The ghost papers

While economic fallout from the pandemic will lead to the death of additional newspapers at a time when they’ve never been more important, one aspect of the changes occurring in the industry hasn’t been as widely covered. It’s the growth of socalled ghost papers.

“The bigger problem is the ghost newspapers that now pervade the landscape, stripped to the skeleton,” newspaper analyst Ken Doctor writes for NiemanLab. “This crisis, like the declines of the past decade, will probably be less about pure extinction and more about new apparitions; newspapers gutted in a way previously unthinkable. Badly wounded (but still faintly breathing) dinosaurs, if you will.

“How do we judge if a newspaper is still alive? By most definitions, it’s the appearance of a product, usually in print but now digital, that carries a dignified nameplate, preferably in a familiar German blackletter font.

“The financial companies that have and will continue to consolidate the local press — perhaps now at an accelerated pace — know that, and they’ve built a cynical strategy atop it. Keep the nameplate and fill the space between the ads with national wire copy, stories pretending to be local (but really from someplace three newspapers away), self-serving columns from mayors and local corporate leaders, and lots of low-cost calendar items.

“‘Fake news’ is a truly odious epithet. But we’re now truly into the faux news era in local news. It’s a thin patina of fraudulent localness, packaged in the wrappings of a century ago, and priced at $600, $700 or $800 a year for seniors who nostalgically (or unknowingly, through the magic of the credit card) continue to pay until the day they don’t.”

This newspaper is fortunate to have as its publisher a native Arkansan who still lives in the state and wants to put out a statewide newspaper in which he takes pride. That’s Walter E. Hussman Jr.’s whole purpose in moving subscribers toward a digital product. The goal is to cut production and delivery costs in order to keep a news staff large enough to cover news, business and sports in all 75 counties.

Unfortunately, we’re already seeing some other newspapers across the state and the region become ghost papers.

“If we define life — or non-extinction — by the mere persistence of an old nameplate, we obscure the damage being done to local communities every single day,” Doctor writes. “As we begin to list out the longer-term impacts of the current catastrophe, put that one higher on the list. All of this — this spring massacre of news revenue — is prologue, of course. We just don’t yet know what it’s prologue to. The 2020 calendar has never looked longer. As one of the most successful, optimistic and progressive of today’s publishers told me: ‘If it’s a couple of months, we’ll make it through. If it’s six months, all bets are off.’”

In 2018, media analyst Kevin Slimp reported that the best newspaper owners recognize that “job No. 1 is to put out a good product.” He concluded that newspaper owners “should not have ignored their print products, and they should not have reduced their staffs. When you start getting rid of reporters, no one wants to read your paper.”

The pandemic has led a number of business and civic leaders to recognize the importance of strong newspapers to American democracy. The question is whether readers will respond with their subscriptions while at the same time demanding that they be given something other than ghost papers.

“News is not just another manufactured commodity to be sold by corporate hype,” writes Texas populist Jim Hightower. “Newspaper readers can see in black and white the drastic drop in the quality of coverage that Gannett and other Wall Street syndicates are now producing. And while Gannett’s grand business plan is to convert print readers to cheaper web versions, mediocrity online is no more nourishing than it is in print. After all, what does a Wall Street hedge fund know or care about Peoria, Pocatello or Poughkeepsie?”

Hightower laments the loss of experienced journalists, especially at a time like this. He says: “It’s not just that newsrooms are being cut to the bone, but that the most experienced diggers, writers, editors, photographers and artists — the people with the deepest institutional knowledge of the economic, social, political and cultural workings of their towns — are the ones being let go. Money managers see them not as assets but as expenses whose elimination means bigger profits.”

Hightower says hedge fund ownership “is a critical factor in today’s imploding system of degraded local newspaper coverage. Sure, you might get free information through social media like Facebook and Internet sources underwritten by Google ads. But that’s a dead end too, since the ad money goes straight into the bottomless profit pit of the tech giants, which don’t produce any local journalism.

“Indeed, to the extent there’s substantive local material online, much of it has been ripped off from — hello — our vanishing local newspapers. This is a deadly whirlpool for the info and insight we the people need to be even quasi self-governing.

“So what do we do? Let’s begin by acknowledging that local journalism is a public good and a democratic necessity, not a fast-buck profit center for absentee investors. … Require tech monopolists to fairly compensate local papers for the news content they now essentially steal. In addition, assess an ad revenue tax on the monopoly profits of Internet giants to finance a journalist-directed, national endowment for local journalism.

“If we are to be, in James Madison’s words, ‘our own governors,’ it is essential — and urgent — that we come up with new ways to sustain and expand local journalism, the medium that lights up our nation’s democratic possibilities.”

Doctor says the silver lining right now is that readers are seeing for themselves just how important high-quality newspapers are.

“Our word, as journalists and as institutions, is being consumed and appreciated,” he writes. “A story like coronavirus is often when journalists feel most connected to the sense of mission that got them into this line of work. It’s the love — plus a much appreciated viral bump in audience, subscriptions and memberships — that is buoying otherwise overwhelmed publishers and newsrooms. More bittersweet is how one innovative local news executive put it to me: ‘This may be our last chance to prove how valuable we are.’”

When asked about advertisers, another newspaper executive told Doctor: “Even those who have something to sell are really concerned about doing it. They’re unclear on how to get their message right and not seeming to profiteer.”

“Several publishers say that lots of people aren’t waiting to hit a paywall and run out of free articles for the month,” Doctor writes. “They’re hitting those Subscribe buttons earlier and unprompted. They’re acting on both the value of the journalism and the community service. One other indication of increased loyalty is few subscription cancellations. Churn is down.”