Labor Day, Capitalism and a Failure of Newspapers

I read an interesting article yesterday.

It was timed no doubt, as is this one, to coincide with Labor Day.

It's an old newspaper trope, tying an article to the calendar to increase it's relevance. Usually it works, that's why we do it.

This article was published by the Neiman Foundation at Harvard, which tracks trends in journalism, and it was adapted  from Christopher R. Martin’s 2019 book, “No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class," published by Cornell University Press.

The gist of it is that in the 1960s and 1970s, newspapers abandoned the idea of a mass audience and, driven by a desire to capture an audience most attractive to advertisers, began to target their content toward those more affluent audiences.

As a result, "newspapers pursued more upscale readers with workplace 'lifestyle' columns featuring the lives of young professionals and their concerns about office gossip, job interview strategy, expense accounts, and office party etiquette. Personal finance news also began its ascendancy in the 1970s. The focus was on individualism: people had to take care of themselves. Time Inc.’s launch of the magazine Money in 1972 helped to kick off a boom in personal finance stories, which assumed that every upscale reader had an investment portfolio," Martin wrote.

This trend away from covering the concerns of the working class also can be measured, in part, by the loss of reporters covering the "labor beat."

"Today there are just six full-time labor reporters in the top 25 newspapers across the U.S., none in network or cable news, none at NPR or PBS, and just a few at digital news organizations and magazines," according to Martin.

This new business trajectory  which changed the target news audience from mass to upscale, "altered the actual news narratives about the working class in US journalism," according to Martin.

Martin tells us, "the upscale focus of the news upset the status of labor unions and upended politics through the last third of the twentieth century and beyond. The mainstream news media’s write-off of the working class set the conditions for the decline of labor and working class news and the rise of a deeply partisan conservative media that hailed the abandoned white, working-class audience. (Working-class women and people of color had no similar emergent news media platform to pursue them as an audience.) The right wing then attacked the upscale-focused mainstream news media as 'elite' and ultimately as 'the enemy of the people.' Given this politicized media infrastructure, the 'surprise' of a Donald Trump presidency seems much less of one."

I think Martin is spot on.

Mercury file photo

Pottstown was once a town where work equaled wealth.

It's not much different than how the increased concentration of national media on the coasts creates what some  call "parachute coverage" of the "fly-over states" -- a New York Times or CNN reporter parachutes into St. Louis to report on unrest there using the same tone and methodology that they would to cover unrest in Kosovo -- and then beats a hasty retreat back to New York with a report on "what's happening over there."

There is little attempt to get a deeper understanding of the situation, get some context, understand the why; just report the what and get the hell out of Dodge.

Sunday's front page

Similarly, says Martin, the news media now "usually look at the working class only through the lens of a political news story, not through the lens of a labor or workplace story. Second, the news media typically consider the 'working class' not in its entirety, but just in the stereotypical white male form, which nicely serves the purposes of divisive politicians who seek to exploit this image and divide working-class people on every other dimension: race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and citizenship."

I often write in this space about the public service aspect of journalism, particularly the only kind I have ever practiced, local journalism.

But this pursuit of an "upscale" audience belies that claim.

You are not serving all the people, or even most of the people, if you are tailoring your coverage to appeal primarily to the wealthier segment of the country, the people with more money to spend on your advertisers' products.

But this was done because at the time, journalism was also a viable business and the decision to pursue a wealthy audience was a business decision, not a decision to practice better journalism.

To be sure, there are plenty of other factors contributing to the decline of newspapers.

Fat and complacent for decades, newspaper managers and publishers failed to see the threat, and potential promise, of the Internet and repeatedly failed to adapt to the assaults on longtime revenue sources, like classified ads. As Google and Facebook scooped up the lion's share of online advertising, there was little left to support the traditional newspaper business model.

But I'm left to ask if local newspapers might not have had more resilience, more time to adapt to those changes, had we continually sought to remain relevant to all the people, not just the ones with disposable income.

