Canadian newsprint is not the enemy — tariffs are
Every day at the News Media Alliance headquarters, a stack of newspapers arrives for me and the staff. But with the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission considering tariffs on Canadian newsprint, those days of screen-free reading could be coming to an end.
The fact that newsprint is being threatened is the work of one newsprint mill in the Pacific Northwest, NORPAC. In August 2017, NORPAC petitioned the U.S. Department of Commerce to begin applying tariffs to newsprint imported from Canada, claiming the imported paper was harming the U.S. newsprint industry.
But NORPAC is not acting in the best interests of newsprint consumers or the U.S. paper industry at large — it is acting in its own interest and no one else’s.
The buying and selling of newsprint has always been regional, without regard for the border. Consumers of newsprint — from newspaper and book publishers to telephone directory manufacturers — tend to buy newsprint in their region, close to their printing operations. The printers who typically use Canadian newsprint are those in the northeast and Midwest, where there are no U.S. mills operating.
But those regions are not newsprint deserts because of unfair trade by Canadian paper mills. Rather, newsprint mills shut down or converted to producing other, more profitable paper products when the demand for newsprint fell, something that has been happening steadily for decades.
Since 2000, the demand for newsprint in North America has dropped by 75 percent.
But affordable Canadian paper has helped keep printed news alive and flourishing well into the 21st century. With new tariffs, many smaller newspapers will feel their belts tightening.
The combination of preliminary countervailing and anti-dumping duties increases the cost of imported newsprint by as much as 32 percent, and a number of newspapers have already experienced price increases and a disruption in supply.
If the International Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce make these tariffs permanent in the coming months, it could lead some small local publishers to cut their print product entirely — or even shut their doors.
Some, like NORPAC, may argue that by imposing duties on Canadian imports we’re saving American jobs and boosting our own economy, but while that may sometimes be true for other industries, the opposite is true of newsprint.
If the tariffs on Canadian newsprint are allowed to stand, we’re not only risking a centuries-old relationship with our neighbors to the north, but we’re putting our own U.S. news industry in jeopardy.
While the big national and regional papers may have less trouble finding the funds to keep their print editions coming, we could see small publishers lose footing, and those tiny local papers are some of the most vital members of our news community.
Under the right conditions, those papers can find a way to maintain their footing, but if the newsprint industry can’t support them, those communities will become news deserts, and that’s a future none of us want.
David Chavern serves as president and CEO of the News Media Alliance.