The State of America's Newspapers

...For one thing, American newspapers suffer from the same bland-ness that has overtaken hotel chains and fast-food restaurants...

...Now that the American-Statesman has the monopoly the offices are housed in an unbelievably opulent structure...

...Some of this movement, of course, was inside a chain...

...It would be a news-in-review tabloid focusing on politics and finance...

...After a while, I started to think of the cities I was calling on only in terms of their hierarchical affiliations...

...I'll get back to you on that" was how most financial discussions abruptly ended, as though the editor had to poll the shareholders before spending $125...

...Both the Bulletin and the Cleveland Press picked up readers during their last days, but it wasn't enough...

...The image of a monopoly press was brought home to me by the omnipresence of the large newspaper chains...

...Time and again in my travels I found allegedly competing newspapers in the same building, their staffs separated either by an office partition or a floor-hardly the stuff of which newspaper wars are made...

...But the company's big ambition is to get a head start in the coming market for mobile (cellular) phone service by setting up service in several cities...

...The offices of the top editors looked down on the freight yards that once belonged to the Pennsylvania Railroad...

...Even if USA Today is the Holiday Inn of newspapers-readers know what they'll get no matter where they are-its circulation success is the first direct challenge to many monopoly journalists across the country...

...In five months of travel, I got as far north and west as the Anchorage Times and Anchorage Daily News...

...The first question the editor asked me was: "How long do you expect to be in business...

...No exceptions, even if the story is several thousand words long...

...In fact, so many editors have come to rely on both the Times and the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post service that the New York Times and the Washington Post have launched national editions...

...and as far east as the Providence Journal...

...Gannett launched the national newspaper on September 15, 1982 in five cities...

...The San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle is produced joirly by the Hearst Corporation and the Chronicle Publishing Co., and includes sections independently edited by the San Francisco Chronicle...

...poured an estimated $60 million into the Washington Star and even that couldn't save it...

...But quickly I learned that the last thing on any editor's mind-in Dallas or elsewhere-is news...

...Once they lost their ability to sell advertising, they became expendable...

...I met with editors of every rank and description, and most were extremely generous with their time, if not with their purchases...

...Time Inc...

...The Hearst chain has the habit of moving its talented young editors from city to city...

...One part of it, the afternoon metros in the older cities, can get in trouble, but it was never as bad as it was painted...

...There are probably few professions whose work force is as mobile as that of newspapers...

...If the agreement is approved, the Times will drop some of its early-morning editions to give the Post-Intelligencer a break in the morning, while Hearst will drop its Sunday edition, except for one of those independently edited inserts...

...The Rocky Mountain News pays $65 for outside contributions...

...Twenty-three cities now have both their papers run by some form of a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA...

...the New York Herald Tribune isn't that city's second newspaper- Rupert Murdoch's Post is...

...Los Angeles Times/Washington Post...

...For the officers, safely removed from the action in their big glass corporate headquarters, newspapers are part of a fleet and, unfortunately, one occasionally hits an iceberg of low profitability...

...The rest are, in the words of A.J...

...My education began in Dallas with visits to the Morning News, the self-proclaimed leading newspaper of the Southwest, and the Times Herald, a colonial holding in the Times Mirror empire...

...Often these estate taxes are based on the newspaper's market value, and as communication companies often sell at high price/earnings multiples, this value can be greater than that of the paper...

...This peripatetic tendency was summed, up to me in Dallas by an editor at the Times-Herald, who in his brief career had worked in as many cities as Alvin Dark, the baseball manager, did in his: "You can't shoot a moving target...

...Certainly the early success, at least with circulation, of USA Today points to the weaknesses of numerous daily papers...

...and, like the railroads after the war, they are going through a period of intense consolidation...

...The rest of the paper is a crisp division of news, weather, and sports-presented for quick perusal by Americans on the run...

...In the winter of 1981-82, as part of my job as one of the directors of a newspaper syndicate, I visited the offices of more than fifty newspapers...

...A twenty-fourth, Seattle, was approved by the Justice Department but subsequently blocked by a federal judge...

...I can't help thinking that many of these losses could have been avoided...

