Yesterday the Arizona Republic, for a short time in the distant past a half-way decent metropolitan paper but, since its purchase by Gannett, a much-weakened affair with sagging circulation and profits, announced that it’s going to start charging a $10/month subscription for peeks at its online incarnation.
Within living memory, Gannett went about “streamlining” the paper. Even before the recession hit, they fired most of the veteran reporters and all of the investigative writers and editors. The recession gave management an excuse to fire still more editorial staff, leaving mostly inexperienced, lower-paid fresh J-school graduates to man the ship.
The baleful result shows: today the paper publishes mostly froth, blood & gore, and local puff pieces, plus almost untouched versions of national and regional wire stories. Content is poorly edited, frequently sporting grammatical and spelling errors and, more seriously, errors in fact. In-depth reporting on state government and city hall are minimal. Often you get better reporting from the eastside paper.
Some years ago, the Republic held such a large market share that it could (and did) crush competing newspapers by telling its own advertisers that if they dared to advertise in another local paper, they would never again be permitted to advertise in the Republic. This may no longer be a credible threat, since so few people subscribe to the aptly nicknamed Repulsive today. Nevertheless, to this day the East Valley Tribune reports mostly on the East Valley, leaving the antics at the Phoenix city hall pretty much untouched.
Thus we have few sources of local news, none of them very good.
Although I have the New York Times delivered, I no longer subscribe to the Republic. The reason I don’t is that it simply doesn’t carry enough news to justify the number of trees that are chopped down to print the thing.
When the paper would appear in the driveway, I would carry it straight to the recycling bin and start throwing out the stacks and stacks and stacks of advertising. Most of it was just that: ads, not coupons. What would be left to read would be two slender sections of play-nooz. It wasn’t even very good reporting—mostly froth and sensationalism. The Sunday paper was the worst of the lot: they’ve shrunk the comic strips so you need a magnifying glass to read the damn things, and after you threw out the chaff, the two or three remaining news sections had just a few pages. Feeling I wasn’t getting my money’s worth, I canceled it.
That was years ago.
Today I get my local news online and from the local PBS station. The online incarnation of the Republic is even weaker than its print edition–difficult to navigate, devoid of an editor’s touch, and often sketchy. The main reason to visit the site is idle entertainment: the obstreperous comment sections far outshine the “reporting.”
The question, then, is “am I going to pay $10 a month for idle entertainment”?
I kind of think not.
Judging from the ninety-four pages of comments that have accrued so far at the Republic‘s announcement of its new policy, a vast majority of the paper’s online readers also think not.
In the absence of decent reporting, there’s really no point in paying to read a newspaper online. There are too many free sources of the things the alleged “paper” delivers:
• Many the Phoenix metropolitan area’s commercial radio and TV stations provide the same quality of news (rather low) online for free.
• One Phoenix-area NPR station provides news reporting, free, that is far superior to the Republic‘s play-nooz.
• The Phoenix New Times puts all its content online, and it occasionally publishes investigative journalism.
• All of the local grocery stores except Safeway (which is engaged in its current scheme to invade its customers’ privacy) publish their weekly food ads online.
• A number of sites publish movie screening times
• TV Guide publishes TV schedules, admittedly in a difficult format; Cox has a much better local site.
• More sites than you can shake a stick at publish restaurant reviews.
• Shopping coupons are abundantly available online, and you don’t need a pair of scissors to get them.
• The funny strips that matter can be read online, free of charge.
So…why on earth would anybody actually pay to peek at the Republic online?
There are some organizations whose online news reportage I might pay for. I might pay for NPR, for example, because of the high quality of its content. I might pay for the Times (I get it free because of the print subscription just now), because it is one of only two national newspapers of record. I would have paid for the Wall Street Journal before Rupert Murdoch got his grimy hands on it. But a half-baked local rag?
Would you pay to subscribe to your local paper’s online incarnation? Where would you draw the line, when it comes to paying for online content?
