In the wake of Hearst Corp.’s threat to close the San Francisco Chronicle, some analysts are speculating that the Bay Area’s largest and oldest newspaper might join the ranks of Dean Singleton’s MediaNews empire—which includes the San Jose Mercury News and virtually every other newspaper in the region.
The Peninsula Press Club’s blog today reports that Hearst offered to sell the Chron to MediaNews in 2005, but Singleton felt the price was too high. That report also points out a fact that may be even more significant: Hearst happens to own a big piece of MediaNews.
“When Singleton bought the San Jose Mercury News and other Knight Ridder properties in the Bay Area in August 2006, the Chronicle agreed to put up $263.2 million to buy the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press and Monterey County Herald and conveyed them to MediaNews in exchange for a 30 percent stake in MediaNews’ non-Bay Area properties.”
In addition to the Merc, Singleton’s operation includes three other big dailies in the Bay Area: the Contra Costa Times, the Oakland Tribune, and the Marin Independent Journal. He also owns the smaller Daily News papers in Palo Alto, Redwood City and San Mateo, and the Silicon Valley Community Newspaper group of weeklies.
Since buying the Merc, MediaNews has decimated the newsroom in a series of layoffs and buyouts. Similar cuts have been implemented at all of the company’s Bay Area properties. While every newspaper in the nation has been laying off workers in response to plumetting revenues, Singleton is regarded as a particularly stingy owner—hence the nickname “Lean Dean.”
The Chronicle, on the other hand, has avoided making significant cuts in the newsroom. In fact, when Hearst bought the paper in 2003 and installed former Examiner editor Phil Bronstein at the helm, he combined the staffs of both newspapers. A strong union has protected those jobs. Hearst’s threat to close the paper, announced Tuesday, included a demand for “’significant’ cuts to both union and nonunion staff.” The Chron is reportedly losing up to $1 million a week.
This is just another example of business not keeping up with changing times. A smart business owner would look at the need of the public, and shift the way they do things accordingly.
It’s a funny thing that the Chronicle just went through a major redesign and has purchased brand new presses (not yet installed) guaranteed not to fold the paper in accordion pleats any more, just before threatening to go out of business. Some might interpret this as a union-busting tactic.
The Chronicle’s sister publication, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is also under threat of closure.
The Rocky Mountain News closed down today, leaving Denver a one-paper town.
If the Chronicle does shut down, it would leave the Bay Area as the first zero-newspaper urban area in the country, since none of the MediaNews papers are anywhere close to doing the job of a major daily.
It’s a strange thing that this devastation of the newspaper business seems only to be happening in the US.
“CanWest MediaWorks LP, operator of Canada’s biggest newspaper group, posted a sharply higher profit for its first quarter…”
“West Australian Newspapers, the publisher of The West Australian newspaper, said today net profit for the half year to December 31 rose 32 per cent to $58.5 million despite a further softening in advertising revenues.”
“Newspaper readers turned in large numbers to the higher end of the market as the credit crunch hit the real economy at the end of 2008, according to statistics released on Thursday. Although circulation numbers have been declining steadily across almost all titles in the UK, the economic crisis has helped the estimated readership for several newspapers head in the opposite direction. In the last six months of the year, which also included coverage of the US election, the National Readership Survey estimated that the readership of The Times rose 10 per cent and The Guardian 13 per cent. Over the whole of 2008, the figures for the Financial Times showed a rise of 16 per cent against the previous year, almost all of which was recorded in the final quarter.”
My quick search showed that revenues are down for some other newspapers around the world, but none seems to be in danger of going under.
Is it questionable finance deals that have left much of the US newspaper industry on the brink of bankruptcy? The LA Times/Chicago Tribune problems stem from a highly leveraged takeover.
#2 points out that, “It’s a strange thing that this devastation of the newspaper business seems only to be happening in the US.”
It’s not really strange when you realize that newspapers in America followed a harsher line against the demographic group most apt to buy and read newspapers than those in other countries.
A cold look over the last twenty years at the contents of the LA Times, Sacto Bee, SF Chronicle, and SJ Merc would reveal an all-out campaign of defamation against what was the majority demographic in California. Snotty moralizing lectures, name-calling, and mockery abound all designed to denigrate the once majority demographic.
It only took the members of the that demographic about a decade or so to notice, but why would anyone want to support a publication or its advertisers engaging in a hatefest against its largest readership demographic?
