If I were living my best professor life, I’d wake up late every Sunday morning, grab off my doorstep a print copy of the Sunday New York Times and maybe a Chicago Tribune — I live in Central Illinois — and begin the process of a leisurely, coffee-accompanied weekend ritual of relaxation and information.
This scenario is impossible, however, for two practical reasons. First, I have a preschooler. Second, the local newspaper in Champaign–Urbana, The News-Gazette, is “restructuring” and thus, for now, will no longer deliver the Times or the Trib — not daily, not even on Sundays. (It’s also killing its Monday print edition.)
What’s becoming increasingly clear to me is that this is going to be the year — and possibly the decade — where the many interdependencies of the news industry come into full display, with particular consequences for the newspaper industry.
If newspaper chains are seeking mergers and economies of scale in a last-ditch effort to cut costs, it won’t happen without consequences, as Ken Doctor has been arguing here at Nieman Lab. At this point, it’s likely that we will see the full negative effects of what happens when this strategy crashes and burns, albeit in unexpected ways. And in particular, what we’ll see will remind us that that news is still an industrial process, with actual machinery, complex distribution systems, and a labor force that includes more than just journalists.
If we take systems theory as a guiding metaphor — as the Democracy Fund and other funders, scholars, and pundits do — inputs and outputs can have all sorts of negative and positive consequences. But all too often, we’ve focused our attention on the impacts of a news ecology in a single city or location, with a particular focus on audiences and what happens when the input of local news is threatened.
The growing nationalization of contemporary journalism points to all systems down. For now, I can see three major interdependencies falling apart in the short term horizon.
The New York Times suffers a bit if The News-Gazette won’t deliver it. That valuable weekender print-plus-digital subscription will take a hit, in a scenario that is likely repeating in markets across the country.
Some of us have mocked newspapers for spending millions on new printing presses deep into the audience’s move to digital, wondering what those fancy new presses would do even further into print’s decline.
What we don’t think enough about, though, is the fact that newspapers still make money from their print papers (full stop). And many local and regional newspapers make money printing everyone else’s newspapers on their presses — the Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times — and these agreements between large national outlets and local newspapers to print and deliver their news has been part and parcel what has helped enable the nationalization of these newspapers. (Obviously, there is the internet, but we’re talking about the long game.)
The deadlines agreements set at these local presses — likely hashed out by printers’ unions, industry honchos, and national papers — determines the print deadlines that the Times, the Journal, and so forth have to abide by.
Printing other people’s stuff using your technology is a bit like the old-school version of running a platform. National papers are dependent on these agreements to get their print newspapers to wider geographic communities. When the owners of the platform make a change, distribution to consumers gets disrupted. Some newspapers, like mine, will make the decision to drop these agreements to allow deeper cost-cutting (newspapers are industrial, requiring machinery, trucks, and labor), and in the process, I suppose I’ll now get my Sunday Times by mail or just give up on it.
There are also other issues as deadlines get tighter and press runs get maximized. The huge economies of scale in a giant chain like Gannett make it look ridiculous when it comes to say, failing to print out a timely celebratory print edition after a team wins a massive victory, as Nashville’s The Tennessean failed to do when Vanderbilt won the College World Series.
Years ago, when I was doing my research on newsrooms moving newsrooms, I visited The Miami Herald just as it was about to leave its beautiful, mid-century-modern headquarters on Biscayne Bay (which have been destroyed by a wrecking ball). My heart ached in that romantic way it can when it comes to change and newspapers: Why sell such a beautiful building?
There’s little room left for nostalgic romance in the newspaper industry, and one of the reasons McClatchy had to sell the building wasn’t about cutting expenses of current production — it’s about dealing with its debt. That debt came mostly in its poorly timed deal to buy Knight Ridder in 2006, including major pension obligations.
While I have no idea what happened to my Philadelphia Inquirer pension, my short employment stint there probably didn’t put much in my retirement coffers. But those from the 1980s “golden era” of newspapers who have reached retirement age have pensions, often established through strong union contracts (#okboomer). And even if you’re an Alden Capital gutting everything, there are strong legal protections against balking on pension payments (see the current scenario at GE, for example).
