Tales from the newspaper death spiral
Why it's pointless to support chain-owned "zombie" publications
Earlier this week, my fellow Iowa Writer’s Collaborative colleague Dave Busiek posted an excellent column lamenting the state of newspaper journalism around the Hawkeye state.
The conversation that ensued in the comments was passionate and interesting. Several folks invoked the familiar exhortation SUPPORT LOCAL JOURNALISM! I share the general sentiment, but believe there is a case to be made that doing so by subscribing and paying for publications run by corporate chains like Gannett and Lee Enterprises - which own virtually every paper of note in Iowa other than the Cedar Rapids Gazette - is counterproductive to the effort of restoring watchdog journalism here.
I flash back to the winter of 2022 when there was much handwringing over the bid by hedge fund vulture Alden Global Capital making a run at buying out Lee.
The social media missives from my former newspaper colleagues at the Lee-owned Quad City Times were dire and full of foreboding.
“WARNING: hedge fund giant and newspaper killer Alden Global Capital is trying to take over your local newspaper!”
Alden, of course, is notorious for taking over newspapers, making massive staff and editorial cuts and diminishing the quality of journalism at those outlets, even at some of American journalism’s most-respected mastheads.
Now, the evil hedge fund had its sights set on Davenport-based Lee – the third-largest newspaper chain in the United States and owner of around 90 daily newspapers in mid-size and small metro areas (such as Des Moines, St. Louis, Buffalo and Omaha)
“If you support local journalism, you will support our fight against this hostile takeover!” another ex-colleague pleaded on Facebook.
Again, sounds great in practice. But in reality, Lee had already committed journalistic seppuku years earlier, leaving gutted and mostly toothless newsrooms behind.
The sad truth is, all the awful things my well-meaning and earnest friends still laboring for Lee said Alden would do had already been done to those papers by Lee itself.
For the past 20 years Lee has been a willing player in the local news consolidation game, taking on more papers – and debt – while constantly cutting staff, diluting quality and milking dwindling advertising proceeds for the benefit of shareholders at the expense of serving the communities where its papers are located with meaningful watchdog journalism.
Nothing the doomsayers claim Alden will do hasn’t already been done at dozens of Lee papers. Alden is just bigger and badder and better at doing it. If Lee is a pack of crows picking at the carrion of depleted newspapers, Alden is the giant vulture flying in to make sure the bones are picked nice and clean.
Frankly, it’s the same frustrating story at nearly every major chain newspaper in the country. My last stop in the industry was as News Director at the Gannett-owned Iowa City Press-Citizen. I was one of the scores of Gannett editors axed on a black Monday in April 2020, right as the Coronavirus pandemic was ramping up.
Fortunately for me, I had an exit strategy, as I’d seen the writing on the wall years earlier. The fact is no journalism job is safe due to the accelerating death spiral of staff reductions leading to reduced quality leading to fewer subscribers and advertisers leading to staff reductions leading to reduced quality - you get the picture. This is not going to fix itself.
The Press-Citizen is a smallish paper, but one in an economically healthy metro area of around 100,000, home to a major research university and the largest hospital system in the state.
Despite those advantages, the P-C – like most Gannett publications – is continually starved of the resources needed to adequately conduct top-notch reporting. I had three full-time news reporters (all relative rookies under the age of 26) and one photographer to cover cops and courts, city government, county government, the university, arts and entertainment, local businesses, the hospital system and every school district in the region. Oh, and I could offer salaries of around $30,000 a year to reporters who had to churn out two or three daily stories by necessity.
In 2024, I’ve been told there remain only two reporters, no on-site editor and no brick and mortar location in Iowa City. Yes, Iowa City - a UNESCO City of Literature - effectively has no functioning, local daily newspaper. This is a travesty.
This scenario, and no doubt many much worse, are the same at paper after paper in America. And we wonder why the state of journalism has degraded so awfully?
It is literally impossible to do more than cursory watchdog journalism under such circumstances, so expect to see even more rampant corruption in city halls, county buildings and state courts across our nation in the years to come.
To be clear – I in no way question the effort of frontline reporters, editors and photographers. They are working their butts off, doing more-with-less, at ridiculously low wages. The issue is the willing starvation of resources from the corporate bean counters. Nearly no non-large metro daily in America delivers the level of quality and depth of coverage it used to.
To use a sports analogy, when I was editing the Press-Citizen, I often felt like I was asked to win baseball games with a roster of one rookie pitcher, a catcher and one outfielder while the opponent fielded a full side of nine and a deep bullpen.
Sorry, no matter how hard you try or how much talent those three players have, that is a losing formula.
That brings me to my plea: stop being guilted into buying subscriptions, clicking on the sad clickbait and AI-generated articles or otherwise feeling goaded into “supporting local journalism” if the purveyor of local journalism in your town is owned by a chain or hedge fund.
The time is long past for a new paradigm. Maybe it is finding a news source that is non-profit based. Maybe it is a hybrid of private and public. Maybe it’s something no one has come up with yet.
But I will tell you what it will not be, at least if top-notch journalism is what you’re looking for, and that is any paper owned by a publicly-traded company using paid advertisers as a business model. That model is broken and beyond repair. The vast majority of those papers are now nothing more than glorified weekly shoppers managed by greedy owners and a net disservice to their communities.
It’s time to stop trying to save these zombie publications and move on to something new. American democracy very well may depend on it.
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I believe every word you say. Still, I can’t rip the bandaid off of the Des Moines Register. I want to support the writers there who are still doing great work. But it’s hard to see it so diminished. Reading it reminds me of the last few times I went to the downtown Younkers. The store was a shell of what it had been, with just two stories verses six. But yet, I kept going anyway.
This is so, so good...So let's say I love the political reporting at Brand X and subscribe because I count on them to cover things I'm interested in. The coverage is thinner, year after year, as the hedge fund slowly cannibalizes them. Does my subscription help the publication survive and the young journalists, or am I just prolonging the misery and helping enrich the hedge fund? Pull the plug, or no? What's the next step? Any thoughts? Thanks.