The business side of the business, the capitalists, not the journalists, made a business decision.

And, as it turns out, it was a pretty short-sighted one.

Perhaps that's because the late 60 and early 70s was also when local newspapers started getting bought up by chains, when Wall Street got involved.

Wall Street has ever been focused on the next quarter, not the next quarter century.

That's when making payroll, covering costs and serving your community was replaced with meeting profit projections, cutting costs and serving your shareholders.

We are now in the final, late-stage consequence of this choice.

Having abandoned the working class, they, quite understandably, have abandoned us.

And, ironically, that fickle up-scale audience we chased has as well.

They're all now getting their news digitally without realizing (or caring) that much of the digital news they read  is the re-written work product of a newspaper reporter. Or, if not, that it has not been verified for accuracy or made much of an attempt at fairness.

All too often its primary characteristic is what faux conservative talk show host Stephen Colbert comedically, but prophetically, coined as "truthiness."

Dictionary.com formally defines truthiness as: "the quality of seeming to be true according to one's intuition, opinion, or perception without regard to logic, factual evidence, or the like."

Further, the increasingly fractured news audience remain largely united in one aspect, they are outraged at the idea that they should be asked to pay for news "when it's free on the Internet."

What should we expect from an audience that has never purchased a newspaper?

The bottom line here is when you let the money men make the decisions, they make decisions about money, not journalism, and certainly not community.

Hedge funds and technology have brought us from full newsrooms,

at left in the good old days, to no newsrooms and reporters who work

at home. No, my view is not nearly so dramatic.

And when the money dries up because of the decisions they've made, or failed to make, they take their stock options and put the business up for a fire sale.

And that's when the parasites show up.

Just like in the natural world, the financial world has bottom feeders, those who take what is left, what is perceived to have little value -- financial value at least -- and strip it for parts to extract what' profit they can, a process made infinitely easier if you have no intention of making that businesses sustainable for the long haul.

They sell the real estate to a shell company, and charge the company rent to occupy a building it once owned. Eventually, they put the building up for sale too, particularly if the rent payments have covered the original purchase price.

They cut staff and run articles from other newspapers they own in the area, filling the pages with less relevant content than readers used to enjoy; thus giving readers less reason to buy that newspaper again.

The Aug. 6 edition of The Vindicator, almost its last,
comes off the press.

The practice has become so common it even has a name: "ghost newspapers."

And Youngstown, Ohio is about to- find out what that's like.

When Youngstown's newspaper, The Vindicator, failed to find a buyer, a neighboring company bought the name, the masthead and the subscription list after it went under.

The Vindicator's final edition.

They certainly won't employ any of the journalists who know the town best.

Instead, they will continue to publish a "Vindicator" that is filled with stories about other towns, not Youngstown.

Yesterday, the day after the final Vindicator was published, the Tribune Chronicle took over publishing The Vindicator in Mahoning County.

“It’s going to be The Vindicator edition of the Tribune Chronicle,” Charles Jarvin, publisher of the Trib told WKBN News. “It will have The Vindicator masthead on it. It will be of the style of the Tribune Chronicle, however, as we go forward but it will be the Vindicator edition of the Tribune Chronicle.”

For a time, The Mercury was somewhat insulated from this trend.

The front page of the Aug. 13, 1948 edition.

Pottstown was always a working town.

Whether it was Bethlehem Steel, Firestone, Flagg Brass, Doehler-Jarvis, Gudebrod, Dana or Mrs. Smith's Pies, the business of Pottstown required labor.

Lots of it.

So covering Pottstown meant covering the lives of the people who worked at those plants.

When I arrived here from New York in 1997, I was amazed at how much Pottstown still resembled a community from the 50s or the 60s.

And like those communities, the local newspaper was still a vital part of life here.

But about a year after I arrived, word came that Mrs. Smith's Pies had been sold. It was only the latest in a long string of closures.