But it’s a little worse than Eric Johnson portrays it to be. Here’s an Internet article claiming:
“An annual convention of newspaper editors has been canceled for the first time since World War II, undone by the worst economic crisis since that harrowing era. The American Society of Newspapers Editors’ decision to skip this year’s meeting was announced Friday, coinciding with the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News—the largest daily U.S. newspaper to shut down so far during a steep two-year slide in advertising revenue that’s draining the life out of the industry.”
It may be that the vicious print beast cannot be revived, and none deserves to be humiliated and run out of town more than the editors and writers who twist the news and ideas they present for the most base of motives. Here is the link to the article about no convention for newspaper fat cats.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D96K7GD82&show_article=1
There is a God.
The question that people should be asking is: If the major local newspapers go out of business, or are reduced to abominations like the current Mercury Lite, where will people get their local news?
Many will be quick to answer that question with today’s panacea for everything: The Internet. Those folks fail to understand that it’s human reporters, not technology, who gather facts and write news stories. Human editors edit those stories. It is only after this process plays out that those news stories appear on the Internet to be scooped up by the aggregators, Google, etc. and for folks here to comment on.
If there are no more reporters and editors, or if staffing is cut to the point newspapers can’t possibly give good local coverage what you will have left are local TV, radio and of course blogs. To be fair there are some good ones in each of those categories, but the majority of those media sources are pretty bad, IMHO, unvetted and even more biased than The Drudge Report or Huffington Post on a bad day. Do you really want to get all of your local news from those sources?
While some, like #3 above, are happy about the demise of newspapers based on conflicting political beliefs the larger issue here is getting information to the community.(And yes #3 some of that information will conflict with your or my personal point of view.)
Maybe, as some have suggested, the time is right to turn off the printing presses and move all newspaper content to a subscription-based on-line newspaper. With the majority of readers now reading the free on-line versions of newspapers that would make sense. Hopefully advertisers would follow the newspaper on-line because that’s where the readers would be.
I’d be willing to pay a reasonable subscription fee if the content is worthwhile. How about you?
If newspapers go under, we’ll just hold our TV news (and their websites) to a higher standard.
Post #3 hits one big, largely ignored nail right on the head, by pointing out the glee with which arrogant newspaper editors have used their positions to wage war against our traditions, self-image, and national pride, all in an attempt to destroy our established, imperfect culture, and replace it with a utopian society based on unrealistic, egalitarian nonsense. Daily newspapers have in the last forty years functioned as a cancer of the nation’s soul, disrespecting its mettle while attacking its vulnerabilities with the viciousness of a foreign invader. Small wonder its once stout body of subscribers so resolutely rejected it at the first opportunity.
Personally, I don’t know a single person who prefers getting his local news on a computer, but I also don’t know anyone who ever subscribed to a paper to be reminded ad infinitum about the horrors of slavery, the tragedy of the Native Americans, the injustice of the internment camps, the destruction of the Aztecs, the nobility of the migrant worker, the evil history of Europeans, or the many reasons why white males in America have it coming to them. With the exception of the respectful mention of a historical anniversary, or passing of an icon, history is a big picture subject that is best studied in school and leaned from historians, not in slanted, shame-on-you stories in the newspaper.
I’ve never met anyone who didn’t understand that some people were just naturally violent and evil, yet judging by the reporting in the Mercury our police department almost never uses force against bad guys—it only uses force against young men with mothers who love them, and were in the process of turning their lives around, or about to start looking for a job, or talking about connecting with the children they fathered. Likewise, the paper has also never come across a story about an illegal involved in crime, despite that illegals make-up a sizable percentage of prison inmates. The Mercury tells us only about the young illegal living the American Dream (except for the law-abiding part), who comes from an economically-devastated village in Mexico (what’s new?) and is here doing the work Americans won’t do (like roofing, plumbing, landscaping, etc).
Our paper has been in the corner of the underdog for years, provided the dog wasn’t a pedigreed white; preaching tolerance to working-class readers even as the underdogs drove down wages and exhausted the budgets of schools, hospitals, and prisons. Of course, for most of those same years the Mercury was demanding top dollar for advertising space, and extracting every penny possible from those loyal subscribers in need of a few lines in the classified section. Well, the newspaper industry finally got its turn to be tolerant—of underdog startups like Craigslist and EBay, when these new underdogs took advantage of not only a new technology, but of a buying and selling public who’d had their brand loyalty squeezed out of them, line by line.
While I do not dispute that the newspaper industry has been rocked by the new technology, I firmly believe that had it not bullied and alienated the readership upon which it relied (and its advertisers coveted), had it understood that with real power comes real responsibility, the industry would have never surrendered its subscribers or lost its battle for survival.
