When I look at my thin and featherweight Kansas City Star Monday through Saturday (Sunday remains an exception), I feel like I’m looking into a freshly dug hole that is waiting to receive the corporate remains of local newspapers.
Sure, things have been going downhill for years, but it struck me with extra force only recently how bad the situation is.
Here in Kansas City, we all hear complaints and grumblings about how The Star has shrunk and its coverage has contracted. But it’s just about as bad in almost every other metro area. As surely as the glaciers are melting, local newspapers are fading and failing.
You can count on exactly three fingers the papers that are prospering: The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. But they are national papers benefitting not only from the decline of local papers but also from the upsurge in public interest in the altered political landscape. (Some call it the Trump Bump.)
Many dedicated newspaper readers have either dropped their local papers and purchased subscriptions to one of those three papers, or they have continued to subscribe to their local papers and augmented them with online or print-and-online subscriptions to one or more of The Big Three.
The Star is just a microcosm of the trend. Let me show you some of the ways in which The Star and its corporate owner, McClatchy, symbolize the overall descent of the daily newspaper.
:: I wrote about The Star’s precipitously falling circulation last month, but it warrants a recap. The Star’s Sunday print circulation now stands at less than 120,000, and daily circulation is below 80,000. Sunday circulation fell by a startling 26 percent between September 2016 and September 2017. The drop in daily circulation during the same period was 12 percent. That kind of loss is not sustainable very long, and it prompted a retired, longtime reporter at The Star to analyze it in these words, “What we’re talking about now is a long, ugly drag to the bottom.”
McClatchy Co., based in Sacramento, and the other newspaper chains have pinned their hopes on a transition from print to digital. But it’s just not working; there are too many other places for people to go to get what information they want without paying for it.
According to the Alliance for Audited Media, The Star actually lost stand-alone digital subscriptions between this September and last, falling from 12,288 to 10,219. Either number is paltry in a metro area with 1.7 million people. The transition to digital has gone much better in some cities, such as Boston, but I believe many papers are facing the same struggle as Kansas City.
Source: “The Financial”
:: For years, The Star has been dropping stand-alone sections, such as FYI and Business, and funneling material from discontinued sections into the A section, which, until about 10 years ago, was reserved for national and international news and the editorial pages. Initially, Star management tried to sell the changes to readers as beefing up the A section. For a year or so, the A section did grow, partly with the addition of four pages of “In Depth” coverage several days a week. Now, however, “In Depth” is down to a single story on a single page and might as well be called “In Shallow.”
For thumbnail evidence of what I’m talking about, check out this “bottoms-up” photo I took of Saturday’s A section…
In essence, there are four “sections” — national, local, business and FYI — crammed into the 14-page section. That is a total embarrassment. But, like I say, it’s not exclusive to Kansas City; other papers are doing the same thing. Not all of them are owned by a chain that is drowning in $800 million of debt — McClatchy — but none of the major newspaper chains is prospering.
:: I didn’t realize until last Thursday just how desperate The Star’s chase for readers was. I had heard that The Star had begun evaluating reporters partly on the basis of the number of “clicks” their stories were getting, but I thought that was designed to motivate reporters to go after big, substantive stories. But Thursday I saw on The Star’s website a story that struck me as odd for a number of reasons. Carried under the heading of “latest news,” it was about a white guy who tried to run down a black man in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the Ozarks. But it was written by a local reporter, Max Londberg, who had dressed up and repackaged an old Springfield News-Leader story as if it was original reporting. When I Googled the incident, I found the incident had occurred more than three months ago — and 175 miles from Kansas City.
After I wrote about that, a commenter posted a link to a story that longtime Star reporter Matt Campell had written about a woman in Virginia who saw a house on fire “and immediately went into full TV journalist mode on Facebook Live, creating a video that has made her something of a sensation.” Sensation, yes!
So, it dawned on me that, at least on its website, The Star has its reporters trolling for “clickbait” stories — akin to those you see linked at the bottom of mainstream stories, trying to lure readers with headlines like, “Celebrities that are falling down drunk” and “LiAngelo Ball explains why he shoplifted in China.”
This go-for-the-clicks strategy did not emanate from 18th and Grand — that would be bad enough — but with McClatchy executives, who have directed managers at all 29 of its daily papers to pursue stories that theoretically will attract wide readership. Reporters have been given checklists, and if potential stories don’t meet certain specific criteria, they should not pursue them. I presume that includes grass-roots, no-glitz stories like those a reporter would get covering school boards, city councils and courthouses. Unexciting though those stories are, they have long helped keep politicians and elected officials honest and have provided citizens with important information about what’s going on in their cities.
