David Westphal

By David Westphal and Geneva Overholser

One of the dominant themes of political life these days is the ever-growing division between urban and rural Americans. Thomas Edsall described it this way in The New York Times: “A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the upheaval in American partisanship.”

This topic sometimes makes its way to our dinner table discussions, where we try to understand what is driving rural and urban citizens so strongly apart. It hits home for us partly because of our journalism careers at The Des Moines Register, which for many decades was arguably the pre-eminent American newspaper covering farming and rural life. Iowa ranks second only to California in the value of its farm production, and even with population declines over the years, more than one-third of its residents are still classified as rural. 

Chronicling this rich agricultural footprint was a huge part of The Register’s mission. The farm sector was both a major source of the newspaper’s advertising revenue (mainly classified ads) and a primary focus of news coverage. And it resulted in one of the rare daily newspapers that was delivered to homes in all of the state’s counties. It was, The Register boasted on its front pages, “The Newspaper That Iowa Depends Upon.” (At one point, the Sunday Register claimed a statewide circulation of more than 500,000 – a majority of the state’s households.)

Although vestiges of that time remain – the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) still draws thousands of riders each year – the newspaper’s statewide reach is long gone, a result of demographic, cultural and economic changes that have hit newspapers nearly everywhere. According to a recent NiemanLab report, The Register’s combined print and digital subscriptions have fallen precipitously, to below 40,000.

What did it mean when, for half a century, most Iowans were reading The Register? What was the impact of a newspaper that covered both rural and urban Iowans? It’s impossible to know with any certainty, of course. Consider this a thought experiment— one with some relevance to the divisions our nation is facing today.

 In his book, “Covering Iowa,” William B. Friedricks wrote: 

“Beginning in the 1870s, but really from the 1920s on, when its circulation began to take off, The Register sought to appeal to all Iowans. In so doing, it became a unifying force within the state. In an age when tensions between farmers and merchants, politicians and professionals, rural and city people, and even men and women were increasing, the paper provided a common meeting ground for all Iowans. It held the attention of the state’s various constituents by providing special sections to appeal to certain groups: it offered detailed coverage of agriculture; campaigned for programs of statewide interest, such as the promotion of good roads; and identified the views of Iowans on important issues in the Iowa Poll. Through such efforts, the Register brought citizens of the state together, and in many ways helped define what it meant to be an Iowan.”

It’s not the case, of course, that rural residents were all big fans of The Register. The newspaper routinely spotlighted problem areas in the farming sector such as damaging environmental practices or safety issues. It regularly chronicled the amount of federal subsidies farmers were receiving. The decidedly liberal orientation of The Register’s editorial pages was not a big hit in many rural homes. 

But one thing we think is true: A great many farmers, agribusiness people, and small-town political and business leaders believed that, through The Des Moines Register, they were being seen – by the state’s political and business leaders and by ordinary Iowans across the state. Even as they in turn could see the lives of urban Iowans.

Throughout much of the 20th century, Iowa was the antithesis of the sharp rural/urban divide that now defines our politics. From Harold Hughes to Dick Clark to John Culver to Tom Harkin, Iowa fielded some of the most liberal politicians in Washington, often with robust support from rural voters. In 1984, Harkin’s first Senate victory, a majority of rural counties voted for him. And in that same election, about 40 percent of Iowa’s urban counties backed Republican Ronald Reagan over Democrat Walter Mondale for president.

There was a striking open-mindedness in the electorate, with voters gravitating to candidates and issues without the bindings of tribalism. That fluidity was still in evidence in Barack Obama’s two presidential victories, with nearly two dozen rural counties supporting his 2012 successful re-election bid. Not so today, of course. In the last two presidential elections, all of Iowa’s rural counties have voted for Donald Trump. 

In an editorial after the 2020 election, The Register lamented the state’s new pattern of “us vs. them” voting, which it said is permeating politics at all levels. “The risk for Iowa,” the editorial said, “is that it feels as if the state’s historical rural-urban divide is now on steroids, pushed to a new extreme…”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find ourselves believing that The Register’s decline, and its retreat from a statewide footprint, is a significant part of this story. Again, impossible to prove. But perhaps examining what has been lost, or nearly lost, from the paper’s report could shed some light.

At one time, The Register had full-time correspondents in eight Iowa cities beyond Des Moines. It had stringers in all 99 counties. It had a fleet of cars that reporters and photographers would use to drive across the state to cover athletic contests, cultural events and spot news developments. The Register was wonderfully innovative.  In the 1920s it was one of the early newspapers to purchase airplanes for covering spot developments around the state. At one point, according to George Mills’ book, “Things Don’t Just Happen,” the editors employed carrier pigeons to fly film of an execution at the state prison in Fort Madison to Des Moines. (The pigeons never arrived.)

