The Slow Death of American Newspapers

I love newspapers! Not the kind you find on your computer screen, but the kind you can hold in your hand and on a Sunday morning, sit in your easy chair with a steaming cup of coffee, lean back, relax and read to your heart's content.

I fell in love with newspapers while stationed at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard on Hunter's Point in the San Francisco Bay. As a new fan of the San Francisco 49ers, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the Monday San Francisco Chronicle to follow the latest exploits of Y.A. Tittle, Leo "The Lion" Nomelini, Bob St. Claire, Joe "The Jet" Perry, and "Hustling Hugh" McElhenny.

Along the way I started to read and enjoy the rest of the Chronicle. I became hooked on Herb Caen and his Bagdad by the Bay daily column. His insight into what was happening on the streets of San Francisco also caused me to fall in love with "The City," as it was known by the insiders. And inadvertently, I became a newspaper columnist because of Herb Caen.

After leaving "The City" I never lost my love of newspapers. I returned home to South Dakota and found newspapers that were totally ignoring a large portion of the state's population, the Indian people. There was no connection between the residents of the Indian reservations and the editors of the larger dailies and weeklies. It seemed to me that the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota speakers in South Dakota were "out of sight and out of mind."

Most of the news about Native Americans was in the "Police Blotter" or in the court reports. In fact, the editor of one weekly newspaper in a community that bordered an Indian reservation got his "Indian news" by sending a reporter to scan the courthouse records on Monday morning. Since most Indians in South Dakota have distinct names such as Poor Bear, Eagle Elk, Lays Bad, etc., it was no problem for the white readers to immediately identify anyone involved in a criminal act as "Indian." The deduction: most people involved in crimes are Indian, therefore all Indians are criminals. That white perception of Indians was very strong in the 1960s, 70s, and even into the 80s and 90s.

I started an Indian-owned weekly newspaper, The Lakota Times (now Indian Country Today), 30 years ago to bring an end to that misperception of the Native people in this state.

It hurts me to see some of the newspapers I love falling on hard times. Income and circulation has fallen dramatically and giant newspaper conglomerates like Gannett and Lee Enterprises are cutting their news staffs to the bone. Sadly, I can see where this all started.

About 14 years ago I attended a convention of the National Newspaper Association in New York City. Of course the publishers of all of the major newspapers in America were in attendance. The keynote speaker at that convention was Bill Gates of Microsoft. Later I asked the president of the NNA why they chose Gates as their speaker. I told him that I believed the Internet would become the greatest enemy of newspapers. He scoffed at me and angrily dismissed my concern.

Even as my weekly newspaper, Indian Country Today, continued to grow, I refused to put it on the Internet. I figured, and I believe quite correctly, that if readers could get the paper free on the Internet, they would not subscribe to it. And I think that in an effort to keep up with technology, the decision by newspaper publishers to put their newspapers on the Net has been the cause of their continuing decline. When I sold Indian Country Today it was not on the Internet and it had a weekly circulation of 24,000. It is now on the Internet and its weekly circulation has declined to 7,000.

The "Old Gray Lady" of newspapers, the New York Times, is now suffering because their publisher chose to put the paper on the Internet. The bean counters at the Times discovered too late that the paper could not make the money on advertising on the Internet that it made the old fashioned way, by placing ads in the newspaper itself. They soon found that no advertiser would pay the price of an ad placed in the newspaper for an ad on the Internet. And advertising is the life's blood of the newspaper industry.

The Internet is doing what radio and television could not do: it is killing the American newspaper. And until every newspaper publisher in this country rebels and says "No, we are not going to put our newspaper on the Net," the slow death of newspapers will continue.

Of course, that is just the opinion of an old newspaper publisher, a man who loved nothing better than to walk into his newspaper office in the early morning and smell the intoxicating odor of freshly drying ink as the presses rolled in the printing department.

Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, was born, raised and educated on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He was the founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association and the founder and publisher of Indian Country Today, the Lakota Times, and the Dakota/Lakota Journal. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in the Class of 1991. He can be reached at [e-mail]

© 2008 Native American Journalists Foundation, Inc.

Comments

[Nishnabe]

Yipee, Tim Giago is one of the best Native American writers on the scene. Although I don't always agree with his opinions, HuffPo should be including Native writers and Giago is a wise first choice. My father's education was a casualty of the Great Depression and he had to leave school in the eighth grade. So, he self-educated with newspapers. As kids we had to be able to read and understand the three newspapers to which he subscribed. No religion or politics at the dinner table? Not in our house. Dad demanded we know the news stories of the day. Two of my siblings had learning disabilities (dyslexia) but my dad's insistence that they read the papers helped them go on to become successes. All of us continue to read the paper in hard copy. I teach university students and insist they read and bring the stories of the day to class. BTW, before that, only one in 20 students even read a newspaper in paper or on-line. The problem is not the internet. The problem is a failure of the educational system to teach students to know the stories of the day. Thanks HuffPo, and thanks Tim for all you do.

[larry278]

Publishers of newspapers have grown accustomed to being revolting & publishing newspapers which are revolting; one could say that they are fat, dumb & happy. The publishers won't revolt or learn. They will simply cease publication & cash out by selling their real estate, junk the presses & sell their delivery trucks [if they hadn't contracted out delivery & distribution]. The publishers will fire their employees. Some former reporters will supply blogs to web sites as independent contractors, stringers or free lance writers.
The reporters may choose to route their stories through former editors who will fact check & edit the stories to sell to web sites. The former editors will be a de facto clearing house & wholesaler of stories to the web. That's right the clearing house will get a better fee for the stories they process than whomever wrote the stories. The stories processed by the editors at a web clearing house will be more valuable than the unprocessed raw stories a reporter might try to sell directly to a web site because of editing & fact checking. The difference between what a clearing house pays for a raw story & what a web site pays for a processed story will be the profit. That's called capitalism.