I would pay a few dollars (max $2/month) for a service that sent the local paper to my kindle each morning. I know that’s cheap but there is just so much free out there!
What is the other national newspapers of record, in your opinion?
@ Linda: The Washington Post.
USA Today is too light (though highly readable). LA Times, too local. Barron’s, really a business publication. W. Street J., a ghost of its former self.
If I could afford to have two papers delivered in hard copy, it would probably be the NY Times and the Washington Post, providing a nice balance of reporting and opinion. But gosh, I wish we had a local paper even aspired to be one of those!
Your story is just one of thousands that is happening all over the Country. That industry is completely changed and no one (literally there doesn’t seem to be one company yet) has figured out how to do it correctly.
I wouldn’t pay for any news. Why would I? Fox, Cnn, some of the WSJ, and google.com/finance covers everything I want to see.
I do get the Sunday Newsday (Long Island’s Paper) but that is because The Wife wants the coupons, which I believe only make her spend more money but that is not worth the fight.
@ Evan: LOL! Me, I’ve never had the patience to fuss with coupons. But I do have to say, SDXB certainly stocks his larder for a great deal less than I do, largely because he never misses a trick.
This afternoon I stood in the fast-check line interminably behind a young woman who must have weighed close to 300 pounds. She dickered and she fiddled and she pulled out coupons and she demanded rain checks on the “deals” for which they didn’t have enough merchandise to let her use the coupons. Ultimately she walked away with a pile of junk food for which she’d paid $4.20.
Not bad. I guess. There was one huge box of icky-looking sugared cereal, several boxes of sugary icky-looking “snacks,” and a half-dozen boxes of some sort of artificially flavored liquid (a drink, I presume) that purported to contain “REAL juice.” It explained a lot about the poor soul’s morbid obesity.
And it also points up a real issue I have with those little slips of paper: most of them are for fake food: processed ingestibles of one sort or another. Most of these things, like the crud the large lady was buying, aren’t even recognizable as food. It’s a rare day when you’ll see coupons for meat, fresh vegetables, and fresh fruit.
After she trundled on her way, I stepped up to the register and was charged $67 for 15 items consisting of a package of hamburger, celery, carrots, onions, parsley, beef & chicken broth (mostly soup makings, except for the burger), a Swiffer mop to replace the one I used till it fell apart, and some bandages to discourage the dog from licking a hot spot. If the Swiffer & the bandages cost, say, $15, I paid over $50 for more or less nutritious food while she bought enough sweetened corn and wheat products to fill her belly along with some sugar water to wash it down, for $4.20…thanks to those coupons.
Oh well. Back to the News of the Day: if none of us will pay for it, sooner or later it will go away. Journalists have to eat, too.
The Fourth Estate is a crucial element in the survival of democracy. First thing tyrants do (okay, maybe AFTER killing all the lawyers…) is clamp down on the press. The day we say good-bye to the last city newspaper is the day we say good-bye to our freedom.
What remains of it.
“if none of us will pay for it, sooner or later it will go away. Journalists have to eat, too.
The Fourth Estate is a crucial element in the survival of democracy. ”
But it isn’t going anywhere it is just changing. I don’t know about you but I feel like I am getting more “information” today more than ever – its just not monetized correctly (yet).
@ Evan: Well, therein lies the issue: not monetized. When news organizations are losing money on their print editions but can’t make money on their online enterprises, they sure can’t afford to hire investigative reporters. Or even wet-behind-the-ears new j-school grads.
Investigative reporting is an expensive endeavor. It takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money to produce a large investigative piece or series, and a lot more money to have your lawyers vet every assertion the reporters make. Doesn’t really matter what medium is used to deliver the reporting; the work behind it is always going to be the same.
Even an ordinary general assignment reporter or feature writer has to be paid a salary. An investigative reporter’s work has to be supported with a lot of extra funding, above and beyond a salary–which for a heavy hitter is likely to be pretty good.