The Bethlehem Steel plant had been closed for years and the Doehler-Jarvis, Stanley Flagg Brass  and Gudebrod plants soon followed suit.

As the paying jobs fled for lower-paying shores, local businesses fell one by one to the national chains who could sell it for less. Never mind that the money spent there did not re-circulate in the community like with a locally owned business.

The Mercury building at 24 N. Hanover St., Pottstown

It was only a matter of time before Pottstown's local newspaper got caught up in what is happening all across the country.

According to Montgomery County property records, Goodson Holding Company sold The Mercury building at 24 N. Hanover St. on April 2, 2013 for $1.2 million.

The buyer was a company called 24 N. Hanover St. LLC whose address is 885 Third Ave. in Manhattan.

By no small coincidence, that is the address of Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that owns MediaNews Group, which owns The Mercury and all the other newspapers in the 50-mile radius.

So the company that bought the newspaper, purchased the newspaper building through a shell company with the same address, and extracted the value of the real estate by charging itself rent which, as many know, did not go into maintaining or repairing the venerable, but leaky old building.

The building has been on the market for more than a year, although several local sources have told me it has been sold. The transaction has not yet appeared in the county's property records so the final entry in that particular account book remains blank.

What should we do?

It would be nice to suggest that this Labor Day we newspaper people re-dedicate ourselves to covering all of our communities, not just our advertisers' customers, but I think it is already too late for that.

No one likes being taken for granted.

It is also probably too late for the wave of unionization that is sweeping those decimated newsrooms that remain as we try desperately to hold our ground against the final parasitical flood of hedge funds, mergers and buy-outs.

When Hurricane Agnes struck in 1972, we were there to tell the story.

I remain a proud member of the Newspaper Guild. I know I would not have earned a living wage all these years without them, and that allowed me to raise my son, buy a home for him to live in, send him to college and become a stakeholder in the community I cover. 

And I believe that unionizing will provide some protection to those newsroom employees who remain.

But unless there is a major shift in the local news business (should it even be a business?) and a sustainable model for paying us a living wage can be found, it won't be nearly enough.

The writing's on the wall. And then who will tell Pottstown's story?

-- 30 --

365, 12, 7, 24

Well Friday marked another milestone in the life of this Digital Notebook blog of mine.

That was the day that marked a full year of daily posts.

It was on Feb. 1 of 2012 that I began my experiment of seeing if I could post something every day.

The experiment has proven its possible and, often enough, exhausting.

"Why would I do such a thing?" you ask.

Stupidity?

Stubbornness?

Curiosity?

Yes.

To be honest, the real reason was fear.

Like a lot of guys, I don't like facing uncertainty sitting on my hands. I like to try to do something to address it, face it, possibly affect it.

And, as many of you likely know, the company that owns The Mercury is in bankruptcy for the second time in the 15 years I've been here.

Now this particular bankruptcy has more to do with shedding debt and selling ourselves to a newly created "stalking horse" subsidiary, than crash and burn financial distress -- but still....

Newspapers around the nation are closing, reducing days of publication or trying to go the full digital route.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that journalism is going through a major transformation. The key question is: "Into what?"

Easier to answer is the cause -- as it always has, it's technology that is bringing about this change.

It was the printing press (combined with an burgeoning education system) which transformed reading from a magical skill understood by a few learned monks and aristocrats to the next big thing in mass communication since the town crier.

It was a reliable postal service which made it possible for the founding fathers to keep the public informed enough about what was going on elsewhere in the Republic to establish the geographically largest successful democracy the world has ever seen.

(Newspapers from one city were shipped to another, where they were gleefully cut up and the news stolen for re-publication in the new location.)

Cheap newsprint and even better public education made penny newspapers ubiquitous in major cities and then radio made news and communication instantaneous.

Television provided the instant images and the TV news anchor was born.

But throughout all of it, the people who controlled the technology controlled the information.