So here’s where systems crash — all the old debt that we Nieman Lab readers often forget about as we focus on content and trust and audience strategies and new technology. Old-school company debt — the kind that comes from raising capital to expand — isn’t always a bad thing. But pension debt in particular can’t be dispensed with as easily as a newspaper building or printing plant. The pension issue we can see now — but I wonder what other hidden debt exists that we have yet to really understand as weighing down companies.
Journalists aren’t the only ones losing their jobs at newspapers. Some of the most contingent labor is un-unionized newspaper carriers, who get paid by some newspapers by the number of copies they deliver.
I spent a night observing delivery drivers in Omaha after the newsroom ended its afternoon edition and shifted to a morning print delivery schedule, and my heart broke a little. Newspaper delivery is an ideal job for single moms — at least in the sense that no babysitter is required. At 1 a.m. on a weekday, a mom was bagging newspapers while her young son listened on headphones to Disney radio. He could come with her on her route, sleep in the car, and she wouldn’t need a sitter. He wasn’t the only kid around — a number of tweens were watching and occasionally helping their parents speed up the process.
Despite all my years of field research in newsrooms, I found myself ill-equipped to ask these people how they were dealing with cutbacks to their routes and thus, their bottom line. This level of fragility, delivering papers early in the morning to dark houses — this is the kind of fragility we need to think more about. A good year might add $10,000 to the household income, taxed, I was told.
Delivery drivers are now taping notes onto their newspapers about the cutbacks. I wish I still had my D.C.-area carrier’s Christmas card — talking about the cutbacks and the loss of income and not-so subtly asking for a bonus — to share here. Their visibility will grow, slowly, as we take notice to these cards, cues, and Post-It notes, and this contigent labor in the news industry deserve our attention.
It’s my guess that truck drivers will face the same fate, and that printers — in many cases kept employed by union contracts — will see many of these protections gutted and, perhaps, their unions dissolved.
College-educated journalists can find new jobs, even if they’re not in journalism. The way local news cutbacks hurt democracy is far more abstract than what happens to single moms making a few pennies off every newspaper they deliver.
Finally, we celebrate each and every new journalism job added to the news industry as a tangible marker of an effort to save democracy — especially when these are jobs that are bolstered by nonprofit efforts.
What will become increasingly clear is that these gains are at best a net zero for any local news ecology. If you look at any nonprofit that gets money from a big national funder, chances are good you’ll find someone at the helm who has worked at a major news outlet in the area. They’ve left their job at a newspaper or a TV station to go work at a non-profit or digital-first startup. This isn’t new blood for the news industry but journalism dialysis — old blood pumped back into the system for a fresh start. Think about The Athletic as emblematic of this trend, with all those great sports writers taken out of metro newspapers.
Perhaps we should count all the new, young hires that are coming into communities through Report for America and other efforts. But these young hires would have once been hired at a local community newspaper — new blood for a net gain of journalists, at best. The system as it stands is jostling resources and this will become increasingly clear as local news faces growing market pressure.
This, then, is my sober prediction for 2020: that the news industry taken as a system, as a whole, national and local, will start to suffer in increasingly obvious ways from the misfortunes of one of the inputs into it. In political coverage, we’re already feeling the effects of cuts — relied-upon local intel gone, statewide newspaper polls cut — and this too is evidence of national news suffering from local cutbacks.
I’ve just started thinking about this idea of the interdependency of news, national and local, and the more I think about it, the more worried I think we should all be.
Nikki Usher is an associate professor in the University of Illinois.
If I were living my best professor life, I’d wake up late every Sunday morning, grab off my doorstep a print copy of the Sunday New York Times and maybe a Chicago Tribune — I live in Central Illinois — and begin the process of a leisurely, coffee-accompanied weekend ritual of relaxation and information.
This scenario is impossible, however, for two practical reasons. First, I have a preschooler. Second, the local newspaper in Champaign–Urbana, The News-Gazette, is “restructuring” and thus, for now, will no longer deliver the Times or the Trib — not daily, not even on Sundays. (It’s also killing its Monday print edition.)
