Karin Dryhurst

Mergers Won’t Save Newspapers

Attorney General Eric Holder announced this week that he would consider a relaxation of anti-trust laws to allow newspapers to combine business operations.

Holder—and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi—get it wrong when they see the solution to a struggling news industry as a merger between local newspapers.

True, the way forward in media will involve partnerships as the Internet has changed the way news gets distributed across the country and around the world. Every metro news outlet will not have a bureau in Washington, and nor do we need that as Ezra Klein points out.

Partnerships must develop between national news outlets and local news outlets, nonprofits and for-profits as the industry changes.

Clay Shirky insists that no model can save newspapers. I agree that what we want to save is not the recycled newsprint, but he neglects to address the possibility for news brands to evolve.

Traffic to newspaper Web sites has jumped over the last year, showing that it’s not the content that readers reject, but the delivery model.

But as these same newsrooms cut staff or shut down entirely, where will these readers go? Where will they get local information?

Nonprofit news sites have popped up, like the Voice of San Diego and MinnPost, but what about one-newspaper areas without sites like these to pick up the slack.

Take for example my hometown paper, The Miami Herald. The paper recently cut 20 percent of its staff even as Web traffic has increased. The Herald coverage area reaches across a population of about 3 million, as well as more than 150 local governments.

If the Herald continues on its decline, the weeklies and blogs will not fill the gap quickly enough.

I would like to see the development of MinnPosts in towns across the country but closer to the model of nonprofit site ProPublica. These local sites could offer investigative coverage to local newspapers that could then develop partnerships with national newspapers.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore thinks it’s a rumor that information needs to be free; unfortunately, as more Americans grow up in the digital age with Google at their fingertips, it won’t be a rumor. It will be reality.

Nonprofit news outlets are able to provide investigative journalism because it requires resources that print outlets increasingly can’t provide as ad revenue and circulation decline.

Micropayments and paywalls won’t provide that revenue either as experiments at other sites show.

Newspapers would be wise to encourage the creation of nonprofit news sites that they can partner with for in-depth local coverage while the industry adapts.

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Posted at 12:16 PM, Mar 20, 2009 in Media
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