Three examples of The Register’s statewide orientation:

• Farm and agribusiness coverage. For much of The Register’s life, it had a daily page or more of farm news. The Sunday Farm/Agribusiness section, though, was the showcase, filled with rural-Iowa stories and, not coincidentally, pages of classified ads for farm equipment, livestock, auctions, and so on. The farm/business staff was stocked with some of the best journalists in the room. But that room was only part of the story. The Register’s Washington Bureau arguably had the strongest farm coverage of any DC staff – from reporters like Nick Kotz, Jim Risser, George Anthan. One of the byproducts of their coverage was to make Iowa more internationalist, showing how the state’s multibillion dollar farm exports tied the state to a global economy.

• Political coverage. For nearly 50 years, The Register’s political coverage has been recognized mainly for its chronicling of the Iowa Caucuses and the bellwether Iowa Poll. But day in and day out, reporters like Jim Flansburg and David Yepsen would reflect the local and regional politics of the state, traveling to county conventions, steak fries and other political events across Iowa. Former Gov. Robert Ray once remarked that he had a significant advantage over other governors. Because of The Register, he said, he knew what Iowans across the state knew.

• Sports coverage. For many years, and even today, The Register’s sports coverage has been anchored in its dispatches on the University of Iowa and Iowa State University. Almost as important, though, was its commitment to statewide high school sports. The Register sought to print the scores of every football and basketball game from the state’s 400-plus high schools, and would produce weekly columns and features on high school athletes. Every Friday night in football season, a reporter and photographer would travel to a “Spotlight Game,” often played in one of Iowa’s small towns. They would produce a short story and single photo that sent quite a message: What happens here on a Friday night, miles away from Des Moines, matters to us.

Coverage like this was possible, of course, only because the newspaper’s statewide orientation worked as a business model. It doesn’t anymore. The Register, once with a full-time news staff of 225, now has fewer than 50 reporters and editors. It still tries to cover farming and rural Iowa, but with a reach and strength reduced by orders of magnitude. This is true not just of The Register. Coverage of rural matters has vastly declined in recent decades, even in newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post that could well afford it.

Nearly 25 years ago, Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone,” in which he argued that “social capital” was in sharp decline in the United States, a result of dwindling participation in civic life – not just in bowling leagues but in community organizations, in churchgoing, in voting participation and yes, in newspaper readership.  A Cornell University professor, Suzanne Mettler, said that because of these “cross cutting relationships … people had a sense that we’re all in this together; we’re all citizens of this country with a common project, even if we differ on policy issues.”

There may be many contributors to our current us-vs.-them climate. The internet. Social media. Extremist cable channels. Talk radio. Growing income disparities. A nation that becomes ever-less rural. But, as Putnam argued, a primary cause may also be the weakening of institutions like the newspaper that brought people of different backgrounds into contact with one another.

Last weekend on NPR, Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, who has studied the impact of newspaper closures and downsizing, said this: “There’s a pretty big body of research that shows that when a local newspaper vanishes or is dramatically gutted, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, a general erosion of civic engagement. It makes it easier for misinformation to spread, for conspiracy theories to spread.”

And that makes it a nationwide problem because newspapers are in fast decline virtually everywhere, with scant prospects for a turnaround.

So what is the case for optimism here, particularly in addressing the urban/rural divide?

1. Ultimately, the hope is that digital news can help provide solutions. One early attempt: the year-old Rural News Network, which includes about five dozen news sites and organizations that focus wholly or partly on rural issues. Organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News, the network is anchored by the Daily Yonder in Kentucky and Investigate Midwest in Illinois (including its Iowa Watch newsroom), and seeks reporting partnerships among its participants.  This is an initiative that merits the support of charitable foundations and wealthy benefactors, and should grab the attention of national newspapers and TV networks for partnership possibilities. Then there is the growing list of local and regional digital sites, such as Julie Gammack’s Iowa Writers Collaborative, which offer increasingly rich reporting on their diverse populations. 

2. The New York Times, the Washington Post and TV newsrooms – those still with working business models – should return to the time when they gave much broader coverage to farming and rural issues. They are certainly on the case covering the pitched, ideological political battles taking place in rural states, and rightly so. But there is so much more to farm and small-town life, and the big news organizations would do themselves, and the country, a favor by better reflecting it. 

Rural and urban Americans seem increasingly to find themselves utterly foreign to one another.  In looking back at The Register’s (and perhaps some of Iowa’s) best years, we are reminded that this is not an unsolvable problem.

