Tag Archives: #Media

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If you won’t pay for the newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer thinks that you should be taxed to support it anyway.

It is well known by both of this website’s regular readers that I like to cite newspapers as my sources. Part of the reason is that I am mostly deaf; I simply don’t get my news from television, because it is much easier for me to read the news than listen to it. And newspapers usually cover stories in greater depth than television stations.

More, I have been an adamant defender of the First Amendment, and its protection of freedom of speech and of the press. The government should not have any control of, or censorship authority over, the media, whether it’s a big corporate entity like The Washington Post,, or an individual blog like The Pirate’s Cove.

Which makes this begging OpEd in The Philadelphia Inquirer all the worse:

    A call to action as a key deadline looms for the federal proposal to help local news

    Support for the sustainability of local journalism, what should be viewed as the very glue that helps hold our democracy together, may be seen as expendable as the Build Back Better act is finalized.

    by Jim Friedlich[1]Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns The Inquirer. | Saturday, October 30, 2021 | 6:00 PM EDT

    Deadlines are a fact of life for the reporters, editors, web producers, visual journalists, and others at the heart of America’s free press. But today we face a deadline of a different sort. The number of newsroom employees in the United States has fallen by almost 60% since 2000. Since 2004, over 2,100 newspapers — including 70 daily papers — have stopped publishing altogether.

    In the next few days, Congress will decide the fate of a federal bill called The Local Journalism Sustainability Act, designed to help reverse these trends.

    The Local Journalism Sustainability Act has been the subject of earlier advocacy by The Lenfest Institute, the nonprofit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Earlier versions of the bill included proposed tax credits for consumers buying news subscriptions, for small businesses advertising in local news publications, and — most critically — for news organizations hiring and retaining journalists.

    This provision is now part of the Build Back Better bill, the major legislation pushed by the Biden administration. The current version of the bill has jettisoned the subscription and advertising tax credits to reduce cost to the American taxpayer. But the bill retains its most important and direct support, a refundable payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 per journalist to help local news organizations hire and retain reporters and editors, the lifeblood of local news coverage and the democracy it helps sustain.

There’s more at the original, but let me be the first to say: not just no, but Hell no! How can newspapers be independent of the government if they are going to require government largesse to operate? How can we trust coverage, by the Inquirer or any other credentialed media organization, if those media are dependent upon $25,000 for every journalist’s and editor’s salary?

No, Uncle Sam would not be paying the salaries directly, but tax credits would come right off the news organizations’ tax liabilities, and would be very much reducing the newspapers’ costs of employing people.

Mr Friedlich noted that, over the past 17 years, over 2,100 newspapers, including 70 daily newspapers, have gone out of business. To quote from the source he linked:

    When the 127-year-old Siftings Herald in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, printed its final edition on Sept. 15, 2018, there were only 1,600 subscribers in a community of 10,000 residents. The community was one of the poorest in the state. For decades, the paper had been published daily, Monday through Friday. But as both subscriber and advertising revenue dropped, publication was first reduced to two days a week in 2016, and then in early September 2018, the owner, the Gatehouse chain, announced the simultaneous closure of the Siftings Herald and two other papers in nearby counties. A former editor, now a columnist at the Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, took note of the closures, writing, “The watchdogs of school boards, city councils and quorum courts are gone. The chroniclers of high school sports teams are missing. To say that this is a sad thing for these counties is to understate the case.”

    For more than two centuries, newspaper editors and reporters, more often than not, served as arbiters of our news, determining what made front-page headlines read by millions of people in this country. They were the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information, especially for residents in small and mid-sized communities.

If there were only 1,600 subscribers in a community of 10,000 residents, it’s pretty obvious: the majority of the community didn’t care enough to subscribe. Whatever value the residents of Arkadelphia saw in the Siftings Herald, it wasn’t enough to actually pay for it. What Mr Friedlich is asking is that people who don’t care enough about a particular newspaper to subscribe to it should have to pay for it anyway, through their taxes.

In 2019, Ralph Cipriano of Philadelphia: magazine wrote of the Inquirer:

    As of May 7th, the circulation of the daily Inquirer, which once stood at 373,892 copies in 2002, was down to 101,818.

Using the same metric as was used to describe the Siftings Herald, to which only 16% of the residents subscribed, with a circulation of 101,818 daily copies, in a city of 1,603,797 souls, the Inquirer is doing much worse, with only 6.35% of Philadelphians buying it.[2]Full disclosure: I do pay for a digital subscription to the Inquirer.

And it’s actually worse than that: the Philadelphia metropolitan area has roughly 6,108,000 people, meaning that the Inquirer’s circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its service area.

If the Inquirer is valued that little by the people of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, why should all of those people who don’t find it worth the cost of paying for it be taxed to support it?

Journalists have always had an exaggerated opinion of their status. Because freedom of the press is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, the so-called Fourth Estate tends to see itself as somehow specially privileged, and owed support. And for centuries, the public did support newspapers, because they were the source of information from near and far.

The above mentioned quote from one of Mr Friedlich’s linked sources is important:

    For more than two centuries, newspaper editors and reporters, more often than not, served as arbiters of our news, determining what made front-page headlines read by millions of people in this country. They were the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information, especially for residents in small and mid-sized communities.

What is an ‘arbiter’? Arbiter is defined as:

  1. a person with power to decide a dispute : JUDGE
  2. a person or agency whose judgment or opinion is considered authoritative

This is how the credentialed media see themselves, and they were, for centuries, the gatekeepers, the decision takers of what would, and would not, be published. With the arrival of that internet thingy that Al Gore invented, that gatekeeping function passed away. The First Street Journal may not have the circulation of the Inquirer, but as long as I pay my site hosting bills, the editors of the Inquirer cannot stop me from publishing.

It was 2004, when the sites Powerline and Little Green Footballs destroyed that lofty air of authority the credentialed media enjoyed, when, working only on the low resolution television screens of the day, they managed, independently, to spot the forgery with which Dan Rather and CBS News tried to turn the presidential election against the younger President Bush.

Seventeen years later, the Inquirer has announced, in public, by its publisher, Elizabeth Hughes, that it would not publish the unvarnished truth, but only those things which passed muster through the lens of being “an anti-racist news organization,” censoring information which might reflect poorly on “people of color.”

Why should people pay for a newspaper which has announced that it will deliberately slant the news?

It’s hardly just the Inquirer. We noted, just three days ago, how The New York Times, supposedly the ‘newspaper of record’ for the United States, ignored a rather large New York City story, because the editors didn’t want to admit that resistance to COVID vaccine mandates was leaving the trash piled high on the streets in two boroughs. This site has pointed out, many times, how my ‘local’ newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, censors news that is freely available on the local television stations, because of political considerations rather than any journalistic imperative to actually report all of the news.

If the Inquirer is to survive, it must make itself a newspaper, whether in print or digital only, that the people of the Philadelphia metropolitan area find valuable enough for which to pay. If it can’t do that, it does not deserve to survive.

References

References
↑1 Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns The Inquirer.
↑2 Full disclosure: I do pay for a digital subscription to the Inquirer.
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18th Century Technology: More devastation for print newspapers

As both of The First Street Journal’s regular readers know, I am old fashioned in that I like newspapers as my source of news. I started delivering the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader when I was in the seventh grade. I use newspapers as my primary sources because, as a mostly conservative writer, using sources which are primarily liberal in orientation eliminates complaints about my choices of sources. And finally, because I am mostly deaf, television news doesn’t work well for me.

For me, the sad decline of newspapers is sad indeed, but, let’s face facts, they are, at heart, still 18th century technology.

Before I retired, I used to stop at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and pick up the newspaper to take to the plant. Liking a (supposedly) good newspaper, I bought The Philadelphia Inquirer rather than the Allentown Morning Call, which annoyed some of my drivers, because the Morning Call was the closest thing to a local paper, but hey, I was the one paying for it!

But, alas! like seemingly every newspaper, the Call had its financial problems, and, no longer independent, it became part of Tribune Publishing in 2000.

The Morning Call, rest of Tribune Publishing’s newspapers now owned by hedge fund Alden; CEO Jimenez is out

By Jon Harris | The Morning Call | May 25, 2021 | 5:44 PM EDT

The Morning Call, which has been covering the Lehigh Valley for more than 125 years, is now owned by the country’s second-largest newspaper owner: a New York hedge fund that has built its media empire — as well as a reputation for deep cost-cutting — in just over a decade.

Alden Global Capital late Monday completed its purchase of the roughly two-thirds of Tribune Publishing shares it didn’t already own, according to a flurry of filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Now privately held and under Alden’s umbrella are some of the country’s most storied newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the New York Daily News.

The swift closing of the deal came after Tribune shareholders on Friday voted in favor of the transaction, after a competing bid from a Maryland hotel magnate never quite came together. Alden’s deal to buy Tribune for $17.25 a share was announced Feb. 16, but the hedge fund had been interested in acquiring the company since at least fall 2019. In November 2019, Alden bought out Michael Ferro’s 25% stake in the company and quickly built its ownership position to more than 31%.

Douglas M. Arthur, managing director of Huber Research Partners, who tracks the publishing industry, told The Morning Call on Monday that he expects Alden to run Tribune with an emphasis on the company’s finances.

“The current Tribune operating story appears fairly similar to what I believe one should expect once Alden gains control: deep cost cuts, a maximum emphasis on generating cash flow and growing the bottom line,” he said. “The current Tribune management team has been operating this way for several years; certainly its efforts seem to have accelerated as Alden has wielded more influence.”

An immediate change came at the top of Tribune: CEO Terry Jimenez, who was the sole member of Tribune’s board to vote against the Alden deal, “was removed” from his position, according to a regulatory filing.

There’s more at the original.

Alden likes to sell off assets, but what of it? The Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy Company newspaper, outsourced it’s printing to a Gannett facility outside of Louisville in August of 2016, and put it’s building on Midland Avenue up for sale; four years later, the Fayette County Schools decided to buy it. In April of this year, the Inquirer shut down its $299.5 million, in 1992 dollars, Schuylkill Printing Plant, selling the place for a measly $37 million to developer J. Brian O’Neill, outsourcing its printing to, of all places, New Jersey.

And the Morning Call had already done the same thing, selling its building last year. Alden is doing little more than other newspaper companies, because the newspaper business itself hasn’t figured out how to move into the 21st century.

While the article in the Morning Call was at least somewhat circumspect, The Philadelphia Inquirer, owned not by Tribune Publishing but the non-profit Lenfest Institute, fired with both barrels:

Allentown nonprofits rally to the defense of the Morning Call newsroom

Across the United States, Alden Global Capital has pursued a business model that involves cutting staff to the bone and selling real estate at the publications it acquires.

by Harold Brubaker | May 25, 2021

The news in late 2019 that Alden Global Capital, a New York investment firm known for slashing staff at its newspapers, bought a large stake in Tribune Publishing Co. spurred efforts in Baltimore, Chicago, Allentown, and in other cities to recruit local owners.

Now, Alden is expected to acquire complete control of Tribune on Tuesday, after winning shareholder approval Friday. Advocates for local ownership of Allentown’s Morning Call, which runs one of the largest newsrooms in Pennsylvania, say they plan to keep fighting to save their newspaper despite the odds stacked against them.

“We are all disgusted by the news of what happened and concerned about the future, but we’re not going to give up,” said Kim Schaffer, executive director of Community Bike Works, an Allentown nonprofit that works with youths.

A strong local paper is crucial to the group’s work, said Schaffer, who is among nonprofit leaders brought together by NewsGuild union leaders in Allentown to drum up support for local ownership. .  .  .

Across the United States, Alden Global, which owns about 100 newspapers though the MediaNews Group, has pursued a business model that involves cutting staff to the bone and selling real estate at the publications it acquires.

“They have earned this moniker of being vulture capitalists. We’ve seen in city after city how they absolutely drain the resources of these properties,” said David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication.

“While they say many of the right things in terms of the importance of local news and their commitment to it, their record indicates absolute disregard for it,” said Boardman, who is also chair of the Lenfest Institute, which owns The Inquirer.

Alden acquired the Reading Eagle out of bankruptcy two years ago for $5 million. Employees had to reapply for their jobs as the company came out of bankruptcy with 111 jobs, down half from when it entered the process. Last year, Alden sold the Reading Eagle building in downtown Reading for $2.3 million.

I’m sorry, but is that a news report, or an editorial? When the Inquirer shut down its printing plant, 500 people lost their jobs. Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc, which owned both the Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid ‘competitor,’ had 721 newsroom and editorial employees; by 2012, that was down to roughly 320. The Inquirer sold its building to developer Bart Blatstein, and most of the Philadelphia Media Network, then the owner of the Inquirer, Daily News, and philly.com, employees would be moved to the old Strawbridge’s department store on Market Street.

What Mr Brubaker, the article author detailed, was what the owners of the Inquirer had done almost a decade earlier.

I will admit it: I was very used to having grey smudged fingers from reading a print edition newspaper, but I’m also 68 years old. In 1990, the Inquirer had a print circulation of 511,000 on weekdays, and 996,000 for the Sunday edition. By 2019, that circulation was down by 80%. When my generation passes away, the last generation which was really used to print newspapers[1]Even I don’t read the print newspapers anymore. I live out in the sticks, and there are no newspapers delivered out here. All of my newspaper subscriptions are digital. will have gone to our eternal rewards, and where will print newspapers be then?

There should be a place for print media, even if those print media are online only. Television news, which seems to be doing well, simply does not do much in the way of in-depth coverage, something that print has, and can continue, to do. But my own preference for reading the news rather than watching it on television is pushed by my hearing impairment, and by my need, as a (struggling) writer to be able to copy-and-paste and continually review my sources. I can deride the consumers of television news as low-attention-span, but that isn’t quite fair; they are consuming what their abilities allow them to consume. But, whatever the solution to survival for newspapers in this country is, they haven’t found it yet.

References

References
↑1 Even I don’t read the print newspapers anymore. I live out in the sticks, and there are no newspapers delivered out here. All of my newspaper subscriptions are digital.