THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 26, 1995 TAG: 9507260015
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By GENEVA OVERHOLSER
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
You think it makes little difference that a newspaper died in New York last week? Here are four reasons why you're wrong:
(1) When New York Newsday quit publishing, a rare vote of confidence in urban newspapering was extinguished.
Cities are full of readers who need newspapers. But readers don't pay the bill. Advertisers do - typically 75 percent of it or so. Advertisers don't want just any reader. They want richer readers. The sort more likely to live in the suburbs.
So new newspapers are springing up in the suburbs. Big-city newspapers like this one are trying to figure out how to serve suburban readers better. And in the city, it gets harder and harder to find a newspaper box.
New York Newsday was that rare exception - a newspaper started for urban readers, a journalistic commitment to the city. Now it's gone.
(2) Gone, too, is a piece of competition. New York Newsday covered the city, and well. The New York Times noticed. There may be other reasons why The Times so beefed up its local coverage over the past few years, but the interesting sound of New York Newsday breathing down its neck was a big one.
Competition of any kind makes a difference. That's clear to those who say The Post has never been able to compare to the old Washington Star in local news. It's clear in the calls I get, as people talk about what's in the City Paper or a suburban paper or on television news.
(3) The stark facts of newspaper finances were laid bare for a moment. Killing New York Newsday was not a surprising act for the new chief executive of Times Mirror, the company that owned it. The paper, after all, had been losing money since its inception.
But there's more to this story than that. Newspaper company profits are not your normal profits. At the typical metro daily last year, the profit margin was 20 cents or so on the dollar - the likes of which most retailers couldn't dream of.
You get hooked on profits like that. No sum is ever enough. And if one company can do it, so must the others. Times Mirror was lagging. Members of the Chandler family, which controls the company, wanted better. They hired the vice chairman of General Mills Co. to help.
Monday he shut down New York Newsday. Tuesday the Los Angeles Times, the company's flagship paper, said it would eliminate 700 positions by the end of the year.
Times Mirror stars in the drama of the moment, but its story is typical. Newsprint prices are going up. Advertisers have more and more options. Newspapers are having a terrible time making the huge profits to which they've become addicted. So a reporter is laid off, a paper is made a bit smaller, an editor decides not to send someone on this or that story. Newspaper executives say that the sorts of changes they are making are ones that readers will not even notice. But I hope you will. Because newspapers are being eaten away at.
(4) And the future looks bleaker. New York Newsday was an act of confidence not only in a city and its citizenry but also in newspapering. That's breathtakingly rare. (USA Today is the big exception. You can like it or you can sneer at it, as many in newspapering love to do, but it is the pre-eminent recent act of faith in daily newspapers.)
Oh, there are other future-oriented steps in the newspaper world. The Washington Post took an intriguing one last week in launching Digital Ink, its electronic service. But what of the mother ships, the newspapers themselves? In too many cases, they are sorely embattled.
Change, badly needed, is hard to come by in this environment. Pay is falling behind; newspapers are less able to attract top talent. And the saddest loss of all is in the spirit - the notion that newspapering is special. A business, but so much more. A place you go when you can write like the dickens or take pictures that make people cry, and you believe in government by the people, and you know that the people need to know what's going on.
Every time a newspaper dies, every time a staff shrinks, a section grows thinner or a dream just isn't dreamt, the spirit grows a little dimmer. Democracy is served a little less well. MEMO: Ms. Overholser is ombudsman of The Washington Post. by CNB