...Because of their levels of concentration, the newspapers might well be a regulated industry, even though, officially, there is no Interstate Commerce Commission to adjust rates and apportion routes...

...Odd as it may seem, many owners don't know why they want to own a newspaper, beyond the obvious reason of making money...

...These wires pour into a newspaper's mainframe computer daily-wire editors are best thought of as flood-control experts-so all you need to worry about is keeping the word processors in working order...

...If there were books in the office, I don't remember them...

...If it wins the desired FCC franchises, system development would be costly for a few years...

...Even medium-sized dailies are bloated with advertisements and supplements for consumers every day of the week...

...the word "independent" appears three times in the note on the JOA...

...He wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in the preparation of this article...

...On a more pessimistic note, USA Today may even be described as the airplane that will replace the railroad-like local paper...

...The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal already have their national operations...

...It may not be much-prepackaged news, if you please-but its widespread appeal indicates the extent to which many readers are tired of their local fare...

...In Liebling's day, the victor was usually an eccentric millionaire, who with his monopoly powers could inflict on the readership whatever version of the truth the traffic might bear...

...Bad enough that two-paper towns are vanishing like trolley systems...

...Perhaps the best illustration of what has happened to the newspaper office as a symbolic part of the community is in Austin, where the American-Statesman, a Cox newspaper, has become the only one in town...

...Nearly 98 percent of all American cities and towns are in the hands of a monopoly...

...Denver is Times-Mirror versus Scripps Howard more than it is a battle between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, which are warriors in the symbolic way of medieval horsemen...

...In my rounds I visited several of the papers that subsequently foundered...

...Likewise, the Houston Post is off one of the many freeways outside the city, in a building that from a distance resembles a large white radiator...

...I saw a JOA in the making in Seattle, where the Times, the all-day paper forty-nine percent owned by Knight-Ridder, and the Post-Intelli-gences the Hearst paper that comes out mornings, were proposing to join business forces...

...distribute news, are reporting record earnings...

...People I knew at the beginning of my travels had vanished by the end...

...What makes it easier for editors to jump from paper to paper is that many newspapers are now merely digests of available wire services...

...Liebling, "one-paper towns," and the natural tendency in such places is to put out a paper inoffensive to the greatest possible number of readers...

...Increasingly, newspaper chains are now rushing to produce their own versions of national newspapers, and it is not farfetched to imagine the day when the newsstand will resemble that familiar strip of neon motel signs present outside every city in America...

...The only exceptions are the national editions springing up across the country...

...by January, 1983, it was 531,000...

...Like the railroads, newspapers flourished during and after the industrial revolution...

...When there is more than one paper in town, the syndicates are usually divided up so that the same New York Times reprint doesn't appear in both papers...

...A map of newspaper holdings in the United States would resemble one showing the European holdings of the Hohen-zollerns, Wittelsbachs, Wettins, and Habsburgs...

...Managing editors, in particular, are terrified of money...

...A typical item, listed under Montana, for May 2, 1983, was: "HELENA- Area residents who engage in the frisbee-throwing sport of 'folf may have to do their folfing elsewhere...

...The experience amounted to an education in American newspapers...

...Cleveland, Newark, and New Orleans are the sole possession of Newhouse...

...Seattle is divided between Hearst (the Post-Intelligencer) and Knight-Ridder (which owns forty-nine percent of the Times...

...Nearly all the papers look alike...

...Hence the heirs have no choice but to sell-usually to one of the chains...

...In turn, few of these monopolists compete with one another...

...Many of the papers I visited, even if they were short staffed, were putting up new buildings or installing hugely expensive and elaborate computer systems...

...A soon learned that what does interest editors is changing jobs...

...So it may be for the newspapers, as the likes of USA Today arrive daily in the form of new technology, making it easier for department stores to advertise elsewhere or for AT&T to broadcast the news...

...Lest anyone think JOAs are solely to benefit the struggling independent publisher trying to compete with the chains, it should be noted that Newhouse is party to two such agreements, Hearst two, Gannett six, Knight-Ridder two, and Scripps seven...

...From there, it is an easy leap to: "In Philadelphia, Nearly Everyone Reads The Bulletin...

