“How many times can you write that the general-interest newspaper industry is stressed?” the columnist asked his editor. “As many times as companies keep laying off journalists and shutting down papers,” the boss replied.
But after back-to-back weeks of notable newspaper shutdowns by GateHouse Media Group Inc., including The Times of North Little Rock and the Arkadelphia Siftings-Herald, we seem to be at a tipping point for local journalism in Arkansas.
No industry except perhaps the record business has been so thoroughly disrupted by the internet as publishing. Newspapers suffered a tremendous double blow when first readers and then advertisers abandoned them for the web, and financial pressures only intensified as Facebook, Google and now Amazon cornered some two-thirds of the total digital advertising market.
That leaves a third of that pie for newspaper digital operations to compete for, along with everybody else selling online ads, even as print proceeds have slipped to perhaps a third of what they were in 2000.
Thus, GateHouse closed down the Arkadelphia paper, the Hope Star and the Nevada County Picayune-Times 10 days ago, a week after terminating The Times and the Lonoke County Democrat. These developments are bad enough, but compounded when you consider that other small local papers had been rolled into The Times and the Democrat a little over a year before they closed.
The Times absorbed the Maumelle Monitor, the Sherwood Voice and the Jacksonville Patriot last year, and the Democrat took over the Cabot Star-Herald, the Lonoke Democrat and the Carlisle Independent.
Ashley Wimberley, executive director of the Arkansas Press Association, mourned the end of the papers but added that all the shutdowns were the work of one company. GateHouse, based in suburban Rochester, New York, has hundreds of newspapers in small-town America and has drawn fierce criticism for its “stretch and extract” strategy, stretching finances and staffs to the breaking point and extracting profits.
Expressing sadness for the lost jobs and the towns left without papers, Wimberley noted that “almost all of our member newspapers are thriving, successful businesses dedicated to the areas they serve.”
Still new employment numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor show that a job shift away from journalism and into public relations has accelerated. Today’s American economy has nearly six PR jobs for every job in journalism, up from a 5-1 ratio just two years ago. In the past 10 years, the number of U.S. newspaper jobs has plunged a startling 45 percent, from 71,000 to 39,000. In that light, GateHouse’s acquisition strategy doesn’t bode well for local news coverage.
“GateHouse is the kiss of death,” says a New York editor whose former paper, in an upstate mountain town, was acquired by GateHouse five years ago “at the very beginning of its Pac-Man-style gobbling up of properties” across the country. “As a former executive editor who dealt with GateHouse’s higher-ups, I could not believe the level of short-sighted thinking. I fled like my ass was on fire.”
GateHouse’s pullout in Arkadelphia, Prescott and Hope might open some readership and ad sales opportunities for two online operations based in Hope and possibly for Wehco Media Inc., the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which has newspapers in Texarkana, Hot Springs, El Dorado, Camden and Magnolia. “We are reviewing ways that we might help these communities, but nothing is in place at this time,” Wehco Newspapers President Mark Lane said.
Wendell Hoover, owner of Hope-Prescott.com, told Arkansas Business his online organization is looking at starting a weekly print version for Hope and Prescott in the absence of the Star. Jesse Evans, owner of the Hempstead Herald, plans to devote full-time effort to the online site after taking a part-time approach for several years.
He expects a little more “traditional ad revenue locally” to come his way and hopes that new income can help him cover local news, like high school athletics, that the Star had covered.
And what of Arkadelphia, a town of 11,000 and home to Henderson State University and Ouachita Baptist University?
Mike McNeill, publisher and editor of MagnoliaReporter.com, put it this way: “Ah, Arkadelphia. It should be a gold mine for someone willing to go the online route.”
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