[sKate]

I don't deny feeling sentimental about the printed newspaper. People hold many memories dear: the thud of the paper landing on their doorstep, man's best friend bringing it in and laying it at your feet, and the shout of the newsboy on the corner. Wait, the newsboy has been gone for decades. Nothing left but the newsboy hat.
Who will understand the lyrics of "American Pie" when newspapers are gone?
Reality check: the intoxicating odor of freshly drying ink is also toxic. Newspaper publishers can say "no" to the internet as you suggest. But other online publications will take their place and the publishers themselves may kill the American newspaper.
If it's the content you love as you say, applaud the immediacy with which you can bring content to readers on the Internet. Applaud the number of people you can reach in your community and far away.
Advertisers are abandoning newspapers because of the inability to target customers as they can on the Internet. A single banner ad may not cost as much as a print ad, but an online newspaper can run so many more of them. Advertisers are also jumping ship because the readers are too.
The American newspaper will not die, just the crappy, awkward, messy printed version.
sKate
www.moonfun.net

[TruthAndTheory]

In addition, online newspapers save tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of trees. While I love printed papers, I love saving our enrivonment more.

[TruthAndTheory]

I agree, that a lot of ads are lost online. For example, you don't know about any local stores having sales. You can't find out when the flea market starts up again. You can't print a manifesto from a Unabomber online. But if the Times didn't move to an online environment, then people would just go online and read whatever newspaper was up there for free.

I miss newspapers too. But maybe if e-ink makes fast inroads, we can have something like an actual newspaper again?

[TRYKER]

We were spoiled when Newspapers actually delivered NEWS and HONESTLY reported what the govt was doing in its scams upon the American people.
These last 8 years, when we were fed lie upon lie and were led far astray from the truth, the newspapers signed their own death warrants. The only way the internet is responsible for the papers' demise is that it provided truth where it existed, thereby exposing the papers' falsity and worthlessness.
During a time when there were Pulitzer Prize winning stories to be written about the corruption in govt and finance, we got fluff that sickened us. We were damn insulted. We don't have to buy their bullsh*t. DUH!
Media conglomeration and corporate interference made newspapers just another scam on the people. Too bad.

[Right-turn]

It's called progress or change.......get used to it. I hope they do stop putting their content on the internet, they will die even faster that way.

[richchaplin]

20 years ago, back when no one had even heard of AOL, newspapers were already losing readers. The problem was then -- and is now -- really simple: More Choice vs. Same Amount of Time.

Of course, it didn't seem simple at the time. At the Orange County Register where I worked back then, we were making the weather page color and paid a large graphics department to produce eye-catching designs (they WERE great). To no avail.

As more channels sprung up on TV, and videotapes of movies appeared at neighborhood stores, consumers of information voted with their eyes away from newspapers. Who has time to read when you could watch Star Wars and Deep Throat in your own home? And isn't SportsCenter on?

The internet only exascerbated a already existing problem: Media glut.

[stephanemot]

when I pick up my IHT copy in front of my door around 7:30 am, I've already read a few articles (during the prez campaign, quite a big chunk of it).

yet there is much more, hidden gems, a perspective, a context, an obsolete but precious panoramic snapshot of news and opinions, formatted for a different reader.

[Mavin1620]

The real financial issue with newspapers is the cost of investors buying them. Sam Zell broke the economic back of the Trib and LA Times by overpaying in the first place, then trying to make them pay off his debt as well as support themselves. It is pure budgeting. It is time to say "enough" to this practice.

Also, Newspapers are sort of boring. I would like to read about local news and gossip, and that is hard to get from them. Plus there are all the dead trees.

I hope that the Christian Science Monitor has it right.

[redbow40]

The cause of this has become clear. A media that writes about social issues the public doesn't care about. The intentional misleading of the public to support causes that actually harm the public well being. The telling of lies to protect and support mult-national corporations, while working people are getting the shaft.

[MyTake]

Excellent comment.

[ButteJbyrd]

I, too, will miss the "paper" papers, but I now have my morning coffee in front of a laptop where I can pursue coverage from all over the world. But as someone who spent a career at small town papers, I worry about local coverage. No one's yet come up with a model to pay the reporters, photographers and editors to objectively get the stories that bloggers blog about online. A big reason for the demise of newspapers is that coverage today reflects the interests of the advertisers who pay the bills instead of the reader. Coverage of Indian country was always hurt because traditional papers saw few revenue sources from reservation advertisers, so it was more efficient to just ignore Indian country. And some Indian-centric papers were subject to economic retribution if their coverage offended tribal officials. People want their news for free, but you really do get what you pay for.
Disclosure: I worked for Mr. Giago at Indian Country Today in the 1990s and am today no longer pursuing the news, along with some 50,000 of my journalism colleagues who have lost their jobs in the past two years.

[Netizen]

Prediction: There will be "newspaper" like devices ... same or similar size .. foldable .. page turning (as in Target "Weekly Ads") .. and downloadable in the same way the Kindle is. It's only a matter of time before technology melds the good old-fashioned tactile newspaper with digital technology. And these devices will be better than regular newspapers, because they will be able to display newspapers from around the world, with up-to-the minute coverage, etc. Newspapers will rise again, without the toxic and intoxicating smell of ink that gets all over EVERYTHING.

[sandiaview]

The cause of death of American papers is the undeniable dumbing down of the public and the lack of commitment to education for kids in their pre-school age. Poor readers and uneducated people don't read.

[larry278]

How do you account for the popularity of the www? There's a rumor that many users of the www can & do read.
People who do read don't read lousy papers.