...and by April, 1983, it reached 1,109,000, placing it third behind the Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News in paid circulation...

...is agent the Examiner, the Chronicle and the ounday Examiner & Chronicle, and operates their advertising, circulation, accounting and mechanical departments...

...Moving from city to city on the same day, I was often able to track a wire story from one paper to another, fostering the illusion that dispatches are still tossed from fast-moving trains and then printed in the next edition...

...Nor do they become politically prominent themselves, as, say, Greeley was in his day...

...But what the Times means when it says cities will support only one paper is that advertisers will only flock to the leading daily: New York readers used to support fourteen papers...

...Gannett is boss in Rochester, Wilmington, and Oakland, to name but a few...

...Yet most newspapers are doing well financially...

...None that I met liked to talk about it, especially if they had to part with some for a good story...

...Editors attend budget meetings, go over personnel issues, meet with the unions, or discuss plans for a new building...

...Monopoly journalism is at best impersonal, and readers are now thought of in such terms as "market clusters," to use the phrase of USA Today...

...Indeed, the strength of the major dailies in their coverage of the rest of the country is in their wire services, which have jointly eclipsed UPI as the second wire service behind AP...

...The leitmotif is no longer the manual typewriter...

...The answer, printed below: "By train, says the New York Central, as it plans increased travel comfort to woo passengers in post-defense period...

...Little flags are then removed from the chains' strategic maps...

...I started on the road with few expectations, but came to the conclusion that not all was well with the country's dailies, whatever their reputations...

...In terms of ownership, newspapers resemble not only sixteenth-century Europe but also the railroads after World War II-just before their decline...

...top editors were happy to meet with me...

...Hence, as he watched the number of competitive newspapers in cities drop to around 60 in 1963, he observed that "as the number of cities in the United States with single newspaper ownership increases, the news becomes increasingly non-essential to the newspapers...

...The Anchorage Daily News is eight miles from center city, in an industrial part that appears to be waiting for the rest of the city to find it...

...His tone was that of a banker about to be petitioned for a loan...

...The newspaper as endangered species was an idea that gained currency during the Nixon Administration...

...In their monopoly phase, newspapers are investing their profits in everything-cable television, videotex satellite transmission, real estate, radio-but newspapers...

...In cases where one paper subscribes to the Times, the other might get the Los Angeles Times/ Washington Post, as if to balance its power...

...Gould...

...Similarly, newspapers today, despite the advent of a host of mediums with which to One reason family newspapers are often sold to the chains is the inheritance tax imposed on heirs...

...Modern newsrooms, it should be noted, purr with the clickity-clack efficiency of word processors...

...After a while, I wondered if there wasn't some secret covenant among owners to give papers uniformity, so that the untrained eye can't tell the Dallas Morning News and the Detroit News apart...

...Now they are part of Conrail, what remains of the Penn-Central and other failed railroad mergers...

...Today's editors, by design, are middle management, and they preside over the news almost by remote control...

...Hearst...

...But it is as rare to find Knight-Ridder competing with New-house as it was, after a while, to find a robber baron who objected to sitting down with the competition and a map to figure out how both could make some money...

...The carrier pigeons have been transistorized, and the battered trench coats have given way to drip-dry safari suits...

...Before the recent publishers' convention in New York, James Hoge, publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, said: "Newspaper-ing is a big and diverse industry...

...The road" turned out to be a succession of airports and bus and railroad stations-in addition to newspaper waiting rooms...

...Matthew Stevenson THE STATE OF AMERICA'S NEWSPAPERS Going the way of the railroads...

...For all practical purposes the Times will become the dominant paper in the city, because the Hearst paper, which is losing money, is in no position to dictate terms...

...Many papers, including a host of those still publishing, have lost touch with their readers...

...Only in Kansas City was I shown the door before my presentation was over...

...Despite the profits that can be generated in a one-paper town, the habits of monopoly journalism-arrogance, indifference to the readership, wasting money-threaten the economic foundation of the newspaper industry...

...The Times made the familiar plea to save competition, even thpugh approval will leave the city-save for the intrusions of some suburban dailies-with mornings, afternoons, and Sundays as neatly carved up as the freight markets that fell in between the railroads of Mr...