Not just anyone could buy a printing press, a radio station, or television network.

Throughout it all, there were professionals who decided what was important enough to tell people and, in an information market, what they wanted to know.

What this latest wave of technology has changed fundamentally, I've come to understand, is that anyone can use it. No longer are the decisions about what and when information will be provided in the hands of a few, trained professionals, often called "the gate keepers" in Journalism 101.

Anyone can start a blog, for example, and many, many, many have.

In the information marketplace, those with the best blog, best tweets, best Instragram, Tumblr or Pintrest pages get the most readers.

This is neither good nor bad, it just is.

Well, to be more precise, it is both good and bad.

On the good side, Pottstown does not have just three reporters anyone; it potentially has thousands albeit part-time.

This means when a storm hits, we can get information from people all over the place; what's flooded, what roads are closed, where the is power out. That makes for better instant information.

It also means that stories we may once have ignored can be presented by readers, or at least that readers can advocate for their publication. In other words, it makes it easier to "give the people what they want."

On the bad side, few of these people have any kind of professional experience.

They are free to post anything they please; rumors, calumny and even outright lies, and they may well have agendas and motivations for what they are doing which are more than just a desire to inform the public.

Worse still, they can do it anonymously. Unlike professionals, they often are not accountable for what they write or broadcast.

Also, because these new digital newsies rarely make money doing it, or enough that they can do it full-time, what they produce is often a sideline and rarely sustainable over the long-haul.

A lack of consistency works primarily to the benefit of those in authority. They can just wait out someone nipping electronically at their heels in the reasonable belief that soon enough, they will just go away.

(Joe Zlomek's Sanatoga Post is the admirable exception to these observations and I continue watch with interest how his model is growing and succeeding.)

Now I've used the word "professional" a couple times here and I should note that like any industry, journalism needed a shake up.

For many journalists, the idea that you are pursuing and presenting the truth as best you can discern became a belief that because they say it or write it, it's automatically the truth.

Add on the awards that journalists like to pat themselves on the back with (hey, if we can't get rich at least we can pin medals on our chests) and you have a recipe for eventual upset. Any market hates complacency and we were long overdue for our wake-up call.

Having a lot of upstarts scoop you, come up with business models that make yours look like a steam engine and surf the fast-changing wave of technological changes with such skill that you look like the 98-pound weakling standing on the shore, will do one of two things.

If its all too much, it may make you give up and start eyeing your pension (if you're lucky enough to still have one.)

I've seen some of the journalists I know simply dig in their heels and refuse to recognize that change is not only coming, it's already here and it's kicking their ass.

It's enough to make me want to pull out what's left of my graying hair.

Or, these shake ups may motivate you to remind people that despite all the bells, whistles, touch screens, pop-ups, apps and tweets, you still bring a bedrock value to the game -- credibility.

I've always thought the key to adapting to change is recognizing what new things bring value to what you do, without losing sight of the values and practices you can't afford to give up.

Now, it's understood that "credibility" can seem a bit flimsy when journalism has been undermined in recent years by the need to compete and make money.

I could never figure out why this stunt did not get
Geraldo fired. Then I remembered, it's Fox News.

It's lead to everything from TV spots about how great the news NBC season will be or, what I like to think of as the beginning of the fall -- Geraldo Rivera revealing the empty contents of "Al Capone's Vault."

The blending of entertainment and news has made it ever more difficult to draw the line between news, opinion and fluff.

This is, of course, one of the dangers of letting the market decide everything.

It has given us hour after agonizing hour of "reality TV," as if you've ever seen anyone act completely normal while facing a television camera.

Seriously? I mean seriously?

Let's face it folks, "Honey Boo Boo" would not be on TV if no one watched it.

All of which is enough to put a little fear of irrelevance into the heart of anyone who believes that it actually serves democracy to have an independent entity that questions authority, exposes stupidity, corruption and waste and is able to present it with enough credibility that the people believe it, and act to correct it.

