Paper Cut
County news sources dwindle with the death of the Beacon and shrinking Times-Standard
(Dec. 8, 2011) In retrospect, Humboldt Beacon Editor Franklin Stover says there were plenty of warning signs for the 110-year-old newspaper. Even back in 2006, when he was hired as a reporter for the Eel River Valley weekly, he thought the subscription numbers (roughly 1,700 at the time) seemed troublingly low. And they’ve been falling ever since. This past year the drop-off was precipitous. The children of elderly subscribers kept calling to say their mother or father had died, please cancel the subscription. And it didn’t seem like MediaNews Group, the Denver-based parent company of the Beacon, was doing much to help matters.
Still, when Publisher Dave Kuta told him last Monday that the Beacon would be shut down and his job eliminated, Stover wasn’t prepared.
“I was stunned,” he said last week. “I still am stunned. It’s a weird thing how you can know, how you can sense something happening for a long time, but you look the other way and deny what’s happening.”
Many have accused the entire newspaper industry of the same thing — looking the other way as advertisers and readers flock to the Internet. Newsroom staffs across the country have been slashed, delivery routes eliminated, and venerable dailies like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News have abandoned print altogether.
After buying up newspapers left and right, the Dean Singleton-led MediaNews Group declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. When its holding company, Affiliated Media, emerged from reorganization it held roughly $165 million in debt (down from $930 million) and owned 57 daily newspapers and more than 100 non-dailies in 11 states.
For all his empire-building, Singleton was a notorious penny-pincher. The Times-Standard‘s newsroom staff dwindled from 24 full-time employees when I worked there in 2007-08 (when the Eureka Reporter was serving as a crosstown rival) to 18 today. And the company’s new majority stockholders, led by Bank of America, are cinching the belt even tighter.
The same day that he announced the Beacon‘s closure, Kuta also told staff that the Times-Standard — the Beacon‘s parent publication and the only remaining countywide daily — will stop printing Monday editions after Jan. 2. A full-time Times-Standard photographer, Josh Jackson, also was laid off. Kuta said the decisions were made locally after he was asked to reduce expenses.
The Times-Standard seems to have come down with the wasting disease that’s devouring daily papers nationwide. Is the prognosis fatal?
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Today
44th Annual Kinetic Grand Championship Race
STAFF PICK / events, art, outdoors, sports, for kids, free / 9 a.m.-6 p.m. A 3-day, 42-mile kinetic sculpture race over land, sand, mud and water! LeMans start at the Noon Whistle on the Arcata Plaza. Follow the race through Manila, Eureka and into Ferndale on Memorial Day for the Glorious Finish. kineticgrandchampionship.com. 889-3024.
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Lanphere Dunes Restoration
STAFF PICK / outdoors / 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Meet at Pacific Union School. Help remove non-native invasives at the Lanphere Dunes Unit of the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Tools and gloves provided, wear work clothes and bring water. Carpool to the protected site. 444-1397.
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SIX Comments
Comment / By A Larger Reality / Dec. 8, 2:36 p.m.
No story about contemporary media can omit the lack of relevance and outright censorship plaguing the industry, or the story becomes irrelevant itself.
Bookshelves groan with research on the subject.
When community newspapers lost focus on the daily issues suffered by working families, (like the labor section that once graced nearly every paper), they stopped buying it.
What a shame.
Comment / By Mike / Dec. 9, 7:34 a.m.
Printed paper media will go the way of 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and DVDs. The rise of the Kindle will bring about the death of the paperback novel first and eventually all forms of paper publishing. It will all become fully digital. It’s inevitable.
Paying for digital news will only work when blogs are gone and we know they aren’t going away. Ultimately, all digital news will be mostly free, just as it is now. The old model of taking money on both ends (from subscribers and advertisers) can only work in a world without the internet.
As to censorship, it will always be with us; either censorship because of personal bias (often intentional, often not) and advertiser demanded censorship. There is no such animal as an unbiased story.
Comment / By Mitch / Dec. 9, 8:13 a.m.
Just to add to Mike’s comment, I’d thought that the money collected from subscribers was used to pay much of the cost of actually printing and distributing the newspaper, while the money collected from advertisers was where the business end of the newspaper made its money.
The cost of internet distribution is negligible compared to the cost of paper distribution. There is no reason to charge for the internet product if it carries advertising.
The North Coast Journal is a clear example of an entity able to run its business on advertising revenue, without getting an additional penny from the typical reader.
There are also an increasing number of outfits that do journalism without needing to be funded by advertising, and periodicals that relegate advertising to the back pages, getting some revenue from the advertisers but putting them where they belong. These, I think, are the remaining hope for journalism.
Comment / By A Larger Reality / Dec. 10, 12:20 p.m.
“Censorship has always been with us.”
However, with 5 companies owning 80% the censorship has become unprecedented.
We learned from China’s response to their recent Han/Weegan riots that an entire nation’s internet and satellite communications can be shut down in a matter of hours.
Comment / By Mike / Dec. 10, 11:53 p.m.
Actually, censorship is far less prevalent today than any time in the previous history of the world. The forms that censorship now takes are quite benign compared to past forms. The interruption of cellular and IP-based communications are indeed censorship, but they certainly pale in comparison to book burning and executions. Censorship in our country has never gained the footing that it did in Europe and Asia. Partly because our country’s formation happened after much of the battle for free speech, thought and press had been waged.
“The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely.” The National Assembly of France, 1789.
Our First Amendment rights were modeled on this National Assembly edict.
Another contributor to the mass communications censorship we’ve seen lately (in response to Arab Spring and other protests) is due in large part to national control and ownership of these communications in many other countries. This is not to be compared with our FCC. The FCC runs a licensing scam, and though it gives the impression of control, it’s not the same as countries whose governments own the infrastructure for these communications.
I don’t believe that censorship has become unprecedented in modern times. I believe it was far more sinister in the past. That is not to say that we should turn a blind eye to censorship just because its forms are now different. However, it seems to me that we are freer now to express ourselves that ever before.
Comment / By Franklin Stover / Today, 1:11 p.m.
I think your article was fine and on target. Thanks for mentioning.