Geneva and I are big fans of the architectural cruises that take a waterway spin around Manhattan, with commentary supplied by local architects. Recently, we noticed a hybrid cruise had been added that focused on climate change. So on July 1, on a splendid New York day, we set sail with architect Doug Fox, who surprised us with how much the city is doing to battle climate change.

It’s not shocking that New York would be a leader. After New Orleans, New York is one of the most vulnerable cities in the country to rising sea levels. Superstorm Sandy, coming up on its 10th anniversary, did almost $20 billion worth of damage to the city. New York is also, after California, among the most politically disposed to confront climate change. Still, it was eye-opening how many initiatives New York has taken on, and how many are now being constructed or implemented. Most urgent are the projects that would protect New York from a rising sea and intense rainstorms. But perhaps most heartening are those that would reduce the city’s fossil fuel consumption in favor of clean energy.

Following are highlights of Fox’s fine presentation – plus a few items from follow-up reading.

RISING SEA LEVELS

Sandy was New York’s wake-up call. Its nine-foot storm surge inundated subways, buildings, roadways, neighborhoods, and left big questions about how the city could survive rising sea levels and likely more deadly storms.

Massive Sea Gates

The dream solution to New York’s vulnerability to the Atlantic Ocean is to keep the storm surge out – via a six-mile-long closable gate from the Rockaways to New Jersey. As audacious as it sounds, the Army Corps of Engineers is studying such a possibility, with its huge expenses, uncertainty of success, and unpredictable side effects. Although it seems like a longshot, a smaller version of this has been tried (seemingly successfully) in The Netherlands and elsewhere.

Flood Walls

On our cruise, we saw a couple of newly constructed flood walls. One was on the Lower East Side, a particularly vulnerable area on the East River. Another was on Manhattan’s northern tip, along the Harlem River, in an area where subway cars are repaired. More are in the works, though Fox said there’s no way New York could afford to put flood walls everywhere.

Natural Barriers

Someday, the city hopes to erect a U-shaped barrier that protects all of Lower Manhattan and, to the extent possible, a preferred option is green spaces.  For starters, officials focused on East River Park, the narrow strip of parkland created by Robert Moses between the East River and FDR Drive. The idea was to reimagine the park in such a way that it would provide a natural sea wall. Construction has now begun on a project that will use landfill to raise the park by 8 feet. But this is also a cautionary tale, because it took almost a decade of intense infighting among community groups and government officials to arrive at an acceptable plan (acceptable to most, that is).

PROTECTING AGAINST TORRENTIAL RAIN

Storm surge gets most of the headlines, but New York is also quite vulnerable to damage from ever more violent rainstorms. Within just two months in 2021, the city was hit with deluges from Elsa and Ida, the latter of which dropped three inches of rain in one hour. Streets, subways and buildings were flooded. (Our co-op had hundreds of thousands of dollars in water damage to the elevators and boiler in our flooded basement.)

In a city that has as little green space as New York, the solutions are hard to see. The most effective one would be a total upgrade of the sewage system, which is unfortunately far too cost-prohibitive. But many things are in the works. According to an April story by Bloomberg’s Linda Poon, New York has spent $1 billion on 11,000 projects in its green infrastructure program. “They include installing more than 4,000 curbside rain gardens and bioswales — with another 5,000 planned — making sidewalks and roadways porous, greening the city’s medians and rooftops,” Poon wrote. 

The city is also devising rainwater retention projects such as rain gardens alongside roads. Poon reported on one experiment using recreation areas. “The city will lower the basketball                                                                                                                                               court in a Queens housing project below surface level,” she wrote, “to create a storage space that can hold some 300,000 gallons of stormwater.”

CLEAN ENERGY PROJECTS

New York has massive projects under way to reduce fossil fuel use in the city, both on the supply side (wind power and hydro power) and on the demand side (retrofitting buildings to make them more energy-efficient). 

Atlantic Ocean Wind Turbines

Giant wind turbines are starting to appear in the Atlantic south and east of Long Island. Projects in current development will power more than 2 million homes. By 2035, hopes are that offshore turbines will power 5 to 6 million homes, a large majority of New York state’s residential units.

Canadian Hydropower

New York is proposing to spend $4 billion to build a transmission line from Quebec to New York that would bring electricity generated by Canadian hydropower plants. The idea is to use excess hydropower capacity in the summer, when electrical usage is highest in New York but lowest in Canada. A particular benefit is that this new power source could replace much of the electricity generated by peaking plants in New York, which are by far the most polluting of all the city’s power plants. A separate plan to phase out peaking plants relies on the use of giant batteries during peak demand.

