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Feature

Throwing Print into the Volcano

How Corporate Greed & Incompetent Marketing, Not the Internet, is What’s Really Killing Print Media & Publishing

by Nina L. Diamond

Progress was a good thing once, but it went on too long. -- Ogden Nash

This morning I called a newspaper feature editor I’ve known for many years. He bought my articles when he worked at another paper. Then he was laid off. He was one of the lucky ones to find another job, and he’s been at this paper now for about 18 months. Last year, he bought another one of my articles.

He no longer has a freelance budget. Due to layoffs at his paper, he’s now doing the jobs of three people.

Well, at least his newspaper is still alive.

The same cannot be said for Colorado’s oldest newspaper, The Rocky Mountain News.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Denver paper published its last edition today, as I write this, Friday, February 27, 2009…just two months short of its 150th anniversary.

“Shall we have a moment of silence for The Rocky Mountain News?” I asked my editor friend when he answered his phone. I didn’t even bother to say hello, first.

The heaviness in his voice as he sighed was not unlike that of someone mourning a loved one.

That’s what the corporate owners don’t get.

To the suits, a newspaper, magazine or book publishing company is just a means to a financial end. An entity that sells some product. It doesn’t matter to the number crunchers what that product is as long as they can find a way to squeeze as high a profit from it as possible. An unrealistically high profit expectation for that kind of product. The kind of profit you can’t get without severely cutting what it has to offer, then gutting the entire operation.

And, then, finally, closing it down.

But, hey, what do they care? To them, it’s just another business turning out some kind of widget.

But, it’s not. It’s the press. And, gee, that’s only the cornerstone of a democracy.

Newspapers and magazines are the print press, and book publishers are an extension of our press. Television and radio news are the broadcast press. The Internet’s news sites are the newest members of the press family.

Profit and the press is an uneasy mix. Expecting high profit from the press will destroy its function and its credibility.

Owners have not always sought such high profits. They were on a mission, and that mission had very little to do with money. As for profit, they only wanted to pay the bills and have something left over.

They knew that pursuing high profits was the last thing they should be doing because high profits could only come at the expense of the press’ mission.

Because high profits could only come from putting financial considerations first and journalistic considerations last.

Because high profits meant that the sacred line that separated advertising from editorial could be crossed in the pursuit of said profits, leading the press to make editorial decisions based on advertising considerations.

The greed of media corporations has been slowly killing newspapers since the 1980s, long before the Internet even existed.

While the Internet has played a factor in the woes of all print media delivered via paper and ink, it is not the main factor, and anyone who says it is doesn’t want to admit the truth: Greed has been the serial killer.

Aided and abetted, of course, by a complete lack of marketing common sense and imagination when it came to competing with the Internet once it became a factor during the last decade.

Today’s corporate owners pay CEOs tens, often hundreds, of millions of dollars. That means that lining the CEO’s pocket is the first priority. No wonder there isn’t enough left to run the company properly. Ridiculously high profits wouldn’t be necessary if CEOs weren’t paid such exorbitant, company-destroying salaries and bonuses.

When there’s a death in the journalism family, this time an entire newspaper, you want to surround yourself with family, so after I hung up with my editor-who’s-lucky-his-paper’s-still-alive, I spent the next couple of days talking to some of my extended journalism family of the past 25-plus years (we all worked together in the ‘80s at South Florida magazine) about the challenges confronting the print, broadcast, and Internet media, and book publishers.

And about the solutions.

“There is room for both newspapers and the Internet,” says Erica Rauzin, a Miami-based freelance editor who does print and Internet, and who began her career as a reporter at The St. Petersburg Times, and then went on to be the Editor of the award-winning South Florida magazine. “Newspapers have a mission.”

Erica comes from a journalism family. One of her brothers is a magazine writer and an author, her mother was a radio journalist, and her father, Sylvan Meyer, was one of the last of the great newspapermen.

He was a reporter, a columnist, the Editor of a large daily paper in Georgia, then the Editor of The Miami News, the Publisher and Founding Editor of South Florida magazine (originally called Miami Magazine), and one of the creators of Florida International University’s School of Journalism.

When he retired in 1987, he sold South Florida magazine. The new corporate owners gutted its strong journalistic content. Then, in the '90s, they swiftly turned it into a shallow, thin, dumbed-down, useless waste of paper. They removed its strong regional focus and re-named it Miami Metro.

Losing readership, substance and credibility along this sad journey, the magazine finally died in the early 2000s.

It took the same terrible route that so many other once-fine magazines and newspapers have taken under corporate ownership during the last 20 years.

When her father was a newspaper editor, “there was competition then,” Erica says, noting that so many cities had two or more daily newspapers. “That makes reporters and editors sharper and even more careful.”

Before large conglomerates replaced individual owners of most daily newspapers, journalism was the primary mission, not huge profits. And in that system, “newspapers knew they were helping to change the world. In the 1950s and ‘60s it was some newspapers in the south and civil rights. In the 1970s it was The Washington Post and Watergate,” Erica says, citing just two of many examples.

Maureen Glabman, a Miami-based freelance magazine and newspaper writer who began her career as a reporter for Long Island’s Newsday, and then went on to editorial positions at South Florida magazine, and a business column at The Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, laments the death of newspapers’ book coverage, as book critics lose their jobs and are not replaced, and as newspapers’ stand-alone book sections die.

“The New York Times Book Review is the only one left now, isn’t it?” she sighs.

David C. Perry, a freelance art director, has a unique perspective: he’s been part of the Canadian press and the American. In the 1970s, he was a book designer at McClelland & Stewart, one of Canada’s largest book publishers; then the assistant art director at Maclean’s Magazine, the Canadian news magazine that can be compared to the U.S.’s Time or Newsweek. In the 1980s, he was the Art Director at StarWeek, The Toronto Star newspaper’s television magazine, then the Art Director at South Florida magazine.