...Some of this, obviously, is the cost of doing business, but in newspapers today I sensed it is a major preoccupation, at the cost of improved coverage...

...Other cities with JOAs are El Paso, Tucson, Tulsa, Chattanooga, Birmingham, Knoxville, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Miami...

...The point was that no one could pin a defeat on his rsum if he had moved on by the time the critics caught up with the paper's performance...

...Staff reporters fill in on local stories, but the wires write the leading domestic and international dispatches...

...The current financial success enjoyed by so many papers may well prove short-lived...

...But as Mort Rosenblum of AP wrote in Coups & Earthquakes: "On the surface, America's news-gathering apparatus appears sophisticated and all-encompassing...

...newspapers...

...Knight-Ridder has papers in Aberdeen (SD), Akron, Boca Raton, Boulder, Braden-ton (FL), Charlotte, Columbus (GA), Detroit, Duluth, Fort Wayne, Gary, Grand Forks (ND), New York, Lexington, Long Beach (CA), Macon, Miami, Pasadena, Philadelphia, San Jose, St...

...It might be called the triumph of the bland, and it has done for newspapers what Howard Johnson did for home cooking...

...The desk was spacious and hinted of Scandinavian design...

...bought the Washington Star because it wanted a "presence" in the capital...

...They rarely understand the politics of a city as someone might who was on the job for longer than a year...

...In Detroit, in Chicago, or in Seattle, the newspapers are as central to downtown life as the Agora was in Athens, harking back to an era when the mission of the paper was stated in grandiloquent language on the masthead...

...The reason for this economic well-being, not surprisingly, is that while there are 1,710 dailies in the United States, only 24 cities have newspapers competing for advertisers and readership...

...It may even have to give up its building, a fixture on the Seattle skyline with its globe of the world standing proudly on the roof...

...Times-Mirror, which owns the Los Angeles Times, has papers in Dallas, Denver, Hartford, Long Island, Stamford, and Greenwich.' With the technology available in the form of satellites that shift copy around the country with the ease of a long-distance phone call, it is now possible to collect in one newspaper the best journalism from all over the country and the world...

...I came on this analogy while visiting the Bulletin in Philadelphia shortly before it folded...

...I had especially admired the editors of the Minneapolis Star and the Bulletin and wondered what they and all their reporters would do...

...Initially the audience for USA Today was to be the three million Americans who each day are traveling on business or pleasure...

...Field...

...But left on their own, without competition, newspaper editors can publish whatever the traffic will bear...

...Knight-Ridder...

...Who is to say that Gannett today with its 88 papers might not be the Penn-Central of tomorrow...

...The Madison [Wisconsin] Capital-Times is inaccessible except by car...

...The smallest city on the list is Franklin-Oil-City, Pa., population 24,000...

...For the most part, at least in the industrial sections of the country, these still tend to be clustered in the old, downtown section...

...By October, circulation was 221,000...

...The consequence of what Liebling called a "monovocal, monopolistic, monocular" press goes beyond the obvious loss to the political debate...

...Whether it was always thus is difficult for me to gauge, but at least in the period that Liebling describes, newspapers stood for something-if only the bizarre notions of the owner...

...I had worked in magazines and knew newspapers, aside from those I read, only by reputation...

...the Cowles Media Company bought the Buffalo Courier-Express because the paper had the only cable television franchise in the city...

...The top ten newspaper publishers control 253 papers, which account for nearly 24 million readers -almost half of those in the United States...

...Translated, this means that despite the wreckage of such flagships as the Philadelphia Bulletin, the convoy keeps sailing and making lots of money...

...X he irony of the newspaper business is that while some of the large chains are making, for them, record profits-in 1981 Gannett's net profit was $172 million-before the law they qualify as neediest cases...

...Like a medieval fortress, it sits on the south bank of the Colorado River...

...The reason for this is largely that there is no incentive to improve coverage unless competition forces it, as it has in Dallas, Denver, and Detroit-to list three cities whose newspapers are responding to the competitive impulse...