Building Retrofits

Buildings in New York account for about two-thirds of greenhouse emissions. New laws are on the books that are intended to reduce that number by setting tougher  clean-energy standards, both for new and existing buildings. By 2024, New York City buildings of more than 25,000 square feet must start meeting efficiency standards. Those standards get considerably tougher by 2030, when fossil-fuel hookups no longer will be allowed in new buildings or major renovations. (Our co-op received a very high efficiency rating, but even so we will have to start paying fines in 2030 if we don’t improve our score.)

A primary goal is to push residential and commercial buildings away from oil and natural gas, and toward electricity – heat pumps for heating, electrical induction stoves for cooking. 

We ended the cruise with lots of questions:

1. How were New York City and New York State able to launch these initiatives over the interests of the fossil fuel industry?
2. If all of these projects were completed, what portion of current fossil fuel use would be eliminated? Same goes for share of greenhouse gases.
3. As ambitious as these projects are, are they aggressive enough to make a difference?

This is an important moment for the direction of national political coverage. New editors are coming aboard the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and (before too long) The New York Times. And now, with the Trump presidency behind us, we’ve just ended one of the most tumultuous presidential cycles in history. I hope editors and other news leaders take advantage of this moment to step back, take a breather, look around, consider what it is that people need, what our country needs, and set new priorities for their political news reports. In my view, significant changes are needed.

For starters, I’d seriously expand coverage of state and local politics and government, even at the expense of Washington datelines. Here’s an example from the past of what I mean. One of the things I liked best about the Times, when I was cub editor of the Cedar Falls (Iowa) Record in the 1970s, was the ambitious way it kept watch on state legislatures and governors offices.

A typical story was the 1975 R.W. Apple account of a growing movement in state legislatures to encourage rape victims to report their attacks to police. Thirteen states, Apple said, had passed laws changing rules of trial evidence to limit or eliminate information on women’s sexual histories, and more were about to join. I would have been especially interested in this story because one of the states was Iowa.

The Times was really good at stories like this, and they often ended up on Page 1, as this one did. By monitoring government and political developments at the state level, The Times was able to spot new initiatives spreading across the country and bring its coverage of government much closer to home. Interesting, too, it showed, in often unexpected ways, how states shared common ground. Iowa, a swing state in those days, joined not only California, New York, Washington and Oregon in passing this law, but also Texas and Nebraska.

In the decades since, coverage of government and politics by national news organizations has become increasingly Washington-based, increasingly campaign-oriented, and in my view, increasingly distant from the broader ways government affects citizens throughout the country.

Changing the present course will be difficult. One of the biggest challenges, as my former colleague Jay Rosen has written, is defining news after Trump who, after all, has been a ratings and subscription bonanza for newspapers, news sites and TV news. (As former CBS chief Les Moonves famously said about the Trump campaign, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”) It will be a challenge, and will take courage, to ease back even a little from coverage of the intensely partisan rhetoric that, frankly, has been good for the news business.

But the stars are aligned for potential change. The next presidential election is almost four years away. And within the next year or so, new leaders will be taking over not just the Post and Times but also the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, CNN and others. Just as important, these news organizations are brimming with resources. They could try some stuff.

I cannot say whether the changes I suggest below would be business winners. But I do believe they’d be successful in two ways: They’d provide a more accurate picture of how government and politics work in the lives of American citizens. And because that picture encompasses state and local governments, which are generally less partisan, it would help counter the fever pitch we see reflected in Washington politics.

I’d begin by assigning a reporter — better yet a reporting team — to track government trends at the state level, particularly state legislatures but also governor and attorney general offices and state supreme courts. For that matter, I’d add reporting coverage of trends in city halls and county boards. (When is the last time you saw a story in the Times or Post about new developments among the counties?)

This kind of coverage is all the more important at a time when local news resources are quickly vanishing. Of course, it is no substitute for local reporting. Unfortunately, we have gotten to the point where, in many places, there is no reporting on local governance — a situation that is destined to get worse before it gets better. Having more reporting eyes on these arenas would be a valuable contribution to the public’s understanding.

When you think about the huge impact of state and local governments on American lives, and measure that against what we see in national news coverage, you have a giant mismatch. The public would be better served if the gap were closed.

Some other ideas, put forth over the years, that I hope news leaders consider — under the heading of broadening and diversifying coverage of government and politics:

Put People First: Today’s reporting starts with political leaders; too often it ends there. How about starting with the American people, and see what government looks like there. Are people getting what they want from the government? Are policies really helping? Are people of all walks of life getting a fair shake? What does legislation look like 5 years, 10 years after enactment? Where are the successes along with the failures? I’m speaking here about governments at all levels. (Yes indeed, national news organizations do some of this reporting now; in my view, though, it’s not nearly enough, and it’s swamped by the political and campaign beat.) More bottom-up reporting; less top-down.

