“What’s Really Behind the Plight of Newspapers?”

From a Shoptalk column by Lee Wolverton on editorandpublisher.com headlined “What’s Really Behind the Plight of Newspapers?”:

Newspapers’ fortunes and those of the communities in which they are located long have run parallel to one another….That history has been altered over the past 15 years during which newspapers began a descent into darkness. Industrywide revenues have been more than halved since 2006. Advertising has been particularly impacted.

Our detractors long have been legion but seem to have multiplied in equal proportion to our financial suffering. Everyone’s a critic when you lose your mojo. Invariably, editors hear about the heyday of the newsrooms they now lead. People recall eras when a given paper’s greatness was ostensibly unquestioned. Now, longtime editors are issuing the same laments while watching once mighty titans of the industry wither. “That was a great paper once…” Some of those papers are gone altogether. Others are sure to follow….

The loudest refrain is they’re too damn liberal. Other armchair experts trot out banalities. Newspapers are the buggy-whip makers in the era of combustible engines. They didn’t adjust to the internet. Still others hearken to a bygone heyday when all the editors were brilliant, and every reporter was the second coming of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein….

Few people seem interested in facts at a time when social media gives everyone a voice no matter how shrill or disconnected from functioning intellect. But those who think facts matter might consider these:

Print circulation long has been in freefall but not digital audience. Total weekday circulation for all U.S. newspapers slipped to 28.6 million in 2018 from a peak of 63.3 million in 1984….

Online readership for newspapers has not translated into profitability. Advertising revenues industrywide tumbled from nearly $50 billion in 2005 to $14.3 billion in 2018, according to the Pew Research Center. Print advertising was decimated, plunging from $47.4 billion to roughly $12.5 billion over the same period.

While digital audiences grew, digital advertising did not keep pace, inching past $4 billion by 2018 from $2 billion in 2005. That same year, Google nearly doubled its total revenues….Another player in the digital ad market, Facebook, was in its infancy. Today, those two combined bring in more than $200 billion annually. They gobble up 77 percent of the local digital ad market….The effect of this is suffocating for local news organizations….

Terry Kroeger, the former CEO of BH Media, said: “You can’t help but admire Google’s business model. They have close to zero content-creation cost but are able to turn around and sell the lion’s share of the advertising.”

HD Media, my current employer, has filed an antitrust claim against Google and Facebook. Publishers of 125 newspapers in 11 states announced on April 20 that they also had sued or planned to do so. The Daily Mail, the London paper that purchased the domain name of the former Charleston Daily Mail, filed a claim the following day.

These are what author Timothy Egan would call the worst hard times for our industry….

Just as we need people to clean and police our streets, we need journalists to diligently cover our cities and state, to show us the rights and wrongs not of Washington, but of our hometowns and West Virginia. Who will do it if journalists do not? And if they do not, what becomes of this place?

It isn’t just the future of this newspaper and others that’s at stake. It’s the future of our towns, our state and our country.

Lee Wolverton is vice president of news and executive editor of HD Media.