The decline of the local daily newspaper is yet another symptom af the deliberate fragmentation of our society promoted by our education system, our politicians, and the media.
This “celebration of diversity”, incessantly shoved down our throats by the Mercury News, has successfully endeavoured to divide the general population into a patchwork of sub-populations. (The Merc should be proud of the fact that, thanks in part to it’s influence, huge segments of this valley don’t read English so are unable to read their paper even if they wanted to.) Most people now identify themselves as members of some subgroup more than as a member of society at large.
We wistfully witness the disappearance of this valuable and venerable institution- the newspaper, but what is truly lamentable is what it’s passing signifies- the loss of a community in which the people have enough in common with one another that they collectively comprise a market for a local newspaper.
It is poetic justice that the print media should suffer the ill effects of the socially corrosive propaganda that it has been dispersing.
Poetic justice, but sad all the same.
I don’t know what newspapers you people have been reading—perhaps you’re having The Guardian flown in from England.
Most of the newspapers I see have been doing nothing but reprinting government handouts (at least when Republicans are in the White House) and Republican party publicity releases for years. Very occasionally the New York Times does some actual reporting by accident and then falls all over itself apologizing for weeks afterward.
As for the Mercury News, for me its decline started when it failed to stand behind Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance investigation when the so-called liberal New York Times and LA Times piled on in defense of the Reagan/Bush administration. Since we now know that the story was substantially correct, the Merc’s lack of spine was the cause of its losing its chance to enter the major leagues, which it seemed as though it might have a chance to do back then.
Part of the difference with other countries might be that newspapers elsewhere sell more on a national level, so they tend to be associated with political parties. The US is mostly a country of one-newspaper towns, so the papers are afraid that doing any reporting is bound to offend some portion of the readership, so they don’t do any. Hence there is little point in reading them since there is no content.
The winners may well be the big multinational media companies that can subsidize money-losing operations in the US with profits from other countries. Right now the biggest multinational presence is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, formerly Australian-based but now with interests in so many countries it would be difficult to say where it is based. Murdoch is currently an American citizen. (It is alleged he also acquired Turkish citizenship in order to take over a TV channel in Turkey.)
In the US, News Corporation owns the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, MySpace.com and Fox News, among others. In 2003 the company owned 175 newspapers worldwide (all of which editorialized in favor of the invasion of Iraq).
Recently Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim acquired a significant financial interest in the New York Times. This may be more of the trend. The larger US papers might be attractive takeover targets for other multinational media companies.
I expect that catering to moneyed interests would continue under foreign ownership just the same as it goes on now.
However, the outlook is bleaker for reporting at the state and local level. It may be that we will have to rely on bloggers. Bloggers can be OK at the “what happened at the city council meeting” level, but don’t have the resources to do the kind of in-depth reporting that newspapers used to do back in the 1980s and before.
#5 says: “If newspapers go under, we’ll just hold our TV news (and their websites) to a higher standard. “
How will we do that? The same way we’ve succeeded in holding newspapers to a higher standard all these years?
We’ve had over 50 years to hold TV news to a higher standard, and yet that standard seems to be slipping a little more each year. (How many times does KPIX need to show us a reporter standing in a downpour so we, in our blissful ignorance, will understand that it’s raining?
)
There is a fundamental difference between TV news and print journalism. It’s been said that the word count of the CBS Evening News is equivalent to just one page of the New York Times. Broadcasters write for the clock, the news has to fit within a 24-minute newscast (after commercials).Print reporters have the option of adding additional column inches. As a result with rare exceptions you do not get the kind of depth of reporting on TV that you can get from a good newspaper. (Note I said “good newspaper”, not all are.)
Note to Finfan: The economic problems facing the newspaper industry are not the result of ideological differences with readers.
Newspapers of all political stripes are facing economic pressures due to a failing business model, competition from the Internet and too many old farts in the executive offices who have been slow to adapt to new technology.
Newspapers used to own the market for classified advertising. When Craigs list first started the aforementioned old farts refused to accept the fundamental change in the marketplace and let a substantial percentage of their revenue slip away.
The irony is that the newspapers, not Craig Newmark, had the infrastructure and customer base to be the dominant force in on-line classified. Instead of embracing the new technology they sat on their hands and watched Craig’s List eat up classified ads.
We now see the same slow response to migrating news content on-line, even though that’s where the majority of readers now access the “newspaper.”
