Here's another reason why we need diverse news reporting. See this article, part 5 in a series published by the alternative weekly newspaper the Nashville Scene, about what happened when Gannett took over the Nashville Tennessean. Excerpts:
But [the publisher] had made his point: Any manager at the paper who isn't doing what it takes to deliver profits to Gannett Co. had better beware. Based in Arlington, Va., the publicly traded Gannett is the parent company of The Tennessean....
Posting the kind of profit margins that The Tennessean does and putting out an exceptional paper, they say, are mutually exclusive enterprises.
...
Yet, like many publishers across the country, he generates high profits with a mediocre newspaper. That's precisely what industry experts say such high profits invariably bring: an average to poor product. Newspapers become exceptional, they say, only when publishers are willing to sacrifice profits to invest in the news product.
Here is where it really gets interesting:
According to internal Gannett documents obtained by the Scene, The Tennessean turned in pretax profit margins of 30.6 percent in 1994, 32 percent in 1995, 32.4 percent in 1996, and 35.2 percent in 1997. The profit margin shot up after the Nashville Banner, the city's afternoon newspaper, ceased operations in early 1998. Using conservative estimates for the subsequent 1997 to 2000 period, The Tennessean more recently has posted annual operating profits in the $65 million to $70 million range, with margins near 40 percent. (See the chart, "The Tennessean's Estimated Financial Performance," on p. 28.) And these numbers don't include income from ancillary businesses the paper has established, including, for example, online enterprises.Gannett tries to keep the profits and revenues of its 114 daily newspapers under tight wraps. And for good reason. Increasing rates on local advertisers would be trickier if it were known how much money individual newspapers were earning. Furthermore, such profits might be hard to reconcile with the image Gannett cultivates as a public-spirited corporate citizen in the communities where the company has papers.
Such openness and transparency! Anyway, I wonder how profitable the Argus Leader is each year? Now note this bit of unconventional thinking:
The logic is simple: If The Tennessean's news content is second-rate, people won't buy the paper. This lowers circulation, and low circulation turns off advertisers.
The audacity of it: a better product leads to more buyers! I know several people who don't subscribe to the Argus Leader because they think it's a poor newspaper and because they detest the bias (I can't give it up, however, because I like a hard copy of the morning news and I'm an historian/pack rat/news clipper, after all, but I see their point). Even the managing editor of the Argus has said "Since time eternal, it seems, people in Sioux Falls have been complaining about the Argus Leader, our daily newspaper." Anyway, it seems to me that if I was Executive Editor Randell Beck and wanted to impress the bosses at Gannett I'd take some serious steps to improve the paper and thereby the paper's image and thereby the paper's circulation, instead of calling any criticism of his paper "crap" generated by "violent" "yahoos" and playing the Hitler card. Instead, he allows the bias to persist and the community animosity to grow and the crisis to deepen. If the former editor of The New Republic and the biggest blogger in the country were making of sport of me, I think I'd admit that I faced serious problems, disclose those problems to the public, and adopt reforms. A better product would lessen the unrelenting criticism and might boost sales and make the boss happy.
Comments