...But now that the eccentric individual proprietor is gone, except in a few rare instances, newspapers are run on the same principles that guide any other monopoly industry...

...New York Times...

...Period...

...Rarely do they dispatch young reporters to fires or write editorials denouncing corrupt officials as thieves or rogues...

...The parking lot is divided by hierarchical lines like any modern corporation, and, like most newspapers, it has an elaborate security system at the door...

...and Carl Bernstein now works in television...

...The editor I saw had an office befitting that of a senior vice-president of a large insurance company...

...But a lot of job switching was "intermural" and editors would frequently ask me in confidence, since I was traveling around, if I "knew of any openings in San Jose...

...Still, the reason for these failures goes beyond garnering advertisers...

...For example, the number of foreign correspondents for American papers has dropped to 450 from a postwar high of 2,500, and that is not because nobody can afford to send someone abroad...

...The gulf that has developed between most newspapers and their cities is symbolized by the fate of the newspaper offices themselves...

...But an investment advisory on the Post's stock summarizes the importance of these national operations in the future: "The Post may try to capitalize on its prestige by putting out a weekly national edition...

...But what struck me most was the extent to which newspapermen are short-term journeymen, skilled only in the craft of producing a paper-using the staff and the wires as indistinguishable parts in a great assembly line...

...What is supposed to be news in Denver is about what it's supposed to be in Seattle except for a few school-board election stories...

...Hemingway is no longer on the staff of the Kansas City Star...

...In 1980 there were 182 more Sunday papers than there were a decade earlier...

...The largest city on the list is San Francisco, where the relationship, as stated by Editor & Publisher Yearbook, is the following: The San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle are independent and competitive newspapers, published by separate corporations...

...like the railroads, they drew customers in and about American cities...

...According to the New York Times, which recently quoted "industry analysts," "most cities will only support one newspaper...

...In arguing for the agreement, Hearst, which last year is estimated to have made $120 million, said that without it they would have to close the Post-Intelligencer or, worse, sell it to someone like Rupert Murdoch...

...A popular course, mostly on the private land in Tucker Gulch south of the city, has been fenced and subdivided for home development...

...Like passengers watching their favorite trains being pulled from service, the readers would have to make do with something else...

...The latest evidence supports this conclusion...

...By the time the interstate highway system was finished and airplane travel became commonplace, it was too expensive and too late for the railroads to catch up...

...Today the monopolists are anything but eccentric, and the papers' mission is to serve as quasi-public utilities that strive to balance service and monopoly profits...

...as far south as the Corpus Christi Caller-Times...

...That is a long way from Greeley: "The best use of a journal is to print the largest practical amount of important truth-truth which tends to make mankind wiser, and thus happier...

...For good reason does Liebling repeatedly describe Editor & Publisher Yearbook as the "frightened handmaiden of the newspaper industry...

...But for all the changes, there has been little real improvement...

...The size of the papers varied from the Juneau Empire (circulation 6,650) to the Chicago Tribune (circulation 758,255), although I mostly concentrated on the one hundred largest dailies, as listed in Editor & Publisher Yearbook...

...Further, the job of editor or assistant editor, only in ceremonial ways, is to edit...

...The carpeting and the walls were color coordinated in gray...

...worse is that where vestiges of competition remain, the law has sanctioned newspaper oligopolies to ensure that one paper doesn't spoil the profits of another...

...As the monopoly paper in Austin, the American-Statesman can pretty much do as it pleases, and that includes plowing all its profits into an architectural white elephant...

...Such large papers as the Washington Post are thicker in newsprint on weekdays than, say, the London papers are on Sunday...

...But the glamour of this new technology market might draw much more support for this stock by 1985-87 than we project...

...Consider: Time Inc...

...In 1942, Owens-Corning Fiberglas ran an advertisement in Fortune: "How Will People Travel Tomorrow...

...While the railroad analogy may not be precise, it bears repeating because so many newspapers now have monopolies and are deferring maintenance to their readers-in the form of just getting by editorially-much the way the railroads sealed their demise by putting off maintenance on their rights-of-way...

...Thus any editor who can find the Associated Press in his computer file can find stories to fill most of the holes in the paper...