Maybe the next round of newspaper layoffs should include the decision-makers who are failing to make decisions?
I must agree with #3- and Fin Fan. Newspapers have bitten the hand that feeds them for way too long, and now Karma has reared its ugly head. I studied journalism in both high school and college. The two main themes that were beaten into our heads were, “research both sides of the issue, and just give the facts, your personal opinion doesn’t matter because you aren’t writing an editorial.” So, what school of journalism have these Editors and reporters attended?
One thing that Fin Fan pointed out that I completely agree with is how the media has considered its self like a parent to the public. Their attempts at trying to beat their morals, beliefs, and ethics into our heads have done nothing more than burned them in the end. I deeply resent having the facts, and a detailed report of the issue with held from me because some Pin Head running the paper, or government official, or even a TV news station thinks we can’t handle the truth. I want to know who put them in charge of determining what will and what will not be aired?
I don’t think putting news on the Internet solely is the answer either. There’s nothing like a relaxing Sunday morning in bed reading the paper, or saving a hard copy of the paper showing our first African American President elected into office on the front page! One very important part of being successful in business is “knowing your audience!” Something that clearly the Merc, and others don’t know how to do. It is no wonder that pandering to one’s own interests in the world of media has caused such devastating results.
10 MHz Days: “Most of the newspapers I see have been doing nothing but reprinting government handouts (at least when Republicans are in the White House) and Republican party publicity releases for years.”
What an absolutely absurd statement. Were “most newspapers” beholden to the Republican Party, or to any party for that matter, their agenda would be transparent and consistent. But how is it possible to attribute to a single party the media’s complicity in the wide variety of issues it has facilitated, such as the Iraq War, the government’s disinterest in investigating the 9-11 attacks, the imposition of affirmative action, the creation of the welfare state, the undermining of our immigration laws, or the promotion of gay rights? If this dizzying agenda is represented by a single political group in America, I haven’t hear of it.
I understand that it is difficult for committed partisans to ever consider the possibility that the two-party system that supplies them with a side to embrace and another to despise has very little to do with the worst excesses of government. Though wars can be fought over a single issue, they seldom are, and in the case of our criminal invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq the issues were many, and all favored by the well-heeled. Small wonder that of the many winners in that war—corporations made rich, Israel freed of an obstinate foe, etc., the real losers were our nation, its people, and its brave and patriotic fighting men—the three groups that have no real voice in Congress or at the White House.
MC: “Note to Finfan: The economic problems facing the newspaper industry are not the result of ideological differences with readers.”
Did you even read what I wrote? I acknowledged the challenge presented by the evolving technology; I’m just not convinced it had to be a death knell. Had the Mercury been all that it could be, a solid news source and a familiar and trustworthy part of the community, who can say that its own attempts to incorporate the internet might not have turned out more profitably? Had the paper established its impartiality and demonstrated an interest in the city and the people it served (as opposed to trying to become the liberal voice of the Bay Area), then perhaps it might have occurred to its leadership to open their webpage to free ads, letters to the editor, interest groups, and public comments (selling commercial ads on every page). The Mercury News might very well have become the portal to all things local on the internet (so much of buying and selling is local, we might not have ever needed Craigslist).
But the paper did none of that, because it is, and has been for over thirty years, the arrogant product of Leftist know-it-alls who have little in common with the people of this city. I’ve worn collars of many colors in my life, yet I’ve never worked anywhere in this town where the Mercury’s agenda wasn’t resented (of course, I’ve never worked in a homeless shelter, poverty law center, women’s sports clinic, or Mexican Heritage Plaza).
I’ve pretty much given up on looking to the mercury news for serious local reporting. They tend to reprint whatever local governments tell them.
Yesterday’s front page article on BART was more of the same. A serious news agency would have run the numbers themselves last September. The Murky waited for the press release.
Did anyone watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart when he interviewed Walter Isaacson (President of the Aspen Institute) which just wrote the book, How To Save Your Newspaper?
“I think you’ve got to get away from this notion that good reporting should always be given away for free on the internet. Good blogs, good music, whatever it may be. You see music now, people are charging for it on iTunes. I just think you gotta get to some system where journalists are getting paid for going to Baghdad.”
His idea is to create micro chargers or micro payments to view content on the internet.
It was slightly compelling to hear him talk but I was curious if anyone read the book.
