Welcome to the February Health & Medicine issue of NorthBay biz magazine. We’re at the beginning of another New Year. Optimism and good intentions rule the day. If you’re like me, you’ve (once again) made resolutions to improve your life that you’re determined to keep. However, having gone down that road too many times before only to be bummed out in March by my lack of will power, I’ve decided to make a resolution I know I can keep. This year, I resolve to gain 10 pounds. I’m pretty sure I can get that done—and if I really try, I can be there by March.
From coast to coast and every big city in between, major metro daily newspapers are struggling to maintain relevance due to shrinking readership and plunging advertising revenues. This isn’t new—it’s a phenomenon that’s been proceeding incrementally for more than 20 years. At one point in my publishing career, I was the classified advertising manager for the Chicago Sun Times and competed against the Chicago Tribune, which boasted superior circulation numbers, especially in the affluent suburbs. On any given Sunday back then, the Trib would run an 80-page help wanted section that averaged about $80,000 per page in ad revenue. Not bad huh? More than $6 million in revenue every Sunday from just one ad section. Metro dailies across the country shared in this revenue bonanza for decades.
As the Internet grew, newspaper’s help wanted business began to shrink, slowly at first and then rapidly, as did automotive and real estate advertising. Newspaper’s three-legged cash cow—classified advertising—had fallen on hard times. As revenues plummeted, the industry reacted by reducing expenses. After several years of cuts, the fat was long gone from the operations but, still searching for a way to return to the days of 35 percent operating margins, the cuts continued, this time into muscle and bone. Newsrooms were eviscerated without regard to the immediate and long-term damage being done to the core product or, apparently, readership.
But something else was occurring simultaneously. Spurred by the emergent Internet, Fox news and alternative media, the big three legacy television networks also saw their strangle hold on news dissemination weakening. Suddenly, they weren’t the default option for electronic news consumption. The proliferation of cable channels did to them what the Internet had done to newspapers.
In many ways, these big media companies operated as monopolies, largely free to set policy, rates and choose editorial content at the sole discretion of a news editor (with the blessing of ownership that shared the same ideology). Under the guise of being the public’s watchdog, their mission was to expose corruption and defend the powerless. How better to position themselves and their work as above reproach? They were—and are—blind to their own arrogance, corruption and bias. In fact, their slanted news coverage helped create the proliferation of alternate media with which they now compete. As they rail about their essential role in trying to ensure honest government through their news coverage, what they do instead is support and promote an agenda whether its honest or not.
At the crux of this are the everyday editorial decisions on not only what to cover, but how to cover it. Even more insidious than choosing what to cover in support of a particular ideology are the choices of what news not to cover. Burying a breaking story or failing to give it the continuing coverage it merits over time effectively reduces its top-of-mind awareness for readers or viewers. Charges of media bias, especially in political coverage in an election year, have been leveled against news organizations for decades. As time has passed, it’s become easier to detect in mainstream media because of the proliferation of other news outlets that don’t bother to hide their affiliations and comparisons become obvious.
When you look at the steep decline in readers of major metro newspapers across the country, I believe there’s more in play than just competition from the Internet. Simply put, many people just got fed up with the spin woven into every edition, every day, and quit buying the paper. The same thing goes for the (former) big three TV networks: People simply stopped tuning in, because they felt they weren’t getting an impartial reporting of events, but rather a too scripted report reflecting opinion.
There’s certainly a place for opinion in print and on TV, but it’s on the editorial pages and in “opinion” columns and reports—not on page one or woven throughout the 11 p.m. news. If news organizations stopped peddling their biased viewpoint and instead just delivered the who, what, why, where and how of things, maybe their former audience would begin to return.
That’s it for now. Happy New Year.
