MediaFile

EW Scripps CEO: Storytellers are journalism’s future

Robert MacMillan

Mar 19, 2009 14:41 EDT

I spoke late last week with the chief executive of EW Scripps Co, the company that got its share of hisses and boos for shutting down the Rocky Mountain News this past February.

Rich Boehne, a journalist back in the day, is in charge of navigating a chain publisher of U.S. newspapers through the most difficult time that it ever has had, not to mention all the employees of the papers that the company owns. And let’s not forget the local television stations that Scripps also operates.

Boehne and I talked about the future of newspapers for a story that I was working on about the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2009 report on the state of the news media. I included some of his remarks in a story that I wrote about ideas that the report had for saving newspapers, but our conversation ranged beyond the story at hand.

Here are some thoughts that Boehne shared with me. I prefaced a few of them with paraphrases of my own questions to save you the trouble of reading the whole transcript.

Here is Boehne speaking about how newspapers will persevere despite a decline in advertising revenue that is making some of them less viable than they ever have been before.

We really tend not to look so much at just newspapers. We tend to look at local media and what’s the opportunity for local media. In most markets there are hundreds of millions of dollars of local available ad dollars, and just because you have models today that don’t necessarily work in that environment doesn’t mean there won’t be very profitable robust local media models in the future… I guess we’re maybe a little more fundamentalist in our approach. We try to spend no time looking in the rear-view mirror.

He elucidated on the tide of bad-news stories about newspapers going bankrupt, newspapers threatening to close, newspapers actually closing and what newspapers will do as ad revenue disappears.

The state of the news media? Not so hot

Robert MacMillan

Mar 16, 2009 07:47 EDT

The Project for Excellence in Journalism published its sixth annual State of the News Media report on Monday. The report, at 800 pages and 180,000 words, is a monster. The news media that it’s analyzing, however, is turning into something quite a bit smaller.

The group, along with its chief, Tom Rosenstiel, has provided a snapshot of where the news industry is today, though with an industry so large, a snapshot this size is impossible to condense into one little blog, let alone a story for the wire. If you’re looking to wallow, dig in to the specifics, follow this link.

Here, meanwhile, are some of the introductory remarks and top findings of the study, mostly in the study’s own words. Warning: These findings are not suitable for your friends in journalism who are struggling to maintain their sense of self-worth.

• Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23 percent in the last two years.
• By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.
• In local television, news staffs, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7 percent in an election yetar — something unheard of — and ratings are now falling or are flat across the schedule. In network news, even the rare programs increasing their ratings are seeing revenues fall.
• The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19 percent in the last two years; in 2008 alone, traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27 percent. Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue — the model that financed journalism for the last century — will be inadequate to do so in this one.
• The hastening audience migration to the Web means the news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought.
• The recession? The numbers are only guesses, but executives estimate that the recession at least doubled the revenue losses in the news industry in 2008, perhaps more in network television.

So what are the new trends emerging in 2009? The PEJ tells us:

• The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored. (i.e. Stop worrying about micropayments: Try a cable TV model, or letting people buy things from local merchants through websites instead of just getting annoyed by advertisements for them)
• Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions. (About time!)
• On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out.
• The concept of partnership, motivated in part by desperation, is becoming a major focus of news investment, and it may offer prospects for the financial future of news.
• Even if cable news does not keep the audience gains of 2008, its rise is accelerating another change — the elevation of minute-by-minute judgment in political journalism.
• In its campaign coverage, the press was more reactive and passive and less of an enterprising investigator of the candidates than it once was.

Happy trails, Rocky Mountain News

Robert MacMillan

Feb 26, 2009 18:46 EST

EW Scripps Co’s decision to shut down Denver’s Rocky Mountain News as of Friday offers an interesting lesson about the value of news.

But first, a bit of background: It is not the first U.S. daily to fail as the economy falters. Scripps already put down two other papers in recent memory (Albuquerque, New Mexico and Cincinnati, Ohio, its home town). Having said that, it’s the biggest daily that I can think of to go under since the newspaper apocalypse crept in like Death in the Bosch painting. Not just bankrupt like Tribune’s papers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune or The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and the whole Journal Register stable — and not just threatened with closing like Hearst has done with the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It’s really over.

When it goes, William Dean Singleton’s Denver-based MediaNews Group will still publish the Denver Post. Still, half the printed news that Colorado residents have been used to reading will be gone.

Now, a source of mine who was involved with trying to keep the Rocky Mountain News alive, pointed out that sacrificing the paper means that Scripps is less likely to have to shut down its entire business, which would mean other papers from Redding, California to Memphis, Tennessee to Florida’s Atlantic coast. It also reflects, he said, Scripps’s ultimate commitment: shareholders.

Shareholders don’t like seeing what’s happened to their newspaper stocks. Some have lost 98 percent of their value in the last 12 months, because advertising is going away and might not come back as strongly as it once did.