Go Beyond Conflict: In a Tweet last year, Damon Kiesow succinctly said what many have been urging for some time: “We really need to stop using ‘conflict’ as the go-to frame for every political story.” There is no doubt conflict is an important framing, but it’s not the only one and its overuse is a distortion of reality. It’s true we have a partisan divide in the country. But you would think sometimes, reading or watching the news, that’s all we have. You can tell how much news organizations love the conflict angle by the headlines. We have “bitter fights” and “pitched battles” and “fierce infighting.” And, really, we’re still writing headlines with gunfire metaphors after Jan. 6? (“Exchange between GOP senator, transgender nominee draws fire from Democrats,” WashPost, Feb. 26.) All this has taken on a different color in light of the insurrection at the Capitol. Could it be that one contributor to the country’s division is news coverage that overwhelmingly shows government conflict, especially in militaristic ways? I believe it could. So many of the ways in which people’s lives are affected by government policies — in areas as diverse as transit, food stamps, zoning laws, trash collection — have little to do with conflict.

Give the Campaign Coverage a Rest: The perpetual campaign is real. People are acting now to prepare for the 2022 mid-terms. They are maneuvering for the 2024 presidential election. Some are probably looking even beyond that. Political reporters are able to write interesting stories about these activities. But I’d suggest: Give it a rest. Non-stop campaign coverage heightens the feeling that government and politics are nothing but sport, and contribute to a sense of exhaustion. Plus, they crowd out other kinds of reporting that are a truer reflection of government’s impact.

Look for Common Ground: If news is what’s aberrational or unexpected — i.e., it’s news when man bites dog — we ought to be spotlighting stories in which partisans work cooperatively for the benefit of their constituents. (I’m reminded of the recent Utah governor campaign in which both the Republican and Democrat sponsored an ad calling on citizens to be civil despite political differences.) Acts of political cooperation too often stay below the radar. They should get more attention. Some might say this amounts to social work, not journalism. I disagree. It would be providing a more complete picture of the way government works across the country. For many news consumers, it would be a bit of a surprise how frequently partisan politics are entirely missing from government policies that affect them.

I want to stipulate here that I am grateful for the way the Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and others reported aggressively on the Trump phenomenon. They all took way too long to be honest about Trump’s lying and shattering of other norms, but they and others did fantastic reporting that, as the Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote, may have saved democracy. To do this at the same time they were doing terrific reporting on a worldwide pandemic was remarkable. I hope they continue to spend enormous resources documenting the pandemic as well as continuing threats to American democracy.

Still, our major national news organizations have not provided an accurate and complete view of how government and politics act in people’s lives. They happen to have, right now, an opportunity to do better. I’m not sure it would be good for CBS, but it would be great for the country.

The recent federal report showing a steep decline in newspaper jobs over the last 15 years was a blunt reminder of how far the newspaper industry has fallen. From 2001 to 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers lost almost 60 percent of their workers, and were on track to being eclipsed by most, if not all, major media industries.

My Twitter feed lit up with declarations that newspapers were all but over. Mindy McAdams, a University of Florida journalism professor, urged that J-schools quit teaching students how to become newspaper reporters and focus instead on teaching digital skills. “Newspapers are dead,” she wrote.

I wouldn’t quibble much with the rhetorical point. Newspapers are going to be hard pressed to stay alive. Print advertising, newspapers’ revenue mainstay, has been declining sharply for a decade now, at about the same rate as employment declines. But it’s not just the printed sheet that’s in danger. Despite significant attempts at reinvention, newspaper publishers face a considerable challenge in growing or even sustaining their digital operations as well.

I asked media analyst Gordon Borrell about newspapers’ prospects. His bleak answer: “If I was forced to make a prediction, it would be that no printed newspapers would exist in 2027 that published more than once a week. Those left would be in rural or resort areas that had high populations of senior citizens. There is no ‘emergent model’ for a local newspaper other than that.” (See more on Borell’s predictions later.)

 

Does that mean we’re going to see wholesale shutdowns of newspaper companies? Probably. Technology has shattered the newspaper business model. With the exception of the major national publications, newspapers haven’t shown how they can migrate robustly to a digital world. I agree with the title and substance of a recent blog post by Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a local digital startup in upstate New York: “Only Entrepreneurs Will Save Journalism.”

But I’d make two points about the newspapers-are-toast scenario.