A little fear can be a good motivator.

Which brings us back to this Digital Notebook blog of mine.

Given that a newspaper only has as much space as the advertising pays for, I thought I might try this digital experiment of my own.

This is not the kind of "bell and whistle"
I meant folks.

It started by creating a place that, just like the newspaper, is new every day, where all the news that doesn't make it into the paper can be posted for people to see, or not.

It has also provided, as regular readers know, a place for me to spout off column-style from time to time.

So what insights has this experiment revealed.

Well, to a certain extent, it has primarily reinforced things I already knew.

That in local news, people like news about themselves.

Parents like to see their kids triumphs proclaimed, teachers like to see their work appreciated and people like to see those in authority held to account and, more than a little occasionally, ridiculed.

This is, of course, nothing new to someone who has been in local news for 25 years now.

"People like news, always have," was the sage observation boss lady Nancy March shared with me, with a smile, when I told her I was contemplating this post.

As to the daily pace, that was a little harrowing. Good thing I have been working at a daily newspaper for 15 of those years.

Nancy has another saying you get used to hearing during a typical newsroom morning, as we look over the paper, admire our handiwork and pat ourselves on the back for our cleverness, thoroughness or enterprise.

"Yeah, that was a good story," she'll say brusquely, followed by the inevitable: "What have you got daily?"

And so it was with this blog, planning how to get through weekends and, especially vacations.

Also, one advantage of this technology is that rather than rely on received wisdom, you can actually count which posts get the most interest.

The tireless John Armato

And so I saw the self-evident evidence that when John Armato sent me a press release with photos (I could never have made 365 consecutive posts without his steady stream of good news about Pottstown Schools) and I dutifully posted it.

He would then dutifully send out a link to all district employees, which translated into lots of hits.

Another hit generator is a daily e-mail that comes from Lawrence Feinberg, from the Keystone State Education Coalition. It contains education news from all around the Commonwealth and, when I had a post about education issues, I would send him a link.

Lawrence Feinberg

If he thought it worth sharing, he would and, again, my "hits" would go up.

All of this, of course, is the basic lesson of distribution. You can have the nicest or the cleverest blog in the world, but if no one sees it, what's the point?

It's the newspaper equivalent of giving a party to which nobody comes.

Finally, those posts which seemed to draw the most attention whose source was not obviously from someone with a wide distribution list sharing the link, were those not much different in subject from what I regularly write about in the newspaper.

This blog gizmo shows the most popular posts right on the page you're reading this (presuming you've gotten this far) and you'll see the three most popular posts come from distribution lists.

But the four and fifth place finishers are about Pottstown Borough considering new core values and a new mission statement; and a photo and ruminations on downtown facades.

These are not exactly the kind of subjects that would have a tabloid headline writer drooling. But they are, apparently, the kind of things people want to know about their community and what their leaders are doing.

All of which is to say that I spent a year in this dogged experiment and found out a whole of things I already knew:

1) People like local news about their community, and they like when it comes from a trustworthy someone who doesn't have something to gain by its distribution.

2) A good distribution network is as necessary for building audience for an electronic news vehicle you read on a screen as is is for a one you hold in your hand.

3)  And maybe we don't have that much to fear after all. We just need to be smart, and pay attention to how each new different vehicle works, what advantages it presents, and which paths it may take us down.

4) And finally, we need to figure out how to continue to provide this often-unappreciated function so vital to democracy in such a way that someone can make a living doing it.

And so, 365 posts later, on-line 12 months a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and having garnered several hundred hits shy of 75,000 hits, we bring the experiment to a close.

This does not mean the blog will end folks, merely that I am not so sure that I will continue my daily posting.

I have made no decision about it one way or the other, just wanted to state that having run the course of my experiment, I am releasing myself from the pledge to do so.

Who knows? Maybe that will turn into an experiment as well.

It's not like any of this is planned or anything.