I can guarantee you that the go-for-clicks strategy will not lead papers to prosperity in the Internet era. Major metropolitan newspapers and newspaper companies that stoop to appealing to the lowest common denominator will quickly lose what credibility they have left, and they will go out of business. I don’t know what the answer is — maybe there is none — but if I had my own newspaper, I would go down swinging, filling my paper (and the website) with a blend of substantive, informative and entertaining stories…It would be JimmyCsays times 10. I might call it The Pizza Report: If you didn’t like it, you could eat it.
**
I will leave the last word to Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” who knows a thing or two about newspapers. His Berkshire Hathaway company owns several papers, including The Buffalo News and the Omaha World-Herald.
I came across this quote of Buffett’s in an August 2016 story on the Politico website:
“Newspapers are going to go downhill. Most newspapers, the transition to the Internet so far hasn’t worked in digital. The revenues don’t come in. There are a couple of exceptions for national newspapers — the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are in a different category. That doesn’t mean it necessarily works brilliantly for them, but they are a different business than a local newspaper. But local newspapers continue to decline at a very significant rate. And even with the economy improving, circulation goes down, advertising goes down, and it goes down in prosperous cities, it goes down in areas that are having urban troubles, it goes down in small towns – that’s what amazes me. A town of 10 or 20,000, where there’s no local TV station obviously, and really there’s nothing on the Internet that tells you what’s going on in a town like that, but the circulation just goes down every month. And when circulation goes down, advertising is gonna go down.”
Yep, the “long, ugly drag to the bottom” is well underway, and McClatchy, unfortunately, appears to be leading the descent.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Instead of commenting here, I should be sitting on the couch surrounded by several meaty sections of the Sunday Star. But that’s not the case any more in Kansas City.
In Dallas, however, were I visiting my son today, I would be co-opting his easy chair and I WOULD be surrounded by a hefty Dallas Morning News, with lots of sections containing substantial coverage of news (including many local stories), sports (they are crazy for sports in Texas all the way down to the high school level), opinion, depth (investigations), arts, culture, real estate, and on and on.
It would take all day to read it. The Belo family, which owns the Dallas Morning News, has invested in the news and in greater Dallas. Yes, it sometimes is an economic stretch. But Dallas is a metroplex of about 5.5 million. And it is booming. There is a lot of money going around. And there are advertisers.
The Morning News’s digital presence is substantial, too; I see if every day. It helps me keep up with events in my son’s city.
It looks to me as if the Belo family has been aggressive in pursuing that advertising money. They are good at it, having been leaders in producing and selling the advertising inserts that do not seem to be diminishing in the Sunday Star and elsewhere.
Only thing is, the Star is in danger of having nothing to wrap around the ad inserts.
Fred is correct about the Dallas Morning News. Another still excellent local newspaper is The Post and Courier in Charleston, SC., by far the best newspaper in South Carolina. The privately owned paper (it also owns 11 other small dailies and weekly papers in South Carolina) does a terrific covering local and state government and all the other vital issues in the area. It, too, has lost some circulation but continues to produce a high quality newspaper that relies on the beat structure to report the news. As far as I can tell, the paper is doing OK financially though not producing the 30 per cent margins of 15 years ago.
Thanks to Fred, a former KC Star staff member, and Mike, a former editor of The Star, for their observations on papers elsewhere. (Mike is retired in South Carolina.)
…I find the situation in Dallas particularly interesting. Its Sunday print circulation — 185,404 as of September — is nothing to brag about in a metro area of 5.5 million. (That was an 11 percent drop from September 2016). It does have a fairly large digital business, with 87,673 paid subscriptions, compared to about 10,000 for The Star.
One reason A.H. Belo Corp. can continue producing a hefty, substantive print product is it only owns two papers — the other being the much smaller Denton Record-Chronicle. That means it can pour its resources into the Morning News. Also, as of last March the company had zero debt on its balance sheet. Compare that to McClatchy, which is drowning in debt from its ill-fated purchase of the KnightRidder chain in 2006, just when the newspaper industry began taking a sharp turn south.
Good report, Jim.
Thanks, Les.
I think you’ve pretty much nailed the situation, Jim. JymmyCsays times 10 is something I’d pay for, if you are inclined to go to a pay for content business model. The Jungerman saga alone would be worth the price.
In a slightly different vein (not to neglect that Star!), I was interested in Warren Buffett’s observation about papers in small towns. I follow a few small town papers and subscribed, until this month, to the Courier Tribune here in Clay County. Nobody covers the news up here other than sensational stuff-of-the-moment; not the Star, not the TV stations and not even the internet, now that the Northland News has gone away. We have an AM station that doesn’t do news at all. The Courier Tribune surely has a market to exploit in local news but almost completely ignores it. It seems to report almost solely what I call “completed” stories, such as the inconsequential salary equalization for Clay County commissioners and top employees. There is no evidence a reporter attends county commission meetings, where the bickering and conflicts among commissioners has been an issue for years. (That was the bailiwick of the Northland News, and the reporting was both informative and entertaining.) There is no attention to “process”, an accounting for how things work politically up here. There is some reporting on municipality news, but not very much, and it seems more sparse with time. Nor is there any reporting…and I mean any…on crime, unless it is a murder or something like that. But, the paper is stuffed with advertising flyers and print ads. I don’t know what the rates are for ads, but I have to think they are making some money, at least for now. There must be a population of 150,000 in Clay County alone, and we have no reliable news source. I think the owner, NPG, may be milking for revenues but is losing its future.
Sports, maybe that is what keeps papers from going to almost zero circulation.
Merry Christmas y’all. I appreciate Jim’s work and the intelligent responses of you readers. Here’s hoping 2018 brings a positive bounce in the world of journalism. And may this blog continue to prosper.
Good to hear about the situation in the Northland, Bob…I mean, it’s not good at all, but it’s interesting to know what’s not happening journalistically.
When you refer to the Northland News are you talking about The Star’s former weekly product — one of the many Neighborhood News products we had in the 1990s and early 2000s? We had about a dozen of those, as I recall, in Johnson County alone. They didn’t generate a tremendous amount of money, but they were definitely profitable and made The Star a must-have product there and in other parts of the metro area.
Thanks for complimenting me and our commenters, Bob; you guys are the ones who keep it vibrant. I’m very fortunate to have had this blog seven plus years now, and to have seen it make a nice mark on the journalistic scene.
I do remember the Star northland product, and I wish we still had them, but that was way back. The Northland News was an online publication written/edited by Andrew Palmer, which ran from about 2015 until early 2017. Kind of like the Shawnee Mission Post, but definitely of more limited scope. Speaking of the latter, I hope they are doing well with their paywall system.
I understand the numbers for The Star, but I do think that the model they are putting together for online subscriptions must be working better for them in recent months. It used to be that you couldn’t log in and it didn’t seem like connectability worked real well. I think they have gotten that to a better stage.
Earlier on, their online advertising did not seem to work real well, but it seems much improved for them, although I am no expert. Even with that, I subscribe to the online Star for whatever it is, a $100 a year, and wouldn’t consider getting rid of it, because I think it is still the best source for local news. I am glad we still have it.
Just as bystander, it looks to me like the Star is coming through the wormhole that was technology and it starting to make their model work on the other side. I hope they make it.
For the sake of us readers, Bill, I hope you’re right, but I’m dubious, mainly because McClatchy is at the helm of the local ship.
As I noted in the post, McClatchy has 29 daily papers (most not as big as The Star), and according to a Politico story early this year, the company had only 83,000 digital subscribers system wide. Compare that with the Boston Globe, which, by itself, had 70,000 digital-only subscribers. In addition, the story said, Globe digital subscribers were paying $1 a day, while The Star gets about a third of that.
Unless I’m missing something, The Star’s numbers look pretty grim. Moreover, I think Warren Buffett is right, generally, when he says that nationwide newspapers’ transition to the Internet isn’t panning out.
Jim, I enjoy reading your blog and although I don’t know who else follows you, I surmise there are several with close association with the Star. I too am worried about the future of newspapers. I recently moved to LA, but continue to subscribe digitally to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Washington Post and to the print and digital editions of the New York Times. I let my Star digital subscription lapse mainly because I had it for business purposes as my wife and I were doing work in Kansas City. I do check in regularly and read the free stuff such as the story about Mike Sanders. I have a long-time affection for the Star as my great-great uncle, A.B. MacDonald, received a Pulitzer for his reporting while at the Star in the 1930s.
Anyway, your blog arrived on Sunday morning. Coincidentally Saturday Debra and I had spent the afternoon at the Clippers Game with Les and Loree. Les worked for me at Truman State about 40 years ago, moved to LA ended up at the LA Times, working his way up to layout editor. At age 55 his department had shrunk from 15 to about 3. In short, he took a buyout four years ago and is making a go of it in PR at UCLA. Loree, Les’s companion, is still at the Times. She is in management. But with the recent turmoil under Tronc ownership, she continues to examine her options. Both Les and Loree toiled at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner until it closed in the late 1980s.
