Hold
that Obituary! KR sale doesn't bode ill for community newspapers
"Hold that Obituary!" was written
by Jock Lauterer for the Chapel Hill Herald
on March 29, 2006. This column is not available at the newspaper's
Web site.
When the news came down earlier this month that
McClatchy Co. will buy newspaper giant Knight
Ridder, doom-and-gloom media pundits on the newspaper
deathwatch mournfully trumpeted the event as further evidence
of the inevitable demise of an antique form of communication.
But the transaction has a different ring to me.
As director of the University’s project
for community newspapers and a former co-founding editor/publisher
of two community papers, I’m struck by an overlooked fact.
In addition to their 32 dailies, Knight Ridder
includes 24 community newspapers (defined as weeklies, twice
and tri-weeklies). And McClatchy owns 17 community newspapers.
Why is this important? Because, as you may have
read, the newer, bigger McClatchy plans to shed 12 of its newly
acquired papers.
But here’s the news that doesn’t surprise
me: The dozen papers on the block are all big dailies, while
McClatchy plans to keep all of their so-called “little”
papers.
And why is that?
In the words of UNC-CH journalism associate professor
Frank Fee, “because they’re the ones making money.”
What is it about community papers that make them
so viable? Consider the comments of cowboy poet and columnist
Baxter Black, who wrote the following in a column titled, “Why
I Love My Hometown Paper,” (a weekly in San Pedro, Ariz.):
“Small-town papers often thrive because CNN
or the New York Times are not going to scoop
them for coverage of the ‘VFW Fish Fry’ or ‘Bridge
Construction Delay’ or boys and girls playing basketball,
receiving scholarships, graduating, getting married or going
off to war… I think of local papers as the last refuge
of unfiltered America – a running documentary of the warts
and triumphs of Real People – unfettered by the Spin and
Bias and the Opaque Polish of today’s Homogenized Journalism.
It is the difference between Homemade Bread and Pop Tarts.”
Such a difference has not gone unnoticed.
“Thousands of community papers are thriving
and gaining in circulation even as the big boys decline,”
writes Alabama community newspaper editor John W. Stevenson
in the January edition of Publishers Auxiliary,
the journal of the National Newspaper Association,
a trade group with 2,600 small newspaper members.
“People today, as in previous years, are
hungry to know about what is happening locally,” writes
Stevenson, who is also the NNA membership chair. “They
know their hometown paper is where they’ll find the news
they want.”
Stevenson concludes, “There will always
be those who say newspapers are on the way out. But from what
I’ve seen lately, I’ve never been more optimistic
about their future.”
Stevenson isn’t being a Pollyanna here.
According to the new 2005 Community Newspaper Readership Survey
conducted by the University of Missouri for
the NNA, 81 percent polled read a paper at least once a week,
and of those readers, 95 percent want to see local news, including
school and sports news, in their local paper. And, 95 percent
said they paid for the paper.
This is significant because paid circulation is
a dependable barometer of a paper’s health.
So what is the state of this state’s community
press?
Since I am director of the Carolina Community
Media Project, I ought to be able to crunch some numbers that
prove my point. In North Carolina, of the 197 total general
interest newspapers, 149 are weekly and 48 are daily. Of those
48 dailies, only seven could be called big-city dailies, with
circulations in excess of 50,000. Thus, fully 96 percent of
N.C. newspapers are defined as “small.”
And where is the growth? In addition to the burgeoning
Spanish-language and urban alternative press, the growth is
in the weeklies. Of the 79 weeklies reporting circulation figures
to the North Carolina Press Association over the last 21 years,
59 percent have shown growth in circulation since 1985.
Of the 59 percent who showed growth, 35 percent
have shown solid, consistent growth; and 24 percent have shown
peaks-and-valleys growth. (As a former editor-publisher, I can
tell you, peaks-and-valleys growth ain’t too shabby).
Then here are two more bits of good news: North
Carolina has 13 more weeklies than it did in 2000. Finally,
here’s another myth-buster: 52 percent of the state’s
weeklies are still independently or locally-owned.
The late Charles Kuralt, with his typical gift
for the cogent, was the first journalist I ever heard use the
expression “relentlessly local.” And I would argue
it’s that local-local-local news emphasis that gives the
community papers their vision, identity, franchise and their
future.
In the words of Pennsylvania community newspaper
editor Jim Sachetti of the Bloomsburg Press-Enterprise, “Local?
— It’s the only game in town!”
So, with apologies to Mark Twain, who, upon reading
his own obituary mistakenly published when he was abroad, said
famously: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,”
— hold that obit!
Jock Lauterer, the author of “Community
Journalism: Relentlessly Local,” 3rd. ed., 2006, the University
of North Carolina Press, teaches journalism at UNC-CH.
He may be reached at 962-6421 or jock@email.unc.edu