First, despite their greatly weakened state, newspapers are still the dominant creators of news and information in most communities. Their printed sheets are a much thinner, much reduced product. But they’re still there, in most places now supplemented by digital resources. Most newspapers still have the capacity to provide basic information about their communities and, on occasion, to expose wrongdoing. This month’s Pulitzer prizes for the Storm Lake (Iowa) Times and the Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail provided fresh evidence of just how much. We should remember, too, that in most small communities in the United States, newspapers are the only robust source of local news. As Margaret Sullivan wrote recently in the Washington Post, “Even weakened, regional newspaper journalism is still making a powerful difference today.”

Second, I make the above point not because I think it will stay this way but because newspapers still have an opportunity to innovate to the betterment of their communities. Some owners will milk their assets dry and then turn out the lights. But I believe there will be other possibilities. Not all will involve preservation of the entity we now call the newspaper company. But these alternatives could help strengthen the future of news and information in their communities. (When I say newspapers in this blog, I mean both their print and digital operations unless otherwise indicated.)

In other words, this doesn’t have to be a binary, survive-as-is vs. die question. Newspapers, some of them, could find a way to morph into very different (albeit probably smaller) news providers.

Here are some alternate scenarios (with more detail later):

• Newspaper companies may discover a new or improved subsidy model to replace some of the advertising loss. They haven’t succeeded in a decade of trying, but the game isn’t over.
• Newspapers may abandon their decades-long model of being a one-stop source for all community news and choose a limited number of topics in which to specialize – topics that could command a sufficient subsidy.
• They may replicate the Philadelphia model, in which a wealthy community member (such as Philadelphia’s Gerry Lenfest) buys the newspaper’s assets and turns them into a nonprofit that is supported, in part, by a continuing stream of philanthropy.
• Newspapers may take a larger role in forming networks or co-operatives that spread the cost of newsgathering while strengthening content.

I want to back up here. A decade ago, when the print advertising slide began, some people thought these future scenarios would have played out by now. By 2009, when both the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer silenced their presses, it seemed that the Internet had finally caught up to the newspaper money machine. Perhaps the American daily might go fairly quickly.

By then I had left 35-plus years of newspapering, most recently as Washington editor for McClatchy, and was newly installed as a researcher at USC Annenberg. It seemed a perfect time to be watching this historic digital revolution. I began to focus on the promising new entrepreneurship under way in California, in which journalists were launching local online sites by the dozens. It seemed to me, at the time, that they offered new hope that journalists could continue serving their communities in a digital era. Fast-forward to today, and… well, newspapers are still standing, but online news operations have had their own revenue struggles.

 

Newspapers, it turns out, have been able to keep their presses operating and layer on digital operations by massively cutting expenses. That can’t go on forever, obviously – though weeklies and other small newspapers probably have a longer life-expectancy than metro dailies — but it’s striking how much they have done with a lot, lot less. Digital news startups, meanwhile, have run into a double whammy on the advertising side: Digital ads are worth a fraction of their print counterparts, and Facebook and other tech behemoths have proven to be superior advertising vehicles for many local businesses. The startups’ challenges have given newspapers time to find digital models that might sustain their businesses, but so far they’ve had only limited success.

Why do I focus on newspapers here? Isn’t it true that digital startups will spawn the real future of community news? Yes, I believe they will.

From nonprofits like Pro Publica and Voice of San Diego, to for-profits like Buzzfeed and Politico, entrepreneurs are likely to create thousands of news-and-information businesses in the coming years, in ways we can’t imagine today and in ways that newspapers will find difficult to replicate. It’s not hard to believe, a few years down the road, that a community will be better served by a compilation of digital news sources than it was by its newspaper.

But neither do I believe that nothing bad will happen if local newspapers die. The location of online news startups will be spotty at best, and already-forming news “deserts” are certain to get bigger. (See terrific research on news deserts by Penny Muse Abernathy of the University of North Carolina.) As far as the eye can see, communities will be better off if local newspapers find some kind of successful digital model.

Let’s go back to that list of possible ways newspapers could find new sustainability:

Develop a new business model that subsidizes journalism

It seems unlikely that advertising will continue to provide the primary subsidy for digital news. But what about subscription or membership models?

Subscription revenue is looking more promising for the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, but conventional wisdom holds that the same strategy can’t work for local newspapers. Borrell buys that: “Smaller newspapers can’t drive significant subscribers from outside their area, as the larger papers can. The larger papers are getting more than half their subscriptions from outside the area.  Not likely to happen for the Peoria Journal Star.”

But remember when conventional wisdom held that digital subscriptions wouldn’t work anywhere? As Ken Doctor recently reported in The Street, subscriptions are soaring at not just the Times and Post, but also the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Slate, and… the Boston Globe, which is nearing 80,000 digital subscribers. Perhaps we need to watch the subscription model a while longer before declaring that it can’t work for the metro newspaper. It may work well enough to subsidize a more limited role.