What’s becoming increasingly clear to me is that this is going to be the year — and possibly the decade — where the many interdependencies of the news industry come into full display, with particular consequences for the newspaper industry.
If newspaper chains are seeking mergers and economies of scale in a last-ditch effort to cut costs, it won’t happen without consequences, as Ken Doctor has been arguing here at Nieman Lab. At this point, it’s likely that we will see the full negative effects of what happens when this strategy crashes and burns, albeit in unexpected ways. And in particular, what we’ll see will remind us that that news is still an industrial process, with actual machinery, complex distribution systems, and a labor force that includes more than just journalists.
If we take systems theory as a guiding metaphor — as the Democracy Fund and other funders, scholars, and pundits do — inputs and outputs can have all sorts of negative and positive consequences. But all too often, we’ve focused our attention on the impacts of a news ecology in a single city or location, with a particular focus on audiences and what happens when the input of local news is threatened.
The growing nationalization of contemporary journalism points to all systems down. For now, I can see three major interdependencies falling apart in the short term horizon.
The New York Times suffers a bit if The News-Gazette won’t deliver it. That valuable weekender print-plus-digital subscription will take a hit, in a scenario that is likely repeating in markets across the country.
Some of us have mocked newspapers for spending millions on new printing presses deep into the audience’s move to digital, wondering what those fancy new presses would do even further into print’s decline.
What we don’t think enough about, though, is the fact that newspapers still make money from their print papers (full stop). And many local and regional newspapers make money printing everyone else’s newspapers on their presses — the Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times — and these agreements between large national outlets and local newspapers to print and deliver their news has been part and parcel what has helped enable the nationalization of these newspapers. (Obviously, there is the internet, but we’re talking about the long game.)
The deadlines agreements set at these local presses — likely hashed out by printers’ unions, industry honchos, and national papers — determines the print deadlines that the Times, the Journal, and so forth have to abide by.
Printing other people’s stuff using your technology is a bit like the old-school version of running a platform. National papers are dependent on these agreements to get their print newspapers to wider geographic communities. When the owners of the platform make a change, distribution to consumers gets disrupted. Some newspapers, like mine, will make the decision to drop these agreements to allow deeper cost-cutting (newspapers are industrial, requiring machinery, trucks, and labor), and in the process, I suppose I’ll now get my Sunday Times by mail or just give up on it.
There are also other issues as deadlines get tighter and press runs get maximized. The huge economies of scale in a giant chain like Gannett make it look ridiculous when it comes to say, failing to print out a timely celebratory print edition after a team wins a massive victory, as Nashville’s The Tennessean failed to do when Vanderbilt won the College World Series.
Years ago, when I was doing my research on newsrooms moving newsrooms, I visited The Miami Herald just as it was about to leave its beautiful, mid-century-modern headquarters on Biscayne Bay (which have been destroyed by a wrecking ball). My heart ached in that romantic way it can when it comes to change and newspapers: Why sell such a beautiful building?
There’s little room left for nostalgic romance in the newspaper industry, and one of the reasons McClatchy had to sell the building wasn’t about cutting expenses of current production — it’s about dealing with its debt. That debt came mostly in its poorly timed deal to buy Knight Ridder in 2006, including major pension obligations.
While I have no idea what happened to my Philadelphia Inquirer pension, my short employment stint there probably didn’t put much in my retirement coffers. But those from the 1980s “golden era” of newspapers who have reached retirement age have pensions, often established through strong union contracts (#okboomer). And even if you’re an Alden Capital gutting everything, there are strong legal protections against balking on pension payments (see the current scenario at GE, for example).
So here’s where systems crash — all the old debt that we Nieman Lab readers often forget about as we focus on content and trust and audience strategies and new technology. Old-school company debt — the kind that comes from raising capital to expand — isn’t always a bad thing. But pension debt in particular can’t be dispensed with as easily as a newspaper building or printing plant. The pension issue we can see now — but I wonder what other hidden debt exists that we have yet to really understand as weighing down companies.
Journalists aren’t the only ones losing their jobs at newspapers. Some of the most contingent labor is un-unionized newspaper carriers, who get paid by some newspapers by the number of copies they deliver.