If the bay area does become a one newspaper company region, lets hope that its the Chronicle that survives…The Murky News is a joke and a shell of its former self…
#11
I still don’t understand how you can blame this on ideology. I’ll admit the Mercury news leans to the left but this is also the paper that recently endorsed Republicans Pete Constant, Dolores Carr, Steve Poizner, Gary Rummelhoff, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and non-Labor backed Democrat Chuck Reed.
But like I said they do lean to the left and you know why? Because the City of San Jose and County of Santa Clara is left leaning! That’s why we have only one Republican City Councilmember and only one Republican County Supervisor. That is why no Republican President has won the county since 1984.
That’s why it’s hard for me and others to wrap around this whole idea that the Merc is falling out of favor because it’s a “liberal paper”. I know it’s hard to grasp but you and John Galt and others of your ideology are a minority in this area and have been for years.
J in Berryessa,
In neither post did I attempt to “blame” ideology for the fiscal ruin of the newspaper industry. Had that been my intent, I would not have prefaced the closing statement of my first post with:
“While I do not dispute that the newspaper industry has been rocked by the new technology …”
Or included this in my second post:
“I acknowledged the challenge presented by the evolving technology; I’m just not convinced it had to be a death knell. “
That said, I am willing to examine the possibility that the destruction of the newspaper industry was due solely to the evolution of the Web. However, it seems to me that were one to accept that, one would also have to accept that industry analysts advising the ownership groups either:
A) Failed to foresee the unavoidable disaster, or
B) Recognized it and advised the ownership groups, who did nothing
To accept “A” requires one to believe the analysts guilty of an incompetence beyond comprehension. From the very beginning, novice users utilized the Internet to communicate (on Bulletin Boards) information about new technology, computer club meetings schedules, and to advertise computer gear and software (wanted or for sale). Post decentralization, after the public was invited onto the Net, where things were headed was there to see (and was, by the entrepreneurs).
If we accept “B” we must then wonder why the fire sales didn’t commence back in the ‘90s. If analysts recognized that the Internet spelled doom for the industry, then they either kept it a secret, or newspaper owners ignored the warnings.
I believe the evidence supports neither supposition. Clearly, the threat was recognized relatively quickly, yet the industry continued on as if confronted by a challenge it could survive. But survive by what strategy? What was it they counted on? I suspect the industry counted on the intangibles of its product: a paper’s familiarity to its readers, its history with the community, its role as government watchdog, its place in the everyday dialogue, its built-up trust. It is my opinion that what was assumed was that when the public moved in mass to the Net to get its news and search the ads, it could be swayed to make its destination of choice the website of its local paper.
That didn’t happen, and I have my opinion as to why. Feel free to offer yours.
As for this area being “left leaning,” I won’t argue that this county votes Democratic, and often sends irresponsible liberals to Congress, but do you have any evidence that the people live “left leaning” lives? Tell me, do the housing choices made by people in this valley appear liberal? Do the wealthy of any race buy the biggest and best houses for their dollars, or do they spend their money buying neighborhoods, avoiding certain demographics, and sparing their kids from the unfiltered multicultural experience? Are the valley’s parochial schools packed with the faithful flock, as was once the case, or have they, for some strange reason, suddenly become attractive across religious lines?
Everything about life in this valley is impacted by value judgments made by one class of people about another. Where to shop, where to dine, what parts of the city to avoid, what’s safe after dark, how to attract a certain clientele and how to dissuade another. Put a well-dressed, blond-haired young man in a new BMW, park him at King and Story on a Saturday night, and let’s see how our “left leaning” citizens welcome him. Likewise, drop a pants-off-his-ass Crip in front of a Los Gatos country club and watch how quick the “left leaning” citizens send a black and white welcome wagon for him.
This valley is full of people who lean left on issues they don’t perceive as impacting their lives. In truth, most are just one Section 8 neighbor away from turning Ted Nugent. Far too many people in this valley have been too well insulated for too long. Let’s see how they do in the coming years, after this economic disaster peels away a few of those cozy layers.
Here’s an interesting exercise. It involves a certain amount of making judgements about people (oooh), and even some (drumroll please) profiling! (oh my God. run away. run away!) Obviously, members of SJPD should refrain from participating.
Anyway. Take a drive around San Jose. Try to cover a somewhat random swath of our fair city. Have a look at the people in the cars that are sharing the road with you. Ask yourself the question, “Does that person look like the sort of person who would read the Mercury News?” Keep a rough tally. Suddenly, the solution to “The Case of the Vanishing Newspaper” will be obvious!
its definitely getting a lot worse now and i can really see the double tip recession around the corner