The Times just hired a brand-new editor, Lewis D’Vorking (http://www.latimes.com/about/lat-lewis-dvorkin-story.html) who apparently has not made many friends. The Guild is in the process of organizing the news room which has a long and storied history of being an open shop from when the Times was bombed around 1910 by union sympathizers. One of the participants in the organizing effort is Kansas City native Laura Nelson whose parents both worked at the Star (O.J. Nelson and Christie Cater). I follow Laura’s work and she seems to be a hardworking transportation reporter turned temporary wild fire reporter. She spends a lot of time on social media, I imagine looking for those “clicks.”
Meanwhile circulation continues to decline as the Times has not adapted to the digital age nor made its print edition compelling enough to sustain its subscription base. My friend Les and I had a long discussion about lack of maps in the Times. Being new to LA, I read the Times with a California map at my side. He said they don’t have the resources to produce maps but also pointed out that it’s trick producing fire maps that may be out of date by the time they reach the reader.
I never read the LA Times during its heyday. The current incarnation seems to suffer all the maladies of other big-city dailies: zone editions are gone, there is more wire service copy, all the foreign bureaus are closed, and Doyle McManus, Washington, D.C.-based columnist, announced a major cutback in the number of columns he would be producing. There is still a lot of coverage of Hollywood both from an entertainment as well as a business perspective, which offers a flair for the paper that is not seen in Midwest papers.
Unfortunately, none of the LA billionaires have shown much interest in having their own newspaper. Eli Broad reportedly took a look at it but made a practical decision to pass. I keep thinking someone will figure it out and another national paper will emerge out of the second largest metropolitan area in the country.
The LA Times fell into a really deep, dark hole when the chain it led, Times-Mirror, agreed to be purchased by the Tribune Co. of Chicago in 2000. (A few years ago, Tribune spun off its publishing division, which goes by the name “Tronc” — a derivation of Tribune online content.)
Tribune has been as big a disaster as McClatchy, with more drama. I have a buddy who got out of the Chicago Tribune while the gettin’ was good. He struggled for a few years but landed with the Voice of America in D.C. and is well situated now.
Agree about Buffet. I have long argued he should buy The Star.
There have been significant cuts at the Berkshire Hathaway papers, too. The difference is they let the local managers run their operations as they see fit. Of course, BH wants to see profits, but they don’t micromanage from Omaha; they don’t don’t pass down things like reportorial “checklists.” Still, if McClatchy ever sold The Star to BH, you could look into the green-glass building at 17th and McGee and see employees dancing and toasting the new era, free of McClatchy’s heavy boot.
The Star has two problems. Problem one is McClatchy. McClatchy is cannibalizing Star profits to pay off its debt. Problem two was that ill-advised printing press (which led to quite a bit of debt). The Star itself is a profitable entity. The best thing that could happen to it is for McClatchy to go bankrupt and sell it off as a stand-alone property.
As for content, I have long argued that the key to viability for newspapers is a) to produce that which is not produced by their amateur competitors (and this blog is a small example of that) and b) do the kind of news that the TV stations aren’t going to do, i.e. original reporting. Sit in at those city council meetings, take pictures of the high school sporting events, let people know what’s going on in their neighborhoods. Small-town newspapers are still profitable, so divide the metro area into small towns and service those communities. Do the kind of stories jimmycsays does, extended stories about compelling local events that are unresolved, but no longer front page stuff. TV stations aren’t going to do that.
Personally, the clickbait approach is the quickest way to get you blocked on my computer. Post headlines that don’t live up to their billing and about the second time you will never be seen again.
By the way, The Post is alive because Jeff Bezos has chosen to use it as his personal hobby. As a result, it loses credibility daily. I get it, he hates Trump, but even the people I know who hate Trump no longer cite Post articles. Screeds are depressing because the promised downfall of their subject never occurs. That’s why when I did my column for The Star I never mentioned Bill Clinton.
I made a boo boo. Obviously, the comment about doing original reporting referred back to competing with amateurs. The remainder, HS sporting events, city council, etc. refer to competing with TV stations. Damned copy editor.
Another thought about dividing The Star up into community editions would be that your subscription would include the national and metro area sections and one community newspaper. For additional fees, you could also receive other community editions that were of interest to you in much the same manner that cable TV offers a variety of packages to subscribers.
Maybe you should ring up Mark Zieman (husband of your favorite three-wheeled driver) and offer up your suggestions…
If they haven’t embraced your wisdom, what chance do I have?