...The short text is spliced with graphs and charts that highlight farm trends or the recent winners of the Stanley Cup...

...The justification to the public and to the antitrust authorities was that economies of scale in business and advertising would allow weaker papers to continue publishing and thus provide at least a measure of competition-if only in the news columns...

...Consequently a distinguishing feature is "Across the USA," which is the journalistic equivalent of Willard Scott on the "Today Show" inviting the entire nation to a bake sale in Ely, Vermont...

...Vander-bilt and Mr...

...Even more alarming, most papers actually read the same...

...And the Washington Post is hoping to get its version off some time this year...

...In the fifties and sixties, even though the pre-eminence of the airplane was about to supplant trains, railroads made record profits...

...despite all the cliches describing the newspaper as the stronghold of independence, a paper owned by an individual is the exception.* In effect, American cities are divided up among the chains much the way major league baseball distributes franchises in the minor leagues...

...Besides which, outside of a few big-city dailies, there is the added homogenization of wire copy...

...Newspapers now have 62.4 million daily readers, up a million from last year...

...The publishers responded with intensive lobbying efforts, and the result was the Newspaper Preservation Act, which allows competitors-subject to approval from the Attorney General -to merge business, circulation, and mechanical departments while keeping editorial matters separate...

...By the end of 1983, Gannett plans to spend $40 million on USA Today...

...Though the Philadelphia Bulletin was well known to be in financial difficulties, nearly all the Matthew Stevenson writes for a number of national magazines...

...The Dallas Morning News is adding on a new wing...

...When Liebling was writing "The Wayward Pressman" for the New Yorker in the forties, fifties, and early sixties, he was despairing because there were only seven competing newspapers left in New York and because in 1927 there were 502 cities with competition...

...Informal market-sharing arrangements had actually been around since 1933, when the Albuquerque Tribune and Journal merged operations, but a 1969 Supreme Court ruling threatened to overturn these divisions of the spoils...

...In recent years, however, newspapers have joined the flight to the suburbs, and when I didn't have a car it became nearly impossible to get to the offices of one of these exiles...

...Nevertheless, for all this absentee management, there is a cost...

...Paul, State College (PA), Tallahassee, and Walla Walla...

...I was selected to go on the road to find the appropriate editors and sell them the service...

...An editor in Columbus once told me that she wasn't interested "in any story that costs more than $125...

...The Spokane Spokesman-Review is putting up a new building...

...What isn't there can be culled from any of the other services: United Press International...

...Talking to the editors about the Bulletin's chances and looking out the window at switchers shunting freight cars in the yards, I couldn't help but draw a parallel between the decline and fall of American railroads and the present condition of U.S...

...Without a majority of readers-at least in the particular market you are aiming for -and consequently of advertisers, most owners, more than ever before, are content to pack it in...

...Many of these, reasoned Gannett, have little interest in the news of another city and would therefore welcome a national paper that covered both national and international events, and also included blurbs of news from their hometowns...

...At the Allentown Morning Call, I made my pitch at eleven-thirty at night...

...But memories die hard...

...San Francisco Newspaper agency...

...Previously, the paper had offices not far from the capitol, in a building somewhat resembling a bottling plant...

...They spend their days returning phone calls, and going to lunch, and as though by magic, the paper appears the next morning on the newsstand...

...The group I was representing proposed to edit magazine articles, transmit them over high-speed wires, and sell them to newspaper editors...

...The Houston Post is moving its newsroom upstairs and putting in a $3 million computer...

...Chains crisscross the landscape...

...It wasn't just the drop in advertising revenues that doomed them...

...they're too intent on improving their careers with frequent hops...

...For the crew, newspapers are a succession of Titanics...

...Few of the papers I visited were willing to spend money on improving the quality of their coverage...

...And the swarms of newspaper conventions and seminars are best understood as job fairs...

...If I was traveling by train or bus, it was often only a short walk from the station to a Gothic-inspired building...

...In both cases I met with various editors-managing, news, features-and explained what the syndicate was trying to do and what articles it could provide...

...A paper in Texas, if it chooses, can subscribe to the foreign dispatches of the London Observer...