(In the interest of full disclosure, he’s also my ex, but in the many years since we’ve been a private team, we’ve continued to be a professional team and he even designed the cover of my second book, Voices of Truth.)

“Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, were the economic concerns or profit goals of the parent companies or individual owners of the newspapers and magazines you worked for in Canada and the U.S. ever made a concern of the journalists who worked there?” I ask David.

I already know the answer to this question.

“In a word: no,” he says. “The advertising sales people were trying to make money. We were trying to be good journalists. And the line in the sand between editorial and advertising was more like a wall.”

A wall that, unfortunately crumbled bit by bit over the last 20 years as editorial decisions began to be made more and more with the approval of advertisers in mind.

“Now, it’s very unfortunate that these industries (newspapers, magazines, book publishing, broadcast news) have been redefined as just another entity in the big corporate empire. The press and publishing deserve the respect and separate treatment that come with dealing with precious resources: the truth and creativity.”

Now based in Philadelphia, his community is directly impacted by a media problem that was well underway many years before our current global economic meltdown.

“I get so sad when I see the demise of newspapers. Just this week, the new owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News declared bankruptcy,” he says. “And a company that owns a lot of local community papers declared bankruptcy the week before that.”

A self-professed computer geek, David is quick to say, “I’m willing to accept progress and I do read a lot of news online, but, absolutely, there’s room for both Internet and paper.”

Each plays a distinct role.

“The Internet is a great interactive medium, but unless you have a screen the size of a billboard it’s not good for anything you want to see on a big screen.”

Reading from a screen, he agrees, can be hard on your eyes and concentration after a few minutes, and Internet sites, even the best-designed ones, can be a dizzying mass of confusion.

“For journalism – digging much deeper than you have time for in a TV sound bite, or space for in the typical online article – you need print newspapers and magazines,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of synergy available between paper and the Internet, for each to do what each does best.”

Unlike American book publishing, Canadian publishing companies have long put quality and creativity above unrealistic, huge profit.

“Canada has grants and tax incentives that help support its journalism, media, and publishing industries,” he explains. “These industries have great cultural significance. Canada has a tradition of supporting the arts, media and publishing because, if left strictly to the marketplace, certain valuable cultural resources would be threatened.”

Yeah, like, oh, let’s see…the truth, reliable information, quality, creativity…

We have all been in journalism, the media, and publishing long enough to have been witnesses to unprecedented changes. Some good, most bad.

When I finished going down memory lane with some of my old journalism family, I called Kristina Borjesson, the New Jersey-based, two-time IPPY Award-winner for her books Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Prometheus Books, 2004) and Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11 (Prometheus Books, 2005), whom I’ve gotten to know in the years since her second IPPY. She has been an investigative journalist and producer for more than 25 years, and her extensive credentials include CNN, CBS, an Emmy, and a Murrow award.

She also has two kids: a son in the military and a daughter in college.

“Kids today are different,” she says. “They are, literally, mutations of us. I’m not kidding. They want everything to be audio/visual, and anything they read they want to read on a screen.”

Is that because they were brought up on a diet of computer screens and few books and little paper? Have they adapted to that in the way little critters in the woods take on the look of their surroundings so they won’t be noticed and eaten by predators?

Has environment triggered another evolutionary step?

Kristina thinks so, and adds that “our evolution is happening quicker and quicker.”

Within just a couple of generations, in less than 40 years, she says, people may be so plugged into their devices that it will be as if they have merged with them. Paper might just be that stuff in the museums.

And those of us who actually used paper and read things on paper will be long gone.

But, maybe it won’t be that way. If we don’t let paper be murdered. Or if we don’t intentionally or unintentionally kill it.

“When the Internet was already a presence, both TV and newspapers spent a lot of time saying, ‘You can’t trust anyone on the Internet, you can only trust us,’ instead of thinking about how they could get on the Internet and monetize it,” Kristina says.

So, newspapers give away the daily paper for free on the Internet and only charge for some archival material. Magazines give most, if not all, of their print content away for free on the Internet. Readers don’t have to pay for a print newspaper or magazine anymore when they can get it online for free.

Since the mid-1990s, in order to increase profits, newspapers have been drastically scaling back what they offer in their print versions. Since the early 2000s, when the Internet became a viable news presence, newspapers have been driving readers to their online versions with the promise of more content online. And they deliver on that promise. Except for what’s been permanently cut from newspapers (whether print or online), including Sunday magazines, foreign bureaus, investigative reporters, general and specialty reporters, book sections, and plenty more.

Most of those cuts were actually made prior to the rise of the Internet.

And then they blame the Internet, alone, for killing paper.

In the end, the corporate greed didn’t even end up serving the greedy. The corporations have lost not just their shirts, but pretty much everything else. This backfired on them, as greed always does. Some people made some money in the short term, but most lost big-time in the long run. That’s what happens when corporations pillage and loot, and commit economic violence upon even their own property.

Everyone remembers how, famously and stupidly, the “experts” and the press predicted the death of movies and radio when television came along and hooked the world.

Well, movies and radio didn’t die, they thrived, each having their own place in the ever-growing media universe.

Movies on video and DVD didn’t kill the movie theaters, either, contrary to the next wave of idiot predictions.

The Internet won’t kill print media and books. But, print media and book publishing might commit suicide by throwing themselves into the volcano as a terrified sacrifice to what they believe is the Internet God.

We shouldn’t have to decide between computer and paper. We can have both.

After all, shouldn’t progress give us more choices, not fewer ones?

* * * * *

Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction

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