I spent a night observing delivery drivers in Omaha after the newsroom ended its afternoon edition and shifted to a morning print delivery schedule, and my heart broke a little. Newspaper delivery is an ideal job for single moms — at least in the sense that no babysitter is required. At 1 a.m. on a weekday, a mom was bagging newspapers while her young son listened on headphones to Disney radio. He could come with her on her route, sleep in the car, and she wouldn’t need a sitter. He wasn’t the only kid around — a number of tweens were watching and occasionally helping their parents speed up the process.
Despite all my years of field research in newsrooms, I found myself ill-equipped to ask these people how they were dealing with cutbacks to their routes and thus, their bottom line. This level of fragility, delivering papers early in the morning to dark houses — this is the kind of fragility we need to think more about. A good year might add $10,000 to the household income, taxed, I was told.
Delivery drivers are now taping notes onto their newspapers about the cutbacks. I wish I still had my D.C.-area carrier’s Christmas card — talking about the cutbacks and the loss of income and not-so subtly asking for a bonus — to share here. Their visibility will grow, slowly, as we take notice to these cards, cues, and Post-It notes, and this contigent labor in the news industry deserve our attention.
It’s my guess that truck drivers will face the same fate, and that printers — in many cases kept employed by union contracts — will see many of these protections gutted and, perhaps, their unions dissolved.
College-educated journalists can find new jobs, even if they’re not in journalism. The way local news cutbacks hurt democracy is far more abstract than what happens to single moms making a few pennies off every newspaper they deliver.
Finally, we celebrate each and every new journalism job added to the news industry as a tangible marker of an effort to save democracy — especially when these are jobs that are bolstered by nonprofit efforts.
What will become increasingly clear is that these gains are at best a net zero for any local news ecology. If you look at any nonprofit that gets money from a big national funder, chances are good you’ll find someone at the helm who has worked at a major news outlet in the area. They’ve left their job at a newspaper or a TV station to go work at a non-profit or digital-first startup. This isn’t new blood for the news industry but journalism dialysis — old blood pumped back into the system for a fresh start. Think about The Athletic as emblematic of this trend, with all those great sports writers taken out of metro newspapers.
Perhaps we should count all the new, young hires that are coming into communities through Report for America and other efforts. But these young hires would have once been hired at a local community newspaper — new blood for a net gain of journalists, at best. The system as it stands is jostling resources and this will become increasingly clear as local news faces growing market pressure.
This, then, is my sober prediction for 2020: that the news industry taken as a system, as a whole, national and local, will start to suffer in increasingly obvious ways from the misfortunes of one of the inputs into it. In political coverage, we’re already feeling the effects of cuts — relied-upon local intel gone, statewide newspaper polls cut — and this too is evidence of national news suffering from local cutbacks.
I’ve just started thinking about this idea of the interdependency of news, national and local, and the more I think about it, the more worried I think we should all be.
Nikki Usher is an associate professor in the University of Illinois.
Lauren Duca The rise of the journalistic influencer
Sara K. Baranowski A big year for little newspapers
Don Day Respect the non-paying audience
Ben Werdmuller Use the tools of journalism to save it
Simon Galperin Journalism becomes more democratic
Felix Salmon Spotify launches a news channel
Meg Marco Everything happens somewhere
Matt DeRienzo Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers
Rachel Schallom The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates
Francesco Zaffarano TikTok without generational prejudice
Juleyka Lantigua A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions
Hossein Derakhshan AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris
Cindy Royal Prepare media students for skills, not job titles
Cristina Kim Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”
Logan Jaffe You don’t need fancy tools to listen
Jennifer Brandel A love letter from the year 2073
M. Scott Havens First-party data becomes media’s most important currency
Masuma Ahuja Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful
Sarah Schmalbach Journalist, quantify thyself
Kathleen Searles Pay more attention to attention
AX Mina The Forum we wanted, the forum we got
Helen Havlak Platforms shine a light on original reporting
Cory Haik We’re already consuming the future of news — now we have to produce it
Beena Raghavendran The year of the local engagement reporter
Dannagal G. Young Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart
Geneva Overholser Death to bothsidesism
Imaeyen Ibanga Let’s take it slow
Seth C. Lewis 20 questions for 2020
Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper Power to the people (on your audience team)
Emily Withrow The year we kill the news article
Margarita Noriega The platforms try to figure out what to do with single-subject newsrooms
Jakob Moll A slow-moving tech backlash among young people
Irving Washington Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job
Zizi Papacharissi A president leads, the press follows, reality fades