NPR-type memberships also offer intriguing possibilities. The Dutch startup De Correspondent uses memberships to bankroll its experiment in trust-based journalism, so far quite successfully (56,000 members paying $63 a year). De Correspondent is about to try its model in the United States. I can’t think of a reason a metro daily couldn’t try it. Even if they don’t, newspapers should absolutely steal De Correspondent’s mission of placing trust at the center of their work.

There are other digital subsidy possibilities, some of them already being used by newspapers: marketing service operations, events, and of course new permutations of advertising models.

Develop niche verticals

Offering readers a little about most everything in their community made sense for the monopoly newspaper. Not so much for the equivalent of a startup. Borrell says he foresees “printed newspapers eliminating any ‘of record’ coverage and concentrating on something that others can’t touch — more in-depth reporting and analysis. They’ll likely morph into intellectual analyses and debates about a locality’s big issues, with an occasional human interest feature.”

But that’s only one of many possibilities that could prove promising to an otherwise dying newspaper. Entertainment and business coverage are two obvious choices, though already spoken for by alternative newspapers in many places. But you could imagine verticals on topics like schools or local sports, or under the right circumstances, the civic, government and political life of the community.

Timing is key, and tricky. Few publishers want to pull the plug on their as-yet profitable business models. Among many considerations, newspapers still have a healthy revenue stream publishing government legal notices – a revenue source that would be more vulnerable if moved to a few niche topics.

Perhaps more challenging, most mid-size newspapers are owned by chains or investment companies, where the obstacles to reinvention and innovation of this type can be much higher than under local ownership.

Find a wealthy philanthropist who cares about news

It’s too early to make a judgment about the Philadelphia experiment. But Gerry Lenfest’s $88 million purchase of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and philly.com, and their subsequent conversion to a nonprofit, could prove to be a model even the smallest of communities might replicate.

Lenfest’s nonprofit has a mission much bigger than continuation of those existing news organizations. It also has a research function intended to inform journalism far beyond Philadelphia.

But the idea that philanthropy, whether from an individual or an institution, could help finance a newspaper’s transition to digital has promise. We won’t really know, until newspapers begin closing in droves, or threatening to close, whether philanthropy will emerge as a significant subsidy of local news. But it could, in places. (And for that matter, I hope local philanthropy continues to develop as a driving force of news startups as well.)

Form partnerships, networks… innovate!

The life cycle of collaboration efforts for newspapers was probably predictable: at first extreme wariness, then a few experiments, now more robust but still cautious.

This is an arena that remains wide open for newspaper newsrooms. If earlier efforts were guided by the principle that newspapers be the dominant partner, or that they must lose no competitive advantage, those strategies can now be shed.

In her recent report on news deserts, Abernathy wrote: “Newspaper publishers and editors need to develop partnerships and networks with other news organizations that stress collaboration instead of competition.” She cited the example of how the Tampa Bay Times, collaborating with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. But there are many other opportunities. Ken Doctor, in NiemanLab, recently told the story of how the Providence Journal used its crime archives to partner with the popular podcast, “Crimetown.”

If Pro Publica, the Associated Press and the New York Times can collaborate on a dime, deciding one Friday evening to pool resources in compiling net-worth reports for White House staff, anyone can collaborate. And almost certainly they should. There are opportunities for collaboration with other news organizations, to be sure, but also with non-journalism entities such as libraries, universities, NGOs and so on.

Newspapers have reached the point where they have almost nothing to lose by going full blast on innovation. Even if their efforts don’t result in newspaper survival, experiments could plant the seeds for new enterprises that at least preserve some of the newspaper’s DNA.

Summing up

The threat to newspapers’ survival has long produced a two-sided debate. One side declares that newspapers are vital and must be saved; the other side declares that newspapers’ death is inevitable because they are incapable of innovation.

But reality doesn’t demand a future in which newspapers are either preserved or dead. Through innovation, newspaper companies might be able to invent a future that, while diminished, could preserve their function as a provider of community news and information.

Achieving this future will be very, very difficult. There still is no sure-fire model for financing digital news production, and newspapers face multiple built-in challenges that work against their becoming entrepreneurial and innovative.

But as their economic positions grow more tenuous, they may find improved conditions for innovation – perhaps more support from a public grown alarmed, perhaps a stronger sense of: “What the hell, let’s try it.”

Go for it. Time’s a’ wasting.

 

Gordon Borrell on newspapers’ future

I asked media analyst Gordon Borrell about newspapers’ prospects. He first addressed print publications.

The trajectory of printed newspapers in terms of circulation and profitability is quite predictable, and not good… Ten years from now, printed newspapers will still likely exist, but much like the Old Farmer’s Almanac still exists.

