Exciting changes!

LITTLE ROCK — WHAT’S WRONG with newspapers today? The same thing that’s always been wrong with newspapers: the people running them.

We’ve become accustomed to bad news from the ever narrowing world of print journalism these uneasy days. Not just bad journalism, but bad business decisions. It’s as if the suits at Corporate HQ—or more likely a committee of suits at Corporate HQ—had drawn up a business plan for all major American newspapers back in 1994 and proceeded to follow it. Right off a cliff.

As more newspapers go off that cliff, you’d think that more of them—a publisher or editor or somebody, anybody who’s in charge—would yell, “WATCH OUT!”, and stop on the edge. And decide, then and there, that

they’re through watching the

newspaper they love commit

suicide. And start charging

money for their product.

Like a real business.

A few years back, at some meeting of inky wretches in Pittsburgh, a covey of young, new-media Internet types flitted around the conference with a mantra along the lines of: “News wants to be free!”

They said it so often you’d have thought they were in Washington. The one in D.C. For in D.C., as everybody “knows,” if you say something three times, and it’s printed, it becomes a fact. This flock of robots was in Pittsburgh at the time, not Washington, D.C.—but “news wants to be free” is still less a thought than a stupidity.

Imagine a dentist thinking along those fruitless lines. He goes to school for a half-dozen years, racks up a truly impressive student-loan debt, hangs out his shingle, buys a few computers and several dental chairs, and hires somebody to keep the books and somebody else to clean teeth. He fills a tooth in your pre-teen’s mouth one day, and, as you’re walking out the door, he tells you to put away your checkbook. “Dentistry wants to be free!” he shouts.

How long would he stay in practice?

Exactly.

News wants to be free? Tell it to those who gather it, photograph it, slap headlines on it, deliver it, opine on it and sell it. They have to eat. So do their kids. How are they going to support themselves giving away the products of their labor?

The geniuses who come up with brilliant ideas like Free News seem to think the worker is unworthy of his hire. Maybe they didn’t get enough Scripture when they were young. Whatever the reason for their blind spot, it’s a big one. And they’ve grown so attached to it, so emotionally invested in their failed business model, that they keep insisting it’ll work just fine. Right up to the day their newspaper goes out of business.

LAST WEEK, another one bit the dust. Or could soon. This time the newspaper isn’t in Seattle or even Denver. It’s a lot closer. And it used to be a lot better. It’s the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. And the suits running its parent company have decided that the paper’s circulation has dropped to the point that it doesn’t pay to print a newspaper four days a week.

That’s right. In order to get back the subscribers it’s lost, the Times-Picayune will make the paper less valuable to readers. Or to be more precise, foursevenths less valuable every week, since the paper will only go to press Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

So the next time a hurricane hits the coast on a Sunday morning, the story won’t make print till Wednesday. That’s about the time the crew at the Weather Channel will be packing up to cover the next big weather story on one coast or another.

It’s crazy. Or it’ll drive you crazy if you can stand to think about it. Murray Kempton, the greatest American opinionator of the last half-century that nobody’s ever heard of these days, once explained why Westbrook Pegler went crazy. Mr. Pegler, a truly talented sportswriter and political opinionator in his youthful and even middle-aged prime, was reduced to ill-tempered idiocy in his later years. Which he spent spewing venom at any politician to the left of Genghis Khan.

According to Murray Kempton, it wasn’t Westbrook Pegler’s hatred of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he customarily referred to as La Boca Grande, that had driven him nuts, or even his drinking. It was writing his column over the weekend and then having to wait till Wednesday for it to make it into print. Mercifully, he didn’t live to see newspapers start cutting out their Monday and Tuesday editions altogether. The way the Times-Picayune has chosen to do. Just think of New Orleans Saints fans, poor creatures. One of the best things about the Times-Picayune was the Monday morning editions after Saints games. The editors there weren’t afraid of splashing photos of the game all over the paper, including the front page. Even taking up most of the front page. New Orleans loves its Saints. Now there’ll be no Monday print edition.

(You’d think that the next

time the Saints win the Super

Bowl—on what’s called Super

Bowl Sunday—the paper would

at least consider running an Extra the next day.)

Yes, what’s left of the news would still appear on the Times-Picayune’s website. Which we visited this week. And everything we clicked on was still free of charge. Sports. Obits. No paywall that we could find. The Times-Pic refuses to catch on. Which makes a once devoted reader wonder how long there’ll still be a Times-Pic.

The less valuable a newspaper becomes to its readers, the fewer readers it’ll get, so management will have to make still more cuts, making the paper even less valuable. That isn’t a business model, it’s a vicious cycle.

THE FOLKS who own the Times-Picayune also own a few papers in ’Bama. Here’s the headline last week in the Press-Register in Mobile when it announced it was cutting back its print editions to three days a week:

Exciting changes for our readers

But only if you have easy access to the Internet. For those who don’t, tough.

The big problem isn’t computer access. Most people have it these days—even on their phones. The big problem is how to make digitized news pay for the folks who provide it. Or as the suits would say, how do you “monetize” it?

That little detail hasn’t quite been worked out yet despite a lot of hopeful starts and even a few partial successes. Till then, where’s the money going to come from to hire the best journalists, writers, businessmen and production people? To put it in plain Suthuhn, these newspapers are eating their seed corn. This they call a business plan. An exciting business plan.

It’s not just newspapers that lose out when “exciting changes” like these are made. Imagine how a vanishing newspaper affects the community. If you turn a newspaper into a TV station—with only a handful of reporters covering a multitude of beats and subjects they barely understand—who’s going to be the watchdog? Who’s going to find out that the mayor is being bribed? Or that local government is paying inflated rates for office space? Who’s going to find out that the cops are on the take? Who’s going to notice that the books have been cooked at the local college?

Who’s going to find out that the state’s veterans home is cheating veterans? Who’s going to find out that a president or two at a college somewhere in, say, Central Arkansas has been pulling some slick deals? Who’s going to question contracts with the state lottery? Who’s going to have the time to dig through all the paperwork and FOI requests and general red tape to get to the bottom of the news and, like any good watchdog, bark when something strange is going on?

Hard as it is to believe, New Orleans may not be above such corruption. From the stories we’ve read, many of them from the old Times-Picayune, New Orleans may be rife with it.

These are times that try a newspaper’s soul. The Great Recession hasn’t helped. Trust us. But we never thought great American newspapers would do themselves in this way.