One daily voice per metro?!?
The latest in the never-ending bad newspaper industry news: the Hearst Corp. is considering closing the San Francisco Chronicle if it can’t cut costs sufficiently to stem its ongoing heavy losses.
Hearst has reportedly lost about a BILLION dollars since 2000, with never a profit, since acquiring the Chron in a complicated deal that saw Hearst get rid of its flagship San Francisco Examiner.
When I worked at the Chron as a graphics guy in the first half of 2000 (shortly before Hearst bought it), times were flush — nearly every meeting seemed to have food brought in — and its circulation was about 500,000; now it’s around 370,000. The news staff has been whacked repeatedly, and its current news staff of 275 is less than half of what it was several years earlier. Losses in 2008 were more than $50 million, and this year promises to be far worse.
According to the Newsosaur blog, it could take cutting nearly half of the entire staff (news, production, circulation, etc.) of 1,500 to balance the books this year.
Hearst has already announced it will close its Seattle Post-Intellignecer (where I also worked) very soon — perhaps becoming a web-only product — and has threatened to shut the Chron as well.
A major city like San Francisco with no real daily newspaper?? That’s insane. Yes, there’s a shrunken freebie tabloid San Francisco Examiner still printing, but it’s a city paper, not a metro one, and doesn’t publish on weekends.
But WAIT! A proposed solution keeps popping up: to sell the Chron to MediaNews Group… that’s the mega-merger behemoth that owns virtually EVERY OTHER daily in the Bay Area, from Marin to Oakland, Contra Costa to San Jose, San Mateo to Monterey. This chain is the result of various sales and acquisitions engineered by McClatchy, Knight Ridder, Hearst and MediaNews, leaving virtually every daily other than the Chronicle under the rule of William Dean Singleton — who also owns nearly every daily in Los Angeles County other than the L.A. Times.
Selling the Chron to MediaNews would mean essentially EVERY DAILY NEWSPAPER in the enormous Bay Area would be under a common ownership (Hearst has a piece of this conglomeration, so it would do fine). Antitrust laws? If the Chron is seen as imminently failing, antitrust objections might be suspended, plus the newspaper industry is so stressed nowadays by other news sources that all the old rules might be suspended.
MediaNews is famous for its “consolidation” of resources. That means whacking staff at various publications so that, say, a single copy desk at one paper might edit copy from all the newspapers in a regional “cluster” of properties. Adding the Chron to the mix guarantees a lot more pink slips… and there have been a whole lot in recent years.
And some pundits predict the same for Southern California. The Los Angeles Times is part of the Tribune Company, which has already gone into bankruptcy, and the paper has lost about a quarter of its circulation and has had repeated rounds of layoffs, including a round just weeks ago.
Merging the Times into the MediaNews properties that surround it has been suggested, and this carries all the problems of the Bay Area situation. Grander still (or more appalling) is a proposal to merge the Times with its biggest Southern California rivals, the Orange County Register and even the San Diego Union-Tribune; the thinking (in some circles) is that things are so dire these days that nobody will survive unless all major players are joined together.
Either scenario means a huge consolidation of power and ownership, with a potential for fewer independent voices and more potentially compromised coverage from complicated business interests.
All the scenarios here have a common look: Bad News.
——-
Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com and blog site at http://blog.cagle.com/greenberg/
*reprinted with permission from Steve Greenberg
Related posts: