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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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The Decline and Fall of the Local Newspaper
Wednesday 31 January @ 16:57:55 |
 by ED FELIEN
How I got started in the newspaper business
I remember how it happened.
I was standing on the corner of Fourth Street Southeast and 14th Avenue in late November of 1969 trying to hand out leaflets I had written explaining how the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional, illegal and immoral. No one was taking them. Rejection is bad enough, but rejection with a windchill below zero was intolerable. There has to be a better way to market these ideas, I thought.
 Later, browsing through a head shop on Lake Street, I came across a copy of The San Francisco Oracle, a psychedelic newspaper straight from the Haight. The content was classic hippie: utopian communalism, Eastern religion, peace and love. But the use of graphics and color was truly astonishing. Photos and drawings shocked and disoriented. Color washed an entire page or erupted for emphasis. Each page was like a painting, suitable for framing, or, at least, for cutting out and putting on your wall.
Another paper I came across was the Chicago Seed. They weren't as extreme as The Oracle, but their content was a mix of local news and hippie philosophy. They used color in the same way, but more restrained.
Two other San Francisco papers made a big impression on me. Dock of the Bay was stark black and white with revolutionary politics, mostly manifestos, but featured centerfold photos of revolutionary heroes like Huey Newton, Ho Chi Minh and Che'. Good News had local news held together with revolutionary urgency. They clearly saw themselves as part of the anti-war movement. Their job was to be a useful tool for political activism.
In April of 1970 I found a few kindred spirits and we started publishing Hundred Flowers. Dickie Dworkin was short and wiry with the largest Isfro I'd ever seen. He had actually worked on his college newspaper. His experience was invaluable. Warren Hanson was an earnest student and graphic artist at Augsburg. We convinced him to drop out and join our commune. Tom Utne, the younger brother of Eric of the Utne Reader, was a beautiful artist, delicate and ephemeral. He floated in and out of our lives. Doug Demalignon helped with circulation and layout and, even now, does graphics for Pulse.
We came out every week for almost a whole year, cheerleading for the anti-war movement, railing against racism, sexism and corporate greed and discovering organic food. Our centerfolds were meant to be posters celebrating local revolutionary acts: a photo of demonstrators raising the Viet Cong flag at City Hall; a photo of a car driven through the door of The Red Barn restaurant, a chain responsible for gentrifying Dinkytown; a group photo of the Minnesota Eight before they went to prison for burning draft files, etc.
Why does anyone do a newspaper?
Last weekend the Guthrie produced "In Darfur," a reading of a play about a New York Times reporter who was desperately trying to get the story of genocide in Darfur in the Sudan on the cover of the New York Times above the fold. She was willing to compromise her personal ethics and the safety of her friends just to get the story. The horror and the inhumanity was a story that needed to be told, but was it worth the cost? Anyone writing for a newspaper probably goes through similar ethical and personal dilemmas, though probably not with life or death consequences. We all believe we have a story that needs telling.
It used to be that someone started a newspaper because they believed they had a vision of a community that a newspaper could help define. It was a tool to make the community better.
But, in a capitalist economy, it was also a commodity. The newspaper could itself be bought and sold. And, if the worth of the paper could be calibrated by commonly agreed criteria, then speculators could buy and sell it even though they were thousands of miles away and had no interest in the community it served.
The McClatchey family bought the Star Tribune for $1.2 billion eight years ago, and they sold it in December for $530 million. It is impossible that the worth of the Strib had diminished to less than half its value in that short a time. More likely, the McClatcheys got caught in a capital gains squeeze and needed to firesale the Strib to cover a tax bill. They had bought the Knight Ridder papers, sold them off piecemeal making a handsome profit, but this meant they had an enormous capital gains tax to pay by the end of the year, unless they could sell something for a loss. The sale gave the McClatcheys $530 million in cash and probably at least that much in capital losses to offset their gains. Now Avista, which has no experience running a newspaper, will take over the Strib and try to increase the profit margins (which always means cuts in the newsroom).
The Pioneer Press has already gone through those changes. Their newsroom staff has been cut by about 10 percent, with more cuts on the way.
What's happening at City Pages? Steve Perry, the paper's longtime editor, just quit. The editor at the Strib left just before the McClatchey family sold the paper to Avista. Is City Pages due for some major cuts? Steve Perry wouldn't return calls, which is understandable.
The founding editor and publisher of the OC Weekly in California's Orange County resigned at about the same time as Steve Perry. City Pages and the OC Weekly are both part of Village Voice Media, which owns alternative newspapers in 17 major markets in the U.S. Both Perry and Will Swaim cited philosophical differences as their main reason for leaving, but Swaim was a bit more specific: "They run a very complicated organization and want to have standardization in all their markets." In other words, corporate headquarters is planning on cutting local writers and making up for it with national columnists.
It's the USAification of the local media. Clear Channel has already tried to eliminate local radio, and, now, newspapers will eliminate their local relevance by cutting their local newsrooms. As Molly Ivins said about the situation: "It's not murder. It's suicide."
The Strib has a profit margin of 19 percent and that's not big enough. They want more, and they'll get it by cutting their writers. City Pages and the alternative press have been losing classified ads to Craig's List, and the money from big tobacco isn't nearly as big as it used to be. Corporate-run newspapers get bigger profit margins by cutting costs, and, almost always, that means cutting local writers.
What's going to happen?
As the local papers get less and less local, as they dumb down to reach a broader audience, as they become more cautious and conservative, there's a greater opportunity for other media to fill in the gaps. E-mail newsletters and blogs can provide hyper-local news and information. But television didn't eliminate radio, and even Clear Channel couldn't kill it—it just went underground with Radio K, Fresh Air and Air America. And there will always be people like us who find newspapers exciting, the ink intoxicating and the printed word on paper familiar and reassuring.
We don't plan on going away soon. We still have a story to tell. ||
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