Ernie Smith The death of the industry fad
Josh Schwartz Publishers move beyond the metered paywall
Joni Deutsch Podcasting unsilences the silent
Eric Nuzum Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show
Knight Foundation Five generations of journalists, learning from each other
Annie Rudd The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph
Moreno Cruz Osório In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks
Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech
Bill Grueskin Our ethics codes get an overhaul
S. Mitra Kalita The race to 2021
Carl Bialik Journalists will try running the whole shop
Jeremy Olshan All journalism should be service journalism
Elizabeth Dunbar Frank talk, and then action
Nathalie Malinarich Betting on loyalty
Heidi Tworek The year of positive pushback
Stefanie Murray Charitable giving goes collaborative
Joshua P. Darr All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse
Richard Tofel A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges
Craig Newmark Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation
Tanya Cordrey Saying no to more good ideas
Pablo Boczkowski The day after November 4
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The business we want, not the business we had
Heather Bryant Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving
Raney Aronson-Rath News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions
Rick Berke Incoming fire from both left and right
Brian Moritz The end of “stick to sports”
Jonas Kaiser Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists
Lucas Graves A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters
Meredith Artley Stronger solidarity among news organizations
Kristen Muller The year we operationalize community engagement
Sarah Stonbely More people start caring about news inequality
Kourtney Bitterly Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation
Mira Lowe The year of student-powered journalism
Peter Bale Lies get further normalized
John Garrett It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization
Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young The promise of nonprofit journalism
Joanne McNeil A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)
Sarah Alvarez I’m ready for post-news
Rachel Davis Mersey The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide
Mariana Moura Santos The future of journalism is collaborative
Sonali Prasad Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional
Victor Pickard We reclaim a public good
Michael W. Wagner Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative
Steve Henn The dawning audio web
Mike Caulfield Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd
Tamar Charney From broadcast to bespoke
Sue Robinson Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments
Candis Callison Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change
Gordon Crovitz Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms
Nicholas Jackson What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support
Linda Solomon Wood Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal
J. Siguru Wahutu Western journalists, learn from your African peers
Fiona Spruill The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves
Jake Shapiro Podcasting gets listener relationship management
Sarah Marshall The year to learn about news moments
A.J. Bauer A fork in the road for conservative media
Jasmine McNealy A call for context
Tom Glaisyer Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful
Jeff Kofman Speed through technology
Mario García Think small (screen)
Jim Brady We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own
Christa Scharfenberg It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women
Joe Amditis Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table
Talia Stroud The work of reconnecting starts November 4
Kevin D. Grant The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth
Catalina Albeanu Rebuilding journalism, together
Laura E. Davis Know the context your journalism is operating within
Alana Levinson Brand-backed media gets another look
Barbara Gray Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement
Nushin Rashidian Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?
Bill Adair A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song
Dan Shanoff Sports media enters the Bronny era
Whitney Phillips A time to question core beliefs
Monique Judge The year to organize, unionize, and fight
Tonya Mosley The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends
Brenda P. Salinas Treating MP3 files like text
Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage
Doris Truong The year of radical salary transparency
John Keefe Journalism gets hacked
Ståle Grut OSINT journalism goes mainstream
Monica Drake A renewed focus on misinformation
Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor Think twice before turning to Twitter
Rachel Glickhouse Journalists get left behind in the industry’s decline
Matthew Pressman News consumers divide into haves and have-nots
Julia B. Chan We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏
Alice Antheaume Trade “politics” for “power”
Carrie Brown-Smith Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening
Greg Emerson News apps fall further behind
Anthony Nadler Clash of Clans: Election Edition
Errin Haines Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story
Alexandra Borchardt Get out of the office and talk to people
Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz News coverage gets geo-fragmented
Colleen Shalby Journalists become media literacy teachers
Nico Gendron Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z