Borrell is not much more optimistic about newspapers’ digital futures. Digital journalism, he said, “is a costly venture currently without a significant supportive business model… When the print product goes, so will ‘journalism’ to a great extent.”

I’ve been wanting for some time to address a topic dear to my heart: the ever-shrinking news coverage of rural America. For a while I held off because the idea felt too much like a nostalgic lament. It is certainly that, in part. But I decided to write because this is a perfect moment for news organizations to revisit their wide abandonment of agriculture and rural issues, and to take steps to better represent this part of American life.

A few days ago my wife, Geneva Overholser, and I attended the funeral for George Anthan, my friend and former colleague and one of the best agriculture journalists of our time. I had the good fortune of working with George for many years at The Des Moines Register, including three years when he was my boss in The Register’s Washington Bureau. It’s startling to think that George’s nearly four-decade-long body of path-breaking work covering federal farm programs and the agricultural industry is now a lost beat. But that is mostly the case, and it unfortunately reflects a larger truth: American newspapers have moved ever farther from reporting on farming and rural life. My sense is that the same trend is true for TV news as well.

Something else made me want to write about this topic, and that’s this year’s political campaign and our growing understanding of the deep fault lines that are alienating Americans from each another. I wonder if one piece of the disaffection visible in rural areas isn’t the fact that many no longer see themselves represented in news coverage at the state and national levels. Continue reading The vanishing coverage of rural America

My colleague at New York University, Jay Rosen, has an uncommon gift for reducing things to their essence, to a simple phrase. The most well-known, I’d guess, is his naming of “the people formerly known as the audience.” (His PressThink blog on this is 10 years old this month.) I’m also fond of “the production of innocence,” Jay’s formulation of how the political press attempts to be objective. Lately, though, I’ve been mulling a single word Jay uses to describe political reporters: “savvy.” He wrote on his blog:  “In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts… Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be.”

Back when I practiced daily journalism, this characterization used to rankle me. Today, no longer reading political journalism through the lens of a daily practitioner, I’m rankled for a different reason. I’m increasingly unhappy with political reporting that seems aimed at the insider crowd.

(Disclosure: When I refer to political reporters, I know I’m speaking about me and how I spent some of my career, reporting and editing at The Des Moines Register and McClatchy’s Washington bureau. So there’s that.)

As Jay has written, there are many different manifestations of the “savvy” phenomenon. One that has long bugged me is framing policy proposals primarily – or only – through a political lens.  Such as: “In a move to shore up blue-collar electoral support, President Such-And-Such today proposed….”  As if that were the most important way for a reader to understand an idea that could end up affecting his or her life. I actually think this particular practice has subsided a bit, though it’s impossible to know.

But another example that has gnawed at me this campaign season is political reporters’ love affair with predictions, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t subsiding. I fear some reporters are moving toward the standard set by sportswriters, for whom predictions are a routine and casual part of their arsenal. Continue reading Journalism and the predictions game

Has the moment finally arrived for the flourishing of local, digital-native news businesses?

A case can be made that it has, though I’ll admit that I thought that was true as long ago as 2008, when I began watching California’s hyperlocal news sites at USC’s Center for Communication Leadership and Policy.

The three dozen or so new digital enterprises we were studying then were full of ambition and promise – even though they collectively met Jan Schaffer’s famous description of hyperlocals as “not yet a business.” These California digital entrepreneurs were leading a revolution that looked, to me anyway, quite ready to take off.

But for the most part it wasn’t ready. It’s perplexing, to say the least, that seven years later, digital local news sites have made only halting progress toward shedding Schaffer’s “not yet” label.

Only in rare cases, involving rare people, have new local news initiatives robustly sustained their way. The business models that would enable a true flowering of digital local news have not yet emerged.

But things may be looking up, at least a little. Continue reading An opening for local news startups?

Is the evening network newscast on the rebound?

After a disastrous 30-year period in which the U.S. audience fell by more than half, are the Big Three staging an against-the-odds comeback? And could it be happening just as everyone else in Old Media is being rocked by things digital?

As unlikely as that seems, something is happening. The evening news audience has now grown in three of the last four years, according to Nielsen, and is up about 12 percent since 2010. It appears 2015 will be yet another growth year. Compared to the 57 percent decline that began in 1980, this must feel like a Super Bowl victory to network executives.

The long decline of the evening news was actually worse than that 57 percent number because it came during a time when the U.S. population grew by more than 80 million people. On a per-capita basis, then, the drop has been more on the order of a calamitous 70 percent. That’s comparable to newspapers’ plummeting circulation that occurred during the same three decades. Continue reading A turnaround for network news?