out Journalists. Let Newspaper Chains Die.”:
Elizabeth Green was musing the other day about buying 261 newspapers.
You could, this Sunday, purchase Gannett, the biggest newspaper chain in the country, for a mere $261 million—about a quarter of what Michael R. Bloomberg spent on his presidential campaign.
And Ms. Green, a founder of the nonprofit education news organization Chalkbeat, is one of the few people who may be able to raise the money to pull off a deal like that.
But she quickly realized that Gannett wasn’t worth it: Buying it would mean signing up to pay off a high-interest loan from a giant New York private equity firm and relying on an advertising business model that may be in its death throes because of the coronavirus.
It’s a moment of deep crisis for the local news business, which could have been blown over by a light breeze and is now facing a hurricane. But it’s also a moment of great promise for a new generation of largely nonprofit local publications.
The time is now to make a painful but necessary shift: Abandon most for-profit local newspapers, whose business model no longer works, and move as fast as possible to a national network of nimble new online newsrooms. That way, we can rescue the only thing worth saving about America’s gutted, largely mismanaged local newspaper companies—the journalists. . . .
The news business, like every business, is looking for all the help it can get in this crisis. Analysts believe that the new federal aid package will help for a time and that the industry has a strong case to make. State governments have deemed journalism an essential service to spread public health information. Reporters employed by everyone from the worthiest nonprofit group to the most cynical hedge fund-owned chain are risking their lives to get their readers solid facts on the pandemic, and are holding the government accountable for its failures. Virtually every news outlet reports that readership is at an all-time high. We all need to know, urgently, about where and how the coronavirus is affecting our cities and towns and neighborhoods.
But the advertising business that has sustained the local newspapers—the car dealers, retailers and movie theaters that for generations filled their pages with ads—has gone from slow decline to free fall.
So the leaders trying to get the local news industry through this economic shock need to confront reality. The revenue from print advertising and aging print subscribers was already going away. When this crisis is over, it is unlikely to come back. Some local weeklies recently shut down for good. . . .
None of this is settled or easy. The most heated debate in places where the nonprofit news executives gather—these days, mostly an impromptu discussion on Slack—is whether it’s ever safe or ethical to take government funding.
The name of their Slack channel? #apocalypsenow.
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Ben Smith is the media columnist. He joined The Times in 2020 after eight years as founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. Before that, he covered politics for Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York Observer and The New York Sun. Email: [email protected] @benyt
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