By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
DEC. 14, 2021 | People often ask me about the status of newspapers in our country. However, I am no expert, but I have spent a life in the business, and know others are seeing newspapers decline is not what they were expecting.
The Internet has dried up tremendous revenues for newspapers. But newspaper management has also contributed to this down-sizing. However, lucky for local readers, the Atlanta newspapers continue to put out a far better newspaper than you see in some cities, such as Cincinnati, or Denver or New Orleans.
What many readers are seeing in their daily newspaper is the lack of extensive coverage and significant news that the newspapers have produced in the past. There’s a good reason for it: most newspapers have drastically cut their staffs, eliminating in the early round small jobs that you as a reader would not notice. But by about the third round of cuts, they were losing the collective nucleus of the better-paid staff, the institutional memory of the newspaper, and readers noticed.
Give the lower-paid and replacement young reporters a story to follow, these newcomers did not have the long-term contacts that a good newspaper needs. They stumbled around about a story, often overlooking core ideas in stories, and readers noticed.
So, with a smaller staff and pages to fill, newspapers started using more and more wire stories ( and photos) from afar. Instead of having more local news, they relied upon more news away from home, from the Associated Press or other sources like the New York Times or Washington Post. (This in essence, was second day news the local paper had not covered when the stories broke in other papers.)
Take a community like Gwinnett and look at newspapering. The Gwinnett Daily Post has faded to only twice a week, and offers scant coverage outside of public relations handouts. The Atlanta newspaper has only at most 3-4 reporters to cover the 950,000 people in Gwinnett! Can you imagine? It’s not that news isn’t happening here. It’s that it is not being covered.
Meanwhile, the AJC collaborates with Savannah, having a full page of stories from Chatham County from time to time. These stories come to them for free when giving credit to their “partnership” with the Savannah Morning News.
But news coverage for much of the Metro Atlanta area? It’s getting to be much like television coverage: following the ambulances and police cars and producing “blood and guts” journalism, while ignoring significant developments all around you.
Do we need to report every wreck or shooting?
Another way to cut costs and fill pages is to have a single, long, long story on a page. Shorter stories cost reporters to cover them. Hence, longer stories win out, often accompanying by another cost cutter: large photographs. Again, gone is solid, significant coverage of local stories, because of fewer stories and longer stories.
Granted that the Internet and social media have taken away revenue sources, and even the immediacy of news. But outside forces are not the only pressures on newspapers. There has been the growing development of ownership of newspapers by those outside the local community, often conglomerates and chain newspapers. These massive firms and hedge funds purchase newspapers to drain them of their assets, while enriching the outside owners, and leaving the community with a puny newspaper and no local input.
There is an effort to introduce tax credits for local newspapers to provide them with revenue to keep going. It’s a federal bill and it’s so far moving along well. But it is yet to pass, and may come too late for many newspapers.
Is there hope for local daily newspapers? We see little, unless more innovative techniques are